105) 3 Uvongo Rd.

3 Uvongo Rd Waterfall

We were so happy to move into our own house in Uvongo Rd. We said that this was going to be the last move of our lives. We thought that we would only leave that house in a wooden box. Our house sat on the side of a hill and at the bottom of the hill were large sugar cane fields and a plantation of gum trees so we could look out of our windows over the roofs of the houses below us and feel that we were in the country. There was a small stream running through the cane fields and we would often take Muffin for a walk there. She loved the freedom to run and we all got a great deal of pleasure from those walks.

Our house was not perfect, in fact there were a few things that were not the way we wanted them but we liked it so much we were prepared to put up with them. There was no shower cubicle in the bathroom and no room to install one. We did not have a veranda and the design did not lend itself to adding one. Most important of all, there was no oven in the kitchen and no place to fit one. The kitchen had a built-in stovetop but no oven. The last owner had owned a large Microwave oven that was a conventional oven as well and so had not needed an oven. I had noticed this before we bought the house but I just put it out of my mind and thought “I will deal with that problem later”. I had bought a new freestanding oven just before we came to Natal less than 18 months before so I did not have any trouble selling it, as it was almost new. With the money I got for it I also bought myself a microwave/conventional oven. I had to learn how to use the microwave side and it took me a little while to get used to it. I remember just after we moved in I invited our friends Brian and Sybella Draycott to supper and decided to pop the bread rolls into the oven for a few moments to crisp them up. I had never done this with a microwave before and set the timer for two minutes, when the time was up they were not very crisp so as I was putting the finishing touches to the rest of the meal I micro waved them for another minute or two. When we were ready to eat, I quickly put the bread rolls into a basket and placed them on the table. They did not look very crisp but the rest of the meal would get cold if I waited any longer so I decided to just serve them like that. Brian took a bread roll and tried to break it in half. It was so hard that he couldn’t break it with his hands let alone get his teeth into it, it was like a rock. Sybella, who is a great cook explained to me that microwave ovens would not get the bread rolls crisp the way I wanted them and the longer I left them in the harder they would get. Fortunately I had some other bread to serve with our meal but of course I got teased about my “rock rolls” for quite a while.

As our house was on the side of a hill the yard was on three levels. The largest and middle section of the yard was where the house was built, behind it and higher than the house was a narrow section of the yard that had a few shrubs on it and below the house there was a section that had a number of fruit trees on it. There was a peach tree, a plum, a loquat, a quince a lemon and a number of banana trees. On the middle section near the house there was a wonderful avocado pear tree, a fig tree and two paw paw trees. We always called that lower section “the lower orchard” which sounded very posh when we only had half an acre of land. A small half-acre at that. When we were buying the house we were told that when the land in Waterfall was sub-divided from farmland into residential plots there was a bit of a mix up. Some of the surveyors used the English Acre measurement and some used Cape Acre measurement one of which is a little smaller than the other. I am not sure which is the smallest but we knew that ours was the smaller of the two. When anyone asked us how much land we had we always told them it was a small half-acre, they thought we were crazy but it was the truth.

The avocado pear tree was quite large and we thought it should have some fruit on it but there was nothing that first year we were in the house, but the subsequent and all following years it gave us an abundance. Far more than we could eat so we would give them away to anyone who wanted some. We really enjoyed them but it has spoilt me and I begrudge paying for an avocado pear now and they have to be very cheap for me to buy them. Our paw paws were good too but harvesting them was a bit of a problem. Sometimes the birds would get to them before us and we would loose out. If the birds didn’t get them and we left them to drop they would smash open as they hit the ground. Jonny would ask me to help him when he went to pick a paw paw. I was supposed to catch the fruit that he would knock off the tree with a long pole. I was not a very good catcher and often I would miss and it would smash on the ground anyway. One day we were trying to get a particularly large and tasty looking paw paw; I was standing under the tree as Jonny knocked it with a pole. Jonny hit it, it fell, I missed it and it hit me square on my head and smashed into pieces, leaving paw paw juice, in my hair and on my face and neck. It took me a little while to see the funny side of it but I did say that I was resigning from that task and unless Jonny could think of another way of harvesting them the birds could have the paw paws. He got a long pole and attached a metal ring to the end of it. I sewed a cloth bag on to the ring and Jonny sharpened one of the edges. The sharpened edge made it possible for Jonny to cut the stem of the paw paw and it would then fall into the bag and we would have lovely whole fruit.
The banana trees would also produce a good crop but the birds liked to have more than their share. We did not mind if they took one or two but if we left the bunch of bananas on the tree to ripen properly the birds would have a feast. We learnt to recognise when the bananas were at a point when the birds did not want them but were ripe enough to continue the ripening process off the tree. We would then cut the whole bunch off the tree and hang it in the garage and it would ripen there away from the pesky thieves. The peaches, plums, loquats, quince and figs were never a success but the birds liked them and as we made sure that they did not get the bananas and paw paws we left those to them.