As for John and me, we were no longer being bullied at school. The threat was always there, though, that our two main bullies, boys bigger than us, could be lurking ready to pounce on our way home from school when we walked down the narrow pathway on the hillside towards our house at the bottom.
We had by then become accustomed to seeing snakes, lizards, chameleons, praying mantises and beetles of all shapes and sizes. We knew not to touch any stagnant water in rivers or ponds because of bilharzia, and we knew not to stay out at dawn and dusk when mosquitoes were at their worst. We had also adopted the sensible custom of the “afternoon rest”, which lasted from after lunch until about 3:30pm. This was, I suppose, really meant to keep us from playing outside in the sun at the hottest part of the day. Instead, we, like all children, even the boarders at the school, rested on our beds for an hour or longer till the worst of the sun’s rays had passed. Of course, we knew nothing at all about the ozone layer and we certainly had never heard of sunscreen in those days. We had simply learned the hard way how painful it was to be sunburnt. A rest in the middle of the day meant that one felt refreshed for the afternoon and evening. In fact, decades later I insisted on this sensible practice when my husband and I came with our two boys to Canada. The summers in Ottawa, much to my surprise, could be just as hot as any in Southern Rhodesia and a lot more humid, so during the long summer months when the children and I were at home, I insisted on an hour of “quiet time” after lunch for my boys, then aged 9 and 7. The older child would happily read to himself but the younger one balked at missing out on an hour of play. So, I read to him each day. I found it beneficial for all of us to start afresh at 3:30pm or so with a drink and a snack, by which time the worst of the sun’s heat had gone.
Other Rhodesian customs became the norm for our family, too. We three children rarely wore shoes outside. We would be barefoot whenever we could, so much so that we developed calloused feet with our hardened soles able to withstand rocky surfaces.
We all adopted local words and phrases, too. A British cooker became a colonial stove and a hoover, a vacuum cleaner, words which I later discovered on my travels were used in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, no doubt because of similar colonization by the British.
