Childhood

Do you remember what it was like to push those old tyres at full speed and then trip over them?  The blackness on our hands would take days to completely disappear. I still have the scars from all that falling. The most visible scar is still the one from your bike.

Oh that bike! It was a Raleigh wasn’t it? We shared it amongst the four of us, taking turns to ride it to the end of the street and back. When you got tired you would take it and say the bike was tired and needed to rest. That was a little mean.

Do you remember the big mango tree that stood in front of the house? I still can’t believe you used climb up and label the mangoes before they were ripe. You never really stopped labelling things did you? You still guard what is yours quite carefully.

I still think we would have been great engineers. Remember the mud bridges we used to build in the orchard after the rain. They were so impressive and surprisingly strong, they lasted until the next downpour.

Sometimes I can still smell those goose eggs that we broke. They splashed all over us and we were stinking for days. I’m glad we did that during the school holidays. I also still wonder if that big red spider we used to feed grasshoppers to was dangerous.

Did we really bury that little doll called JJ?  Why did we do that, there was nothing wrong with him? I remember that his sister was my doll Bridgette. She had lovely curly hair and I washed it, put mother’s curlers in it and then put her in the oven to dry because we didn’t have the dryers you sit under like the ones at the hair salon. The plastic curlers melted and fused with her plastic hair and the rest of her melted in the oven too. Who cleaned up that mess?

What did we call the ice-cream man again? Nqi nqi, I think. I guess because his bell made the sound nqi nqi. He was nice, he let us ride on his ice-cream bike sometimes. I wonder where he is now.

I see you still have your wooden axe from the wildlife taxidermy. I wasn’t there when you all went because my punishment for throwing a tantrum was to stay home. But while you were all out I still climbed over the fence and went to play at the neighbours’.

It wasn’t half bad that childhood, was it?  Fences were usually easy to climb over. I suppose not all fences are like that. I heard in Hungary they put up a big fence to stop refugees from coming to their side. I heard it’s not a fence a child can easily climb over. Especially if there are soldiers with guns guarding it. We played war too in our camouflage clothes and our water guns, do you remember? But I heard these guns are real.

Remember how much we used to complain when we got hungry? Ours was the kind of hunger that was satisfied within minutes, yet it always felt like an emergency. Can you imagine that some children starve for much longer than that? That they live in perpetual starvation?

And the 4 o’clock bath time, do you remember that? We would be so clean, our skin shiny with vaseline, that we wouldn’t be allowed to go outside anymore. Then we did homework and watched Captain Planet.

The planet’s problems seemed trivial then. Or was it just because we were too young to understand, that far too many children have their childhood stolen, by war, and by those who turn a blind eye to the suffering that war brings about?