The fires of my youth

When I was young we were not allowed fires, just as we aren’t now, but we had them. My mother was the burner.

She was the gardener, too, and had to dispose of the large quantities of branch, leaf and garden refuse which two and a half acres yielded in abundance. To attempt to stuff this into some smelly plastic membranes was absurd: the only way to deal with is was to pile it at the bottom of the cultivated area of the property and wait.

Over the months it grew: first a heap, then a pile and finally a mountain of rubbish. When it had risen to the proportion of a Hindu funeral pyre, my mother would decide that it was now a potential fire hazard and so should be set aflame. There might have also been some slight regard for the neighbours in this, too, as the infrequency of the event meant that if there was any irritation caused by the fire, it was not often so. 

Neighbours was a debatable term: the very reason for our disregard of the municipal regulations which prohibited fires in residential areas was that we did not consider ourselves to have neighbours. With this size of property, stretching out as a tongue of land between an upper and lower road, we never saw any. No one lived at the tip where a tiny tooth of land belonged to the municipality for some arcane reason; we considered it ours anyway. Nor was there any sign of life human life at the other wider end of the property, where a long boundary of eucalyptus trees and a wild hedge of hard green leaf competed to make the land beyond inaccessible. It was owned, the story went, by some obscure gentleman who was determined to ruin any prospective buyer through the purchase price. 

It was at these two ends of the property where the heaps would steadily rise. A little responsible thought about location would have led to positioning them within the tamed regions of the garden, where a wandering spark would have landed on a nicely watered, green element of my mother’s doing; but having an unsightly pile anywhere near the cultivated areas would have spoilt their effect. The result was that all the unwanted stuff was dragged, wheeled or rolled to the furthest reaches of the garden where the wild side began. There the heaps rose, perhaps warning the uninhibited, undisciplined growth beyond the borders that, were it to dare coming over, it would be cut, consigned to the pile and then burnt.

But the bundu beyond had no fear of fire: it thrived on it, but on its own terms.  It could start up at night when my parents were out. The early horror of my life was the night when fire broke out in one of the properties alongside ours and advanced, an impi of fire. Though my older brother and sister tried to calm me, I was as uncontrollable as the flames that seemed to be at our windows and about to consume the home. My tears would have extinguished the blaze had not the fire brigade reached the scene. Not that it came quickly: the status of our area was vague, being neither part of the suburban identity nor the rural reaches. It was served, if we were lucky, by some ad hoc arrangement of very basic equipment, rather quaint but terrifyingly slow both in reaching the scene and extinguishing the inferno. It was up to our neighbours and their staff to fight the fire until the brigade arrived – with green branches, wet sacks and shovelfuls of sand.

Seeing neighbours was quite a rarity: a wild fire was needed to bring them out of the woodwork.  With houses set far back behind hedge and undergrowth, they were otherwise not visible. The idea that the smoke of one of my mother’s purges might affect them was not even considered: any washing on the line would be sufficiently distant to be unaffected by our fire. All they would know of it was the pall of smoke that would rise throughout the day as our fire was fed.

It was an all-day affair: the quantity of material would reach such a giddy height that a day was needed, a day when the lack of wind and a moderate temperature prevailed. Neither of these conditions was too rare: our property was lucky to escape the spring and summer winds; being situated near the brow of a hill it also did not bake in heat. My mother could then choose a day quite easily, say to the gardener, “Nelson, we are going to burn today.”  

“Yes Madam,” he would reply, and the stage was set.

With her supervising, we would begin. It was not difficult to spark the blaze, the summer having dried the branches, grasses and leaves which had accumulated over the preceding months. We would begin by making a small pile, separate from the main one. This would be lit and then came the fun. With forks and rakes these flames would be fed with fire fodder. The thrill of coming close enough to feel the scorching and smell the singeing kept me coming back with more and more, not all of which qualified as garden waste. With the opportunity that such heat gave, experiments on the combustibility of various non-green material were surreptitiously conducted.  As toys distorted and ghastly odours arose, Nelson would look at me with a suspicious eye. Not that it bothered me: my eyes were fixed to the widening red and lava-grey mass as it grew into an amorphous and angry menace. As the heat beat me back I came back for more.

As a safety precaution, a long hosepipe was always stretched as near as possible to the pyre. Were any fire to escape, I would have had to sprint down a long garden path to the tap. It never proved necessary, though at the end of the day’s burning, the time came when I had the further pleasure of bringing the beast under my control. After stoking and expanding its appetite, I could now shrink that stomach into a flat field of ash. With angry hisses the fire yielded up its force: it tried to hide itself under apparently harmless layers of grey, but my jets of water sought it out. As the spurts penetrated, flights of smoke rose, but beneath the layers the coals glowered. 

My mother always emphasised how thoroughly it had to be doused. All might look well, but the fire had just gone to ground as those first waves of water came near – try walking barefoot through that black mush and your soles would come out burnt and blistered.  So I would play long and lingeringly with the arc of the spray as I targeted the headquarters and outposts of the smouldering heap. Finding a nerve centre, it was liquidated. 

It was not my mother’s instruction which made me successful: the reverse thrill of extinguishing what I had so wildly fed kept me there for the hours needed to kill the beast. Her own efforts at killing it were, I well remember, not always successful. One night, after she had doused the day’s flames herself, we were thrown out of our cosy chairs by the shout of an unknown voice. At the window  stood a neighbour. “There’s a fire at the bottom of your property!” he yelled. 

We ran from the house, down that long garden path and saw the frightening sight of flames making themselves comfortable among the vegetation. Grabbing branches, buckets and the hosepipe we went berserk. Panic prevailed and the fire was doused. Even after water-logging the pile which had lain low with its malevolent embers until our backs were turned, none of us slept in peace. 

I shall not have a fire again, neither because of the panic that once came with flames nor because they no longer thrill. The reason is simply that laws and housing density have led to the first curl of smoke bringing worried neighbours, security company men and the vans of municipal law enforcement.  I shall be told that all fires in residential areas are illegal (apart from braais, meneer) and that I can be prosecuted.  Knowing this, I do as they tell me and make a braai. On it go the little bits of hedge and dead wood which my small property produces.  It cooks the meat – that’s about as thrilling as it gets.