We used to play on the verandah of the house. Mum got Dad to screen it in after she found a snake slithering towards a basinette with a sleeping baby. The verandah made a wonderful play area. We had a huge chest of dress-up clothes, including the (Great) Aunts’ fur stoles, Mum’s bridal veil, Aunty Betty’s holiday presents, and lots of hats and gloves.
We would spend hours dressing up and playing pretend games: “I’m going to be the grand lady and you come and visit me, we’ll have afternoon tea” or we would pretend to be the (Great) Aunts and have ‘proper’ adult conversations, like we used to hear them have with Mum and Dad when we visited. Often Barbara dressed as the school teacher and made us pay attention to her ‘lessons’ on the blackboard.
Sometimes it was too hot for dress-ups so Mum would fill the old laundry tub with water, and we would use the hose to squirt each other. Our water came from the dam, so if it was a dry year we weren’t allowed to play with the hose (except when we sneaked a few squirts when we watered the garden).
Mum and Dad used to play golf at the Bogan Gate Golf Club on Sundays. We would be left ‘home alone’ to amuse ourselves.
I remember when it was hot, we would sometimes fill the bath tub and spend most of the afternoon playing games in the water, sliding in the sloping end as if we were seals, making soap really frothy and pretending we were drinking beer, and once we put soap on our faces and prentended to shave, just like Dad did.
And if I got tired of playing with my sisters I would go outside and play in the pepper tree. I still have a fondness for the smell of pepper trees.
