The Breeding Ground…
I married my best friend when I was 25. Nice guy. But not husband material…For starters, he was 17 years older than me, but I said I’ll give it a go and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, so off we went! If I knew what I was in for, I probably would’ve left the country!
We worked together, he was a surveyor, so I changed jobs after the wedding, knowing instinctively that we needed space at the workplace. I went and worked in a different town and everything was hunky dory. We had lots of fun together, even went overseas for six weeks and travelled around.
Now, I must tell you that he collects old tractors, engines and other old metal stuff! Lots of it! The big love in his life is (still) a 10 ton steam traction engine, named Lady Diana, that he fixed up himself, boiler as well (the guy is very resourceful!), that he likes to steam up and show off. Of course I helped! We travelled all over the country hunting for various parts, wheels, and chasing legends and stories. I found out a LOT about mechanical stuff!
In the meantime, the engineering firm I worked for had merged with another firm, and there was talk of them moving offices to the city. I had always maintained that I will never go and work in a city and I certainly wasn’t going to start now, so I quit my job and expanded into keeping myself busy on our small holding.
I ran a tea garden on weekends. He taught me to bake scones, as my mother did everything herself and I never learnt to do anything in the house from her! She reckoned I was too slow and always took things out of my hands to do it herself! This obviously caused several hardships in my life later on as far as housekeeping is concerned…I hate doing the dishes – the pots especially!! (I’m working on it…!)
We also kept our own vegetable garden and a milk cow on the small holding, but he also had another farm that he inherited from his uncle and he had a couple of hectares of almond orchards there and lots of decrepit cows, as well as baboons and wild boar that terrorised the orchards!
I found out first hand why Asterix and Obelix loved wild boar – they taste absolutely fantastic! And the hunting stories! (South African Bush Hunting…) You can’t hunt these things with dogs, their skin is too thick, and I mean THICK! Plus they have mean, very mean, tusks. So, up a tree on platforms, with food on the ground to attract them, and a rifle, at night…was the solution.
I’m telling you all of this to give you an idea what a vast range of skills I built up with this guy, because you guessed it, I had to cut up these boars and fill the freezer! Not to mention the drowned milk cow (because of the incompetence of our farm help) and about 28 chickens (because my dog got into the chicken run) that also ended up in the freezer! All in all I did a lot of slaughtering… and learnt how to make sausage and dry meat. When the freezer was full one time, I even managed to sell a young wild boar to a local five star hotel!
I also learnt to make jam, because there was a lot of fruit trees around, and we also grew Cape Gooseberries. They made the most wonderful jam, very sought after everywhere, so I sold quite a lot of them in the city as well. We also made several trips in to the market at night with lots of veges and fruit on a small dilapidated old truck. Although he had lots of money, my ex insisted on keeping all his old cars, trucks and things going, in various states of disrepair. They constantly called on his McGyver skills and we even had to substitute a foil gum wrapper one night for a fuse to have lights to return home!
Having been a bachelor, my ex knew next to nothing about women and sex, so regardless to say, we did not have a very active sex life, I was tight and sensitive and he didn’t know how to handle it, so he didn’t!
So… here I am, working my butt off for a man who then decided he didn’t want to work anymore either and came to be at home as well (to work on my nerves); didn’t want to pay me housekeeping money (I had to use the money from the tea garden); couldn’t communicate very well either…and no sex.
I didn’t have much of a self image by then (not that I was ever strong in this area anyway, but this put me way back!) And then there was my mom, always doing things for me because I couldn’t do them properly or fast enough …
So… enter my imaginative life – the one in my head – and wow, was this an exciting world! My escape, the place I lived most of the day (and night)! Some people have TV, others have books, me, I had STORIES IN MY HEAD,
and I LIVED them…