W

E all do it or dream of it — returning to the places of our childhood. Such attempts to relive the past can backfire though, because, as Joni Mitchell sang, over time “they” do tend to “pave paradise to put up a parking lot”.

They put up the Maseru Holiday Inn parking lot decades ago on a field I once played on, and now there is a bypass road between that and the Caledon River below, where in winter we would cross from side to side without a passport.

Recently, I went back to Lesotho to look at a few places I remembered from my childhood there, but more to mark the 50th anniversary of its independence, an event I well remember.

I started in the Free State border town of Ladybrand, where we’d lived in the mid ’60s in a large, sandstone house near the railway station.

The house was said to be haunted and I saw the ghost one night, but my dad told me I had sunstroke and to shut up. It’s still there, that house, its vast plot of land swallowed up by buildings and yards.

This time, however, I stayed in the beautiful Station House B&B with the attached Living Life restaurant, which made the best rosti I have ever had, and beef strips in a creamy mushroom sauce to dip them in. It’s about 200m from my old home, and once housed the stationmaster in a smaller stone home.

I was travelling with local farmer and tour guide Jan Oberholzer of Sunflower Tours, with whom I also happen to have gone to high school. We have both aged remarkably well. He takes private tours into the Mountain Kingdom and this was a very private one indeed.

In Ladybrand, we visited Lesotho historian David Ambrose (in another golden stone house) and we chatted for hours over our Lesotho days.

Maseru has changed far more since my school days, but the sandstone English Primary School is still there. I walked through it with the principal, who was curious to know what had been there when I’d attended. As they had built classes on our sports field, tennis court and front garden, not much, I told him.

Back then, we’d only had the Lshape of five sandstone classrooms and a modest hall, where we’d had assembly, sang God Save the Queen and sometimes held concerts. Everything had, of course, shrunk terribly, and I was overwhelmed by nostalgia, even for being left standing at the gates all afternoon when my dad forgot me.

The original iconic Basotho Hat building (a simple, double-storey rondavel with a thatched roof almost down to the ground in imitation of the hat), which my father designed in the 1960s, is burnt and gone, replaced