Because we were starting out with only the barest commodities, I thought we must take some health precautions! 

Going back a little:

Personally I didn’t move straight away onto the ten-acre smallholding.  

My husband had wanted the six-bed caravan in place and the construction hut built, before he would allow our small children and I to move into the caravan on the plot. 

The haircut!

That first evening I was concerned about possible health problems and decided that I would cut our daughters’ hair to prevent the possibility of lice. 

But the light was fading by that time and the result was somewhat scary! But I wanted my haircut as well. And as young as our eldest daughter was, I asked her to cut my hair too. That was rather brave of me, don’t you think? 

I have a photo of the results. But I think our eldest daughter will sort me out, if I posted it here.  

She remembers how awful it was going to high school the next day, for the first time at that school. As the `new kid on the block’ and has never forgiven me! That’s what teenagers’ dread, looking weird! 

And I smile now,

Do you know why? She told me some years later, that the other children at that high school thought that she and her younger brother (also a teenager then) were rich.  

I thought that was 'rich'! 

Because here we were actually living in a caravan with tents adjoining it back and front! And in the construction hut we were standing in a large metal basin to bath ourselves! 

Maybe they thought our children were rich because of how the spoke and behaved.  

And to think we used a plastic toilet hut too!

The toilet hut was there on the plot when we bought and moved onto the plot. 

It was a tall narrow black toilet hut, like the ones used at fairs and big sports events, when huge crowds are expected.  

Why the toilet hut was there:

Apparently the last owner of the property had been planning to start up a plant nursery. He had young (Cupressoyparis leylanii) cypress fir trees still in their black plastic packets lined up in two rows.  

But by the time we bought the smallholding, the fir trees had grown quite tall. And they were still in their plastic packets, even though the packets had deteriorated. 

I think he was using the toilet hut while he was working there and setting up the plants he was hoping to sell. 

Also on the plot  there was,

A ten-by-eight corrugated iron hut with a black man living in it, it was part of the sale deal that he continued living in the iron hut.  

We didn’t mind that, but came the day when he was murdered visiting the shebeen (where they sell illegal alcohol) behind the house across the road from us. 

The people running the shebeen came across to our caravan and asked us to call the police. At that point the telephone people had just recently set up a telephone pole next to our caravan. Note, cell phones hadn’t been invented then. 

But it was many hours later that the police came, and by that time the poor man was dead! That was a very upsetting time for us. The police in those days didn’t worry about people been stabbed. 

Out of hard times:

And when winter was coming on we had to move. The winters in that part of South Africa are too cold for caravan dwellers, especially with small children. So we rented a house in a neighbouring housing area for about six months or so.