Boarding school food

I can say with all honesty, that I often felt very hungry at boarding school.  We invariably entered the refectory in single file and in complete silence.  After the customary grace, we were either allowed to talk or not, depending on which way the wind blew for our Boarder's mother.  While we ate our food, she would walk up and down reading the mail received that day, before passing it on to the lucky recipients.

The refectory was a large rectangular room accommodating about ten or eleven long tables, which lined the walls of the room on both sides.  A number of serving ladies would walk around the tables dispensing the food for each meal.  Mealie meal porridge, followed by a couple of slices of bread, spread with whatever you happened to have brought from home after the holidays, was a normal breakfast.  There was always a large pot of tea at the top of the table, together with ten cups heaped one on top of the other.  If we happened to be having a silent meal, then we used a sort of sign language to indicate the amount of tea we wanted.  The index finger, upright and standing to attention meant a full cup, thumbs up meant half a cup and the pinkie meant a quarter.  Just to get back to the serving ladies for a minute, there seemed to be a passive aggressive spirit lurking amongst them.  If for example we were having cabbage or spinach and you whispered "Not too much please", you could be rest assured that you got the biggest of spoonfuls slapped onto your plate.  Conversely, if there was something you really liked and said "Can I have a lot please" you ended up being given a minuscule amount.  You soon learnt to keep your council concerning culinary matters and just hoped for the best. 

We all had our favourite meals and for me it was Saturday nights and Sunday lunches.  Saturday nights were ice-cream nights.  We always had dollops of ice-cream waiting on our plates as we entered the refectory.  I always dribbled syrup all over mine, before scooping it onto a piece of bread.  In this way, I could make it go further and kind of chew my way through the cold toffee-like mess.  On Sundays, you could always count on there being a slice of beef, a couple of roast potatoes, a spoonful of peas and a slosh of gravy, followed by jelly and custard.  Stewed tomatoes on bread and soggy marmite toast were another two of the more tasty meals we had during the week.

Sunday breakfasts were also very memorable and consisted of corn flakes with warm, sugary milk followed by pork sausages.  Unfortunately, I was seldom at breakfast on account of having to catch a bus to take me and a number of other girls to the local Anglican church.  We used to put our sausages between two pieces of bread and stuff them, wrapped in tissues, into our blazer pockets,   All the way through the service, we had the undivided attention of the minister's Cocker Spaniel who sat waiting patiently in the isle next to us, and drooling onto the red carpet.  The smell of that porker wafting between the incense, must have been agony for him.

After the service, tea and toast with lashings of marmalade was served to those who had taken communion.  If truth be told, the vision of the marmalade toast floating before my eyes, far outweighed any spiritual fervour I might have thought I had, and so, I couldn't wait to be confirmed, so as to get my teeth into that crunchy toast with the amber coloured marmalade jewels glistening on top. 

Snakes

There are numerous venomous snakes living in South Africa, of which the Rinkhals and the Black Mamba are two of the better known.  We encountered snakes all the time while living on the farm.  I never really got used to, nor developed a liking for them.

On occasion my father would find a mole snake in the veld, and after popping it into a hessian sack, would come home with his prize slung over his shoulder.  Even though the snake was one of the harmless variety, it still sent a shiver down my spine as I watched it's slowly writh in the bottom of the bag.  My father never killed Mole snakes, but took them back to where he had found them, and let them lose again.

My mother had a number of encounters with snakes over the years.  Being a city girl, she spent her first fifteen years on the farm, checking for snakes under all the beds and in the cupboards. The very night she decided to give up this habit, was the night a snake came slithering across the room from under the dressing table.   My friend from Germany has a similar phobia about snakes, and so when she visited me a few years ago, she went through the same ritual of looking under all the beds and tables and chairs, much to my amusement.

Between the bathroom and the kitchen with it's large wood stove, was an enclosed veranda with a sort of flagstone floor.  It was here that my mother witnessed a large Rinkhals disappear down a crack between the stones.  She quickly fetched my father's shotgun and poking it down the hole, pulled the trigger.  Fortunately for her, nothing happened, and she had the presence of mind not to try again, otherwise my father might have come home to a very grizzly finding!

Once when my mother was watering the garden, she noticed in her peripheral vision, a piece of the hose sitting up next to her.  On closer inspection, there sitting a short distance from her was a Rinkhals, his hooded head flattened and ready to strike.  My mother, bless her cotton socks, ran so fast, she completely missed the entrance to the house.

My father once found a huge rock with a large pothole gouged out of the top, from millions of years of being open to the elements.  He thought it would make an ideal birdbath, so he proceeded to get it transported down to the old house on the back of the trailer, to be incorporate into our garden.  It wasn't more than a few days before we noticed the dogs going crazy and barking incessantly at the rock.  My big sister who was always very brave, got on all fours and peered under the rock to see what they were barking at.  There, all curled up and having a bit of a snooze, was the most enormous snake imaginable.  Out came the shotgun, and the interloper was quickly disposed of.  Unfortunately we never really took to the birdbath after that.

All in all, snakes were part and parcel of living on a farm, and one had to be aware at all times when walking through the veld, that to step on a snake, would not be the wisest thing to do.  Being cold-blooded, they would usually lie sunning themselves right in the middle of a pathway.  My son stepped over one such snake while walking in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains.  Fortunately for him, he didn't step on it and so came home rather white faced to tell the tale.