The Restory Retreat Centre

The Southern vista from Barrowfield Photo by Hanna Jacobs  I have lived in many places throughout my life. The earliest home I can remember was when I was about four years old and we lived in a tiny hamlet called Mica, where my father took a job as electrician in a vermiculite mine. It was very remote and truly unspoilt. It was glorious for my sister and me but nerve wrecking for my mother. It being very much Africa, there were huge spiders and scorpions and green grasshoppers, not to mention deadly creatures like green mambas and malaria mosquitoes. On weekends my father would take us to the banks of the huge Olifants river and we would watch the hippos lazing in the muddy water. We moved to a bigger mining town when we had to start school and from then on every few years my father would find a different job with better prospects and we would move again. For some of the most memorable places we lived I don't have fond memories of. At one stage, when I was about ten ye...

Photograph by David Chedgy My father worked with a horse-plough,  His shoulders globed like a full sail strung Between the shafts and the furrow. The horse strained at his clicking tongue. An expert. He would set the wing And fit the bright steel-pointed sock. The sod rolled over without breaking. At the headrig, with a single pluck Of reins, the sweating team turned round And back into the land. His eye Narrowed and angled at the ground, Mapping the furrow exactly. I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake, Fell sometimes on the polished sod; Sometimes he rode me on his back Dipping and rising to his plod. I wanted to grow up and plough, To close one eye, stiffen my arm. All I ever did was follow In his broad shadow round the farm. I was a nuisance, tripping, falling, Yapping always. But today It is my father who keeps stumbling Behind me, and will not go away.                            ...

My father with the four of us, at some beacon somewhere on one of our excursion, back in around  1969. When we were little, Pa took us to the places he discovered during the course of his working week as an electrician. It sometimes took him deep into the bushveld and later into the rain forests around Tzaneen. We even did a spell of six months down in Cape St. Francis where he worked on the electrification of a brand new 5 star hotel.       We lived in dire conditions in a little house we called "the train house" and I hated going to school in the nearby town of Humansdorp. Mainly because there were no grass playgrounds, only concrete and we traveled by bus, leaving home in the dark and wet of the Cape winter mornings. Accustomed to the dry, mild winters of the Lowveld,  we felt truly miserable.  But I rem ember best how we used to run up and down the corridors of the hotel, the smell of brand new carpets and a newly thatched roof. Looking through ...