Pinot, Bretzels, and Cathedrals

Nostalgia. I got hit with it this morning, and it’s been good to bring me out of a little funk. Here’s a story for you.

“Where are you going?” I jumped at the sound of her childish voice as she (rather stealthily) crept up behind me while I was raiding the great box of apples in the pantry. Inwardly I groaned- Graham and I had a Spider Gang meeting up on the hill and we didn’t want to take our little sister with.

I flipped around on my stockinged heels, glared at Annie, and hissed “Nowhere”, hoping she would be repelled by my spite enough to run off to her room and cry. I pushed passed her while I knotted the stolen fruit into a towel and went off to seek out my brother.

I found him working on the verhanda with his woodwork tools. His class had been making little wooden stools in Woodwork at school, and he was trying to redo one for home since was a shorty and needed a step to reach the basin in the bathroom to brush his teeth.

“Are you ready to go? We should leave. I have some apples here” I said to him, shaking the wrapped apples I held in my hand. Gra stood up, put the sandpaper back on his work surface, wiped his hands down the side of his corduroy trousers. “Ja, I’m ready. Is Annie coming? Her legs are too short, she’ll never keep up, and I don’t want to look after her in the forest.”

“If we leave from here outside the kitchen, she won’t see us. She’s probably crying in her room. Remember what we said- no sisters allowed at the Spider Gang meeting. She can’t come, she’s not allowed.”

“Who’s not allowed where?” Mom’s voice suddenly appered out of thin air, as was quite cusomary for mothers across the world, I suspected. She must have been in the washroom, hunched over the twin-tub washing machine, and heard our conversation on the verhanda.

Oblivious to the curious tone in her voice, I told her that the Spider Gang was meeting in the Wattle Forest, and that Gra and I were walking up the hill to meet up with our cousins up there. I explained that our sister was too small to come with, and that we had decided that we can’t allow our sisters- older OR younger in fact- to join the gang. “Those are the rules Mom.”

Mom looks at us for a while and I now wonder what’s going through her mind. Eventually after a weighted silence, she says “okay, off you go. I’ll keep Annie distracted. Be careful, and please make sure you are back for lunch. Are you dressed warm? It’s still cold out there.”

Gra and I hastily step into our gumboots,, button our our woolen jerseys, yell a quick sal’a’gahle to Annah, a g’bye to Mom and we disappear across the crunchy frosted brown winter lawn.

In all my aged 8 self importance, I led my brother, aged 7, up the farm road. It was a winter morning, the winter school holidays, and we were going off to meetup with our cousins. It was the year we created The Spider Gang, a secret gang with just 4 members: Heather, 9, just a year older than me, Colin, also 8, and Gra.

Annie, with her short aged 4 legs wasn’t in school yet. Jackie, Heather and Colins’ older sister, was too cool to be a Spider Gang member.

The winter sun begins to warm our backs as the dust kicks up at our feet. Always dry in winter, the farm looks forlorn and forgotten. Brown lawn, dusty gravel road, naked bare trees. As we begin to climb the first gentle hill, the pastures open up alongside us. While the summer kikuya grass may be brown and not good for winter feed, the rye grass is lush and green. Dads’ black and white cows fill the second paddock, contently grazing.

I kick on a loose stone lying in the road. “So, what are we going to do at our meeting?” I ask of my brother. With all the good intentions of having a secret exclusive gang, we were really limited in our end goals.

“I dunno,” he replies. “Maybe we can build a fort or something.”

“Mmm, maybe.” I consider this for a while. “Actually, I like that idea. We can have our meeting IN the fort. We can talk about the rules for The Spider Gang and eat our apples.”

The main road is behind us now, and have turned onto the red sand road that takes us between our farm, Netherby, and our cousins’ farm, Melrose. We’re a little bit higher here. To our left we can see Dads’ dam in the valley. It’s shining blue under the cloudless sky. But we can’t see Heather and Colin yet. Melrose is hidden behind the hill. Up here the farm lands are not cultivated. The savanna-like appearance is golden, the grass left long and is ungrazed. A few hundred metres further, the road comes to an intersection. To the left lies Dads’ mielie fields on the other side of a barbed-wire fence. To our right is a huge old gate. Rusted metal frames it, and a new chain and padlock ensure it stays closely fastened to the fence post. The fence post is a grey, weathered, piece of some old tree. The grooves in the fence post are black, the knots swirl round like dark eyes.

With minimal effort, my brother and I climb up the gate, throw first one leg over the top, then a second, and from 4 feet up, we jump down onto the red sand road of Melrose. We have crossed the boundary line and within a few more hundred metres we will be encircled by the old wattle forest.

When you’re 8 years old, you probably don’t know that the Black Wattle Tree is an alien tree; that it definitely does not belong here. This loose cluster of bare, black, scrawny trees sitting on the top of hill isn’t really a real forest, and is in fact the most derelict abandoned couple of square metres to be found across 50 hectares of prime farm land.

However, Graham and I approach it like it’s holding secrets and stories of adventure; our own adventure.

“Hey!” I hear the yell of the cousins approaching the forest from the other side. “What’s the password?”.

My brother and I yell back in unison:”ICE CREAM”. This wasn’t a difficult password to forget. At the beginning of the holiday we had made our secret gang secret-diary books. They were several sheets of paper, cut in half, folded and assembled into a book. We had stapled the pages together at the spine and ceremoniously drawn ice cream cones on the front page. (What a secret society gang called The Spider Gang had in common with ice creams will only ever be realised by the youth. I guess I have long forgotten the meaning, if there ever was any.)

Now we’re running towards eachother, an awkward run coming from the obligatory rubber boots we’re wearing. The sound of our feet rattle and golomp around in those gumboots, our feet landing between tree roots, spiky twigs, fallen branches and generous rocks. With grins on our faces, we say howzit to our cousins, realising with defiance we have achieved something important. We’ve escaped our sisters, eluded the farm chores, and now that we are sitting, I can open the towel of stolen apples and offer them up as if they are the spoils of war. We’ve outsmarted everyone today. Tomorrow can wait.

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