When Old Age and Bad Appearance Hide Great Sweetness

Our first house in Pietermaritzburg was in Retief Street, next door to Bugs’ family house. It was very small, only two bedrooms, one dining room and the kitchen. A veranda connected all rooms. The good thing about that house was not the inside, but the outside. As a matter of fact we had a big garden full of fruit trees and there was a lawn of soft green grass. I thought that my father would have cleaned and cut down every plant in the garden but to my surprise he decided to cut the grass only and leave the rest as it was.

Near the high fence, in the middle of the garden grew an old peach tree which made small hard red and white peaches that never seemed to ripen. The tree was so near the pavement that people working outside without too much effort stretched out an arm and stole all the peaches. This happened every year and the result was that we could never taste these good looking fruits.

Even if that tree was very old (you could see that by its thick and warped trunk) and its roots were not very deep in the ground, at the beginning of spring it produced lovely pink flowers which gave off a very nice smell. Pity that the tree sometimes got full of small brown insects, which produced a white foam which was not very nice to look at. Unfortunately one stormy day a lightning bolt struck it and reduced it to half its size.

Almost against the wall of the house there was a very tall lemon tree. At the beginning we didn’t know what it was because it had a dark and knobby trunk which divided into two smaller branches that almost touched the roof top. Thanks to these branches I often climbed up onto the roof where I used to spend many hours just reading or looking at the clouds (day dreaming). This tree had many white flowers which covered it at the beginning of the spring. They did not last very long, but for several days they covered the tree entirely. It looked like a white cap on the trunk. It was impossible to see the leaves although they were there. It was a real show of beauty.

When the flowers fell, they made a white carpet on the ground which looked like snow. In the place of these flowers grew lemons. At the beginning they were small, green and smooth. A few weeks later they changed their color to a bright yellow, they become big, but unfortunately full of bumps. During my cloud watching I used to eat these lemons which were almost sweet. Near the foot of this tree we put our dog’s kennel.

In a shady corner of the garden grew a patch of small bushes with strange thorns very similar to paper. In fact they were called paper-thorns. If you step on them you realized that paper was just a name because these thorns pricked you deep in the flesh and it was necessary to sit down on the grass to remove them one by one.

In the garden there was also a loquat tree which produced an unusual fruit called loquats. I have never seen the flowers of this tree. Anyway during the hot season this tree gave us many fruits which looked like the Italian apricots. The difference was that the loquats had four big seeds and very little pulp to eat, so that if you wanted to eat something you had to pick a lot of fruits.

The strange thing about this tree was its U-shaped trunk which hosted a community of white termites. These insects closed the opening of the trunk with mud, so as to appear round. At the end of the work of these animals this tree appeared to be half of mud and half of wood. Although I used to destroy this wall of mud with the jet of water, only two days later I found the trunk round again.

I’m so sorry to end this story now, but it’s starting to storm and I would not like to end my life like my old peach tree. It’s safer to go indoors. You will have to be patient and wait for the sun to come out of the clouds so I can finish describing the rest of my garden in Retief Street.