A Clovelly Childhood #5 - Old friends

I was lucky enough this week to be visited, separately, by two childhood friends whom I have not seen for 20 and 40 years respectively. The years simply fell away and it was as though no time had passed since we had last shared a moment in time. Inevitably talk turned to reminiscence and the people who played a part in our lives as we grew up in Clovelly.

Serena moved to Australia, the land of her birth, many years ago and the instant I saw her, the memory of her mother at a similar age flashed before me. I remember her with great fondness, but most of all for the incident with the beetroot. She was cooking a batch of fresh beetroot in the pressure cooker and as I recall, left the kitchen to attend to another household chore and when she came back, the lid had blown off the pressure cooker and purple beetroot juice adorned the ceiling and walls! I have had a phobia about cooking beetroot in pressure cookers ever since and will never, ever combine the two.

Robin lives in Pretoria and we only recently reconnected through FB, and he popped by this afternoon for a walk along the beachfront. He reminded me of the incident of the bushman painting.  As kids, we all played on the mountain behind our houses, where there are large outcrops of rock with caves and sheltered overhangs, not to mention puffadders, cobras, dassies, etc. My sister and his sister decided to do some 'bushman paintings' on a very suitable rock and used ordinary kids' watercolours and not inconsiderable artistic talent. The problem was that not long after, our 60+ neighbour, who was a keen walker and Mountain Club member, happened upon this elegant artwork and for some reason better known to himself, rushed home in a froth of excitement to call the museum experts on bushman paintings!

They duly arrived and agreed that it was possibly done by the early inhabitants of the valley who lived in a large cave on the dunes not far away. What a to-do! And how embarrassing for the poor man when Alison and Jill had to confess to being the artists before the fiasco could develop any further! Neighbourly relations were a trifle tense for a while after that, but as you can imagine, we have laughed for years.