August 2026

Once upon a time, long long ago and far away, when I was a little girl, there was very little health and safety legislation. Don’t get me wrong; I am totally in favour of health and safety rules (see “Health and Safety at work:  What not to do with a pneumatic drill” Sept 14 2020). But some of the most enjoyable and enriching experiences of my young childhood would never be allowed today.

When I was four years old, my family moved out of a block of flats into a house with a most beautiful garden. It had a lawn surrounded by flower beds, fences draped with bougainvillea and masked with shrubs like syringa and winter jasmine, and a loquat tree standing over an area of worn brick paving. Very soon after we moved in, my father took me out into the garden and taught me how to climb that tree. He was a mountain climber himself, so I suppose it came naturally to him. I spent the rest of my childhood until the age of eleven climbing that tree, and as soon as he was old enough, so did my younger brother, and so did all our friends. One of them built us a tree house right at the top (my father did check it for stability before we were authorised to play in it). Neither our parents nor our friends’ parents seemed to give a second thought to the possibility of our falling out of the tree onto the brick surface below. Fortunately, nobody did. We ate the loquats when they were ripe, had battles throwing them at each other when they were green, pretended one of the branches was a horse, and lay dozing in the midday sun on the platform at the top, surrounded by a low wall of shiny green leaves. And today when I see playgrounds closed because of some fault in the carefully constructed rubber surface beneath the climbing frames, I think of my beautiful loquat tree and the taste of its sweet sun-warmed fruit and my father carefully explaining to me where to place my hands and feet.

During the winter, when it rained too much to go to the beach, we often spent Sunday afternoons at the docks. Nowadays members of the public, even without small children, would never in a million years be allowed to just wander around in a dockyard full of sea-going vessels, stepping over thick mooring cables and the railway lines where the cranes for loading and unloading cargoes ran, or leaning over the edge of the dockside to watch the sea sloshing against it far below. In those days Cape Town docks had two main areas. One was a large basin where the ocean liners, including the ‘mail boat’ which carried most of the overseas post, tied up. I knew that this was how the letters from my grandparents in England arrived. There was a smaller dock where fishing boats, tugs and pilot boats were moored. This was where I first heard of the remote, minute island of Tristan da Cunha, far out in the South Atlantic. The ‘Tristania' tied up here, the islanders' little wooden fishing boat which transported cargoes of rock lobsters. These are still their major export. It was also where the ‘John D. Gilchrist' was moored, the research vessel belonging to the university where my mother worked as a zoologist. But the best thing about visiting the docks was the fact that sometimes the captains of the tugs which went out into Table Bay to help the liners get in safely would allow members of the public to go along for the ride. Oh, what a thrill that was! And for many years of my adult life, in spite of the compensations of a job I loved, how I missed it! No-one could possibly go down to Southampton docks these days, wander around among the international shipping and be given a ride on a tug. Not only health and safety considerations but possible terrorism and the sheer numbers of people around today would prevent it.  

But I have been lucky. Now at last in my old age, I am living in a place where if I fancy a boat trip, I can go for a ride on a ferry to one of the islands, as easily as hopping on a bus. The smell of the sea, the little ship bouncing over the waves, throwing up spray, the long wake creaming out behind, the jaunty little red pennant – lovely!

Probably the most unusual experience of my childhood, by today’s standards, was being taken to my father’s workplace. He worked in a medical laboratory and on a few occasions he had to go in on a Sunday.  I often heard him discussing his day’s work with my mother, who had a degree in zoology and had done a year as a medical laboratory technician during WWII as her war service. I am quite sure that he would never have taken us anywhere near live viruses or bacteria, but I was thrilled to see laboratory benches cluttered with strange equipment, to smell the various chemicals, disinfectants etc, and to watch him making bits and pieces of equipment by bending glass tubes over a Bunsen burner. In those days laboratory glassware wasn’t ready-made and disposable. You had to know how to make your own pipettes and things, and there was a whole roomful of people who washed and sterilised them after use. Of course, there wasn’t a computer in sight. This was the 1950s. Even pocket calculators hadn’t been invented – people used slide rules. I knew that my father worked to combat really bad diseases such as polio and smallpox and this was the place where the fight went on. No way would that be allowed today, and quite right too. But now in my old age, when I have my annual flu and Covid jab every autumn, I think of my father and that lab, and his part in the ongoing fight.

I am totally in favour of the law protecting children from really stupid parents or abusive employers or public carelessness. It is tragic when a young child is killed in a preventable accident. But I do owe some of my dearest and most formative childhood experiences to situations which would never be allowed today.