LYNDA HALLINAN:
the joy of a backyard swing
Ireally don’t envy the life of a royal wife and mother. If it’s not bad enough that your every fashion faux pas and family tiff is gleefully pounced upon by the paparazzi (not to mention the public), just imagine how hard it is to organise a decent playdate for your kids. With Prince George literally expected to be the King of the Castle, and Princess
Charlotte a shoe-in for the role of Elsa in any school production of Frozen, it must be impossible for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to keep their children’s regal feet on the ground.
Perhaps that explains why, when Kate collaborated with Davies White Landscape Architects to create a Back to Nature garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in London this year, her children made an immediate beeline for the giant ball-of-string swing.
“I’ve got such fond memories, of being in the garden and being outside, from my own childhood and I’m sharing that with my own children,” the Duchess told reporters as Prince William showed little Prince Louis the ropes.
From monkey bars and teeter-totters to tandem swings and roundabouts, who doesn’t have happy – and occasionally painful – memories of jungle gyms and park playgrounds? All those shiny metal slides that burned the backs of your legs on summer afternoons and see-saws that thumped your
tail bone when your big sister jumped off while you were still riding high.
Childhood swings are like family cats: you remember every one of them, from the friendly to the fearsome. I still shudder about the time I swung into a stream on a school camp on a sheep farm up the back of the boonies, coming a cropper on top of an unsuspecting eel.
When my grandparents retired to the west coast of the Coromandel Peninsula, their three-dozen grandkids each took turns swinging off the fraying knotted rope swing that hung from the gnarled pohutukawa overhanging the Te Mata
Creek’s best swimming hole.
The tree, and the swing, are both there still. When I was a child, my handyman father welded together a Stalinesque swing set from galvanised water pipes; it doubled as an instrument of torture. Modern-day health and safety standards would demand design modifications to the rusty metal bolts that scratched our legs, the clanking chains that crushed our fingers and the wooden seats that lodged splinters in our backsides. But after we grew up and left home, it circulated around the district before Dad fixed it up for my sister’s children. My nieces and nephew