(415) Near death experience

When I was young, my father was a junior clerk in a soft drink factory. It was a promotion from being the lorry attendant when my mum married him. We were poor. We lived in my maternal grandma's wooden house. There was enough food to go round, but barely.

My mum would take in clothes to wash and iron. Though she could make very little, that furnished my grandma's and her allowance. All the children's new year clothes came from that side income. I still remember my mum's charcoal iron with sizzling ambers glowing red in the guts of that heavy cage. Mornings we find her boiling her customers' white garments. Late afternoons and nights she would be ironing.

Even we kids had to work. There is a neighbour who lived behind us that manufactured coconut sweets. The entire family would be wrapping the little cylindrical sweets in colourful transparent paper before and after lunch. It was interesting to note that although I was the youngest, it was my duty to go collect as well as deliver the sweets. My grandma used to call me the unofficial lawyer of the family. I must have been very outspoken and a pain in other people's neck!

One afternoon, the sweets allotted to us had been duly wrapped and delivered. It was nap time. No one could remember the details. What happened was our neighbour walked into our house, passed the sitting area and walked through the long corridor and saw my legs up in the air struggling above the water holder. I was moments away from drowning in less than six inches of water. There were many people in that house. Apart from my immediate family, we had a family who were our tenants. The man of that family would have been at work like my father, but the mother and her three children should have been around.

Suffice to say that my time had not come, I was rescued by that neighbour. Years later, she related to me that I was already blue in the face. From that episode, I could see that though I was young, I was independent. Perhaps it was that streak of being reluctant to ask for help that almost did me in. It was a very peaceful time in the village. No one locked their front door during the day. If my front door had been locked, you would not be reading my blog today. My parents would have buried their precious three year old two days after the drowning.