Growing up in house of words
IAM the eldest of four children. My father worked away from home so our evenings were spent around my mother, who read to us. We grew up in an old, haunted, rambling house in Wynberg. The house was on a corner, and had high ceilings and hollow, wooden floors.
The huge rooms echoed and led off one another into other rooms with trolls living in dark corners, and smelt of cat pee, Cobra polish and bread baking in the kitchen alongside the smell of garlic and ginger sizzling in ghee.
There was the scent of gardenia, honeysuckle and lemon blossom wafting in from the back garden and mint, when the cat chased grasshoppers along the pathways.
We had dogs and cats that slept on our beds, and we had hens and their chickens clucking in the fowl hokkie underneath the lofty mulberry tree, and a robust rooster that woke us at sunrise. And we had words – newspapers, magazines, comics, picture books, new, used, borrowed, scattered, piled up in untidy heaps in every room in the old house, including the outside toilet.
We read of children in faraway lands, of upside-down tea parties, of crafty, talking animals, of mystery, magic and heroes.
One by one, as the younger children grew tired, my mom would put them to bed.
Though I yawned and my eyelids grew heavy, I wanted more.
But my mother wanted to get back to her own books. What a sense of freedom I experienced when I learnt to read!
Sometimes late at night, my sister, Gail, and I would sit in the wide window of our large bedroom at the back of the house, overlooking the sprawling back garden, lit up with moonlight and stardust. We would be entranced as we would watch our garden come alive.
Fairies dressed in gossamer danced around the Michaelmas daisies and the tall, staked-up dahlias, painting bright colours onto the petals of the heavy blooms. Elves and goblins chased rats around in the vegetable garden as they jumped over cabbages and humungous pumpkins.
Never mind that no one else believed us, Gail knew. She had seen it, “with my own eyes!”
We won book prizes at school and at Sunday school – Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories. The joy and promise of holding a new book against my chest was indescribable, as was the novelty of its new smell and turning the crisp pages.
There was a mobile library that came to park on the field near our home on Fridays, near to the broken tomb of Mr Batts, his horse and his dog, and, some say, his pet snake.
Mr Ross was both driver and librarian. We cheered when the heavily laden blue van turned the corner into Batts Road.
My mom still lives in the old house, though it seems much smaller now. We are free to use the glass library on the other side of the railway line, so the mobile library no longer comes to the field.
Words still play a big part in my life though, from writing to reading and now e-books. In spite of my increasingly digital world, I like putting photos into frames, writing longhand letters and I definitely still enjoy the thrill of turning the pages.