I think all children love playing near water, whether it is a lake, a river or the sea. My children were lucky enough to be brought up in Canterbury, from where you get to the sea pretty quickly if you go for a few miles in three out of four directions. My grandchildren all love the sea. When Jae’s boys come to visit they love having the opportunity to run about and throw stones on the beach, and daughter Gwen’s children in Sydney have the opportunity to run about on the splendid beaches there.
As a child, I lived quite a distance from the sea, but we had beautiful rivers running through the Scottish Border countryside where I lived. I spent a lot of time down by the river going “baggie catching” – baggie being the local term for minnow. I don’t know if they still call them that, given that a baggie now seems to be the term for a Ziplock plastic bag. I would set out with my friends, the main equipment being jam jars with string tied round the neck and a piece of bread.
We would go down to the river Teviot, which meanders through the park in Hawick, climb down to the river and carefully lay the jar on its side with a piece of bread inside on the river floor. You just had to sit quietly beside it until the baggies swam into the jar, when you got hold of the string and pulled the jar back out. It was a good way of catching two or three fish at a time. We would admire them and eventually carefully return them to the river.
My grandfather knew I spent a fair bit of time fishing, and one day, after a fair bit of nagging on my part I think, gave me a present of a baggie catcher. This was a bit of shaped plastic which you could tie over the mouth of your jar: the fish would swim in, but couldn’t get out again. I think he used it to catch baggies as bait for real fishing.
I used it once only! I left it in the river with my jar overnight – a bad mistake. I returned in the morning to find my jar absolutely packed tight with the poor little fish. I was pretty horrified at this jar full of squirming baggies and got them back into the river as fast as possible. I am not sure I ever owned up to my grandfather what had happened. I guess the baggie catcher cost quite a bit: plastic was not readily available then. Nowadays you could make a catcher by cutting off the neck of a plastic bottle, but in these days there were no plastic bottles – drinks came in returnable glass bottles.
Another favourite outing was to go “up the Borthwick” with my mother and family or friends – it seemed to be a women and children only outing. The Borthwick was another nearby river which was shallow enough for us to safely paddle about and try to learn to swim in. Rugs would be taken to spread by the riverside, together with sandwiches and drinks. We happily spent whole days there making damns, and running around or sitting on the grass. When our cousins came over from Belfast in the summer, we would spend days on end in the river.
It seems looking at the photographs, that my mother was fairly cavalier about the passing on of swimming costumes from one child to the next! Poor Robbie at the front seems to be wearing the costume, which I guess belonged to me previously and probably Leslie before that! He is the only child without a smile on his face, poor boy.
I don’t expect to encounter many rivers while climbing Kilimanjaro – though it appears that the first people recorded to have climbed it, which was surprisingly late – in the second half of the nineteenth century – may have expected to do so. It seems that it was generally thought at one time that Kili was the source of the Nile. However, there are some mountain streams formed from water running off the glacier at the top. I see that some sites say that the porters collect water from these streams on a daily basis to use as drinking water. I am not sure whether our porters will do this, or carry the water with them. I don’t think I will bother with taking my swimming costume up the mountain though – water off a glacier would be a bit on the chilly side, I reckon.