Strips of venison biltong hang at the top of a thatched tower. Down below is a workshop where pipes are hammered on anvils and transformed as fluted goblets. A partially constructed copper-welded space-ship is at one side. It's here where three-legged sliced tree trunk stools are made. There's a nook to the left on the way out where necklaces and bracelets and rings are fashioned for any fantasy of feminine beauty. A wisp of wood-smoke strays in through an open kitchen door where smoked sausages hang as savory ornaments. Two doorways access a double volume L-shaped hall with dining on the left. A wall is draped somewhat disconcertingly with African and medieval weapons. It faces a lawn, hemmed on the right by tall mulberry trees, rolling down to a trampoline. Behind it is the domain of the donkey who ate the spaghetti. The wisp twists across a place where a family sits, snacks, reads and sleeps in company. It drifts over the ledges of walk-through windows, over a courtyard surrounding a pool and spirals up and away over the trees.
Here's a glossy red setter. I can't yet remember his name. He's with us. Mara is about three and I'm about two years older than Philip and Becky is somewhere in between. In a way we're like moths in a spiral around a flame. Tami and Mattias are with us. We're children trying to figure out what's going on. None of us moves except Mattias. He's drowning. An explosion of spray knocks us out of our daze. Here, with the fierce eyes of a lioness, is the fully dressed submerged yet elegant form of a beautiful woman. She's holding Mattias in her arms. Who knows where she's come from? I have a fleeting image of her flying out through one of those walk-in windows. She says nothing and takes him away with her. There's nothing she needs to say. She's hammered a vivid impression into malleable minds.
Oh and in case this isn't in your memory, her name is Tessa. She's one of those beings from a utilitarian realm somewhere between divinity and the carefree world of prepubescent children. She comes and goes as gracefully as a flame weaving a spiral of overlapping patterns from mother to child to neighbour. She joins our world as a child and floats above it as a mother, or else she's queen of the castle in a nearby harbour when things get rocky or lonely. The king is the big stocky figure of Michael the sculptor with his huge bushy eyebrows. Heirs to the throne are two princesses and a prince.
Mara, alternately naked or in a hand-me-down oversized T-shirt, wanders around in her own little world under a halo of blond hair. Becky at the time is a 'girl' fully fledged. She has little interest in what we are up to. Girls have other interests, a puzzle without a solution, a challenge which us boys were destined to encounter, but not yet. And then there's Philip.
"I need a belt!" It's him peering into the tent from outside. He's a quick waker. He's ten years old and it's very early in the morning. Barks are coming out of the throats of a score of wild baboons. They're on a ledge right above us, about twenty feet up. They don't sound happy with the sight of alien invaders, not in this place, the jewel of their territory. Each bark is a verbal missile, hurled with the aim of driving us away, and perhaps also a warning of worse surely to follow if we choose to remain. Once I'm also out of the tent they look a lot more scary than they sound.
"What for?" I ask with stomach like cold fist clenching. I think David Parry is here and perhaps John too.
"They're scared of a belt. They think it's a snake."
Who knows where he got that info from? I give Philip my belt uncomfortably aware that he is the youngest and smallest of us. He turns around and steps forward to face the most ferocious, the alpha male, stares into his eyes and then whirls the belt like a whip above his head. The baboons retreat and remain at a safe distance, well out of the slinging range of a snake. We're looking at Philip with some awe. The lion cub - like mother like son.
It's school holiday time and we have enough mealie-meal and sardines to last for ten days and on the trees are plenty of soft-skinned berries with the taste and texture of lychees except their flesh is a translucent pink. Here we can live free and often unclothed like wild animals exploring a wild wordless nature revelling in our senses with warm sun on skin. Nothing is man-made, no-one else is up here on the back slopes of the Magaliesberg, not a house in sight from the summit patrolled by black eagles to the horizon 30 miles distant.
One evening Philip takes me down to a pool, where we had washed pots and dishes, to show me a moonlight ballet. We sit silently watching the black lines of two long and slender snakes who weave a languid spell on a stage the colour of pearl. It's here in youth and nature where what is seen most easily coincides with what is felt.
It's the morning of the ninth day. I'm at the top of the canyon watching a couple of baboons in a tree on the other side. They're unusually raucous and acrobatic, shaking branches as if they're marooned sailors trying to get the attention of a passing ship. I glance behind me. The rest of the troop are silently slinking downstream behind my back and well within snake slinging range. It's a premeditated diversion. In the distance I can see what may be the cause of their departure. A long line of people, some carrying things balanced on their heads.
As they get closer I recognise the figures of you and Michael with some friends and their children, and what turns out to be a line of young porters hired to carry his cooking equipment. It's a three hour hike up and over the steep face of the mountain. Here's where our experiences meet in the same time and place. So I need say no more except that Hungarian goulash and bacon frying smells even more delicious to those who have eaten nothing but sardines and pap and berries for more than a week.
It was some time after that when you and Michael started to build a new home in Broederstroom. Philip spent time exploring the surrounding caves. He took me once to a cave which had never been entered and gave me an experience which few people have ever had. In torch-light it was a small chamber of clear crystal ferns amongst delicate stalactites and mites, each was coated with a sparkling frost which cannot survive human breath for more than a few minutes. Thereafter the magic is gone. Perhaps everything which is breathed on for too long or looked at too often loses at least some of its magic.
The rhythm of days and weeks and years drives a spiral taking all of us ever further away from where we started. The good queen of the castle left and the nearby harbour no longer offered shelter, but many threads of the past remain intact and were still to weave in with those of the future and may still yet. I was 22 when I decided to leave for Cape Town. Part of the reason has a thread in your thatched village/home but that's another story. It was the third and last time I ever entered the actual house in Broederstroom. I didn't come to say goodbye to Becky Mara or Philip. They weren't there, only you were. It was the last time I looked into your eyes, but I still see you in those times when I'm derided by people whose opinions are not their own. It's then when I need the memory of someone who understands freedom and the art of living. It's then when I can smile and say thank you Tessa.
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