Swimming with Cobras by Rosemary Smith Page B

each child nestled into his or her own special space. That was when we realised that they’d shared rooms for long enough.
    Matthew's new room had fish in an aquarium and a shelf of books on Churchill. During his Manchester United phase it was draped in red scarves and flags. Charlotte had an old kitchen table on which she made a doll’s house. She spent hours filling the rooms with furniture made out of matchboxes and tiny lampshades ingeniously fashioned from toothpaste tube tops covered in foil. Lucy would close her door and deliver lectures to the walls in a variety of voices, so that sometimes we genuinely wondered who was in there with her. Anna and her friend Fiona played at being grown-ups, mostly marching around with carrier bags full of old bills.
    Over the years, troops of friends were in and out of our house. During the high school years, when boarders were given lunch on a Sunday there was never any difficulty persuading anyone to wash up. The kitchen, cosy and warm, was a great place for socialising, with apparently many an assignation made and broken there. Years later Anna complained that Matthew had seduced most of her friends within those walls. Malvern and I wondered how we could have missed this Casanova in our midst.
    My real passion was Christmas. Matthew once remarked, “My mother is an activist the whole year round, but at Christmas she becomes as bourgeois as anyone.” I loved baking pies and puddings, the smell of turkey basting, the twinkling of Christmas lights and decorations and the chatter of many voices around the table, where we would often be joined by friends and their families. Sometimes we chose themes. One year everyone dressed up as Victorians, another, Anna and her boyfriend organised a treasure hunt that took us around town. On Boxing Day, which was also Malvern’s birthday, we usually had an open house. This meant a great furry of cleaning after the Christmas Eve dinner, and then Malvern would make gallons of punch, which he would personally stand and ladle out the next day. Friends milled about our garden meeting each other’s extended families visiting for the holidays. It was fun but exhausting. As a child Malvern had always felt somewhat cheated having to share his birthday with Christmas, so we were determined to make his day special, but sometimes I think we just wore him out.
    Life in Merriman’s House was varied and happy, and always very busy. If sometimes I was out of the house more than I should have been, or if schedules became hectic and nerves became frayed, we always knew that the holidays would come and we would set off into the countryside to find ourselves and each other again.
    Each year in the late summer we would go up into the mountains at Hogsback and pick blackberries. These outings reminded me of my childhood when my grandmother came to stay with us in August. I would help her pick the dewberries that grew in profusion among the sand-hills of our North Country home, and we cooked jam while she told me stories of her own childhood. Years later when Malvern introduced me to the poetry of Seamus Heaney, his poem Blackberry-Picking brought back memories of those summers.
    Now though, when I re-read that poem, it’s our Hogsback holidays I conjure up. Our good friend Nova de Villiers and her four children would drive up into the mountains in her large brown station wagon, and we and our four in ours. Our destination was a stone cottage in a magnificent mountainside garden, planned, planted and tended by its owner over many years. It was a delight in spring with azalea and rhododendron, in summer with hydrangea, iris and rose and in autumn with the rusts and golds of many trees.
    As soon as we arrived, the children would leap from the car to see if their favourite places and people were still there. There were the local Xhosa children, whose parents worked on the property and lived there. And there were the magical hiding places under