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There was a period sometime between the age of 6 and 9 when we were taken to horse riding lessons. I am not sure if it is because of the flies, the heat, or the bouncing up and down for hours at a time, but I don’t have too many memories of the horsey period. The couple that stick are somewhat interesting though.
We were out on a ride through the bush one day with about 8 other kids and the instructor when my brother’s horse decided to bolt and pretty much just disappeared off down the dirt track that we were following. I remember pulling on the reins of my own horse as hard as my little arms could pull to stop it careening off after my bro. As there was only one instructor with us she had to keep us all together and just hope my bro was ok (obviously no suing was going on back then!); about 20 mins later we came across my bro walking back down the path towards us, pretty bruised and battered. He’d managed to hang on for about 10mins at full gallop and finally got flung off and landed stomach first on a tree trunk… how he never broke anything is one of the wonders of the modern age. He got to double up with the instructor all the way home where we found his horse happily chewing away at some cud.
Another day after a marathon ride through the bush mum made the mistake of arriving late to pick us up; my brother had somehow managed to find a box of matches so we wondered off into the bush and thought we’d start a little fire behind a large rock. After piling up a bit of grass (the long hip length dried out brush that is found around Africa) and a few twigs, we threw a couple of matches on it and were thrilled to watch watch it spark up and build into a nice little fire… we were somewhat less thrilled to watch the wind pick up a few sparks and send them into the dried out brush just slightly downwind! Within seconds the brush was ablaze and spreading rapidly through the brush toward the stables; we did the only thing that two young, honourable and mature kids would ever do, we bolted and ran as fast as we could to get around the other side of the stable area to make it look like we had nothing to do with the fire. It didn’t take long for one of the farmhands to spot the smoke and fortunately the 10 or so farm hands managed to put it out using wet sacks before it did any real damage, other than destroying an acre or so of dry grass. Although I am sure we would have been the prime suspects, we never got into any trouble as no one could prove anything. Oliver had bailed the matches long ago and we were the picture of innocence.
