Hartley Neita

The first toy I remember receiving was a mouth organ. This was purchased by my father at Times Store in Kingston and I found it on Christmas morning in a Christmas stocking tied to my bed. Also in the stocking were Starlights, a pack of squibs and some balloons.

I did not know one note from the other and that Christmas, our house was full of discordant noise. By the time I learned to play it, it was damaged and could no longer play a note. I have often wondered if my mother did not deliberately spoil it for I remember hearing her telling my father that he should never give me another mouth organ.

It was then I discovered - how, I do not recall - that placing a piece of paper over the teeth of a comb could play notes. Day in, day out, I was playing Home on the Range, Yanky, Doodle, Dandy, and of course, Carry Me Ackee Go Linstead Market.

I also discovered that a dried calabash and the dried pod of the gungo could make noise and I tormented my household by singing and shaking a beat with these instruments.

To get me out of the house, my father made a kite and showed me how to fly it. That was sheer joy. For hours each day during the school holidays and on Saturdays, I flew my kite with my friends in the schoolyard next door. We all tried to fly it high into the clouds and failed. When the threads broke and the kites flew far away, we searched the woods, often without luck.

My father also made my first gig from the wood of a guava tree which grew in our backyard. He refused to put a nail in it and carved it with a point on which it could spin. It is only when I had children that I realised his wisdom in not giving me a gig with a nail.

As I grew older, he made a swing and hung it on the branch of a wild cherry tree which grew in our backyard. Soon, I was pumping it high, until the day the rope snapped and I fell with a thud to the ground. Luckily, it happened just as I started to swing, otherwise, I would not be writing this column today.

Another of my home-made toys was the board-horse. This was just pieces of wood which my friends and I placed in the water running along the edge of the road after rain fell. We ran along with our board-horse, snapping our fingers as they sailed and raced on the water. I tell you, we had more fun than turfites at Knutsford Park or today's Caymanas Park.

Our first cricket bats were dried coconut tree boughs; our first ball, a dried sour orange; our first football, a dried grapefruit.

We also had telephones. We bore a hole at the bottom of two used condensed milk tins, passed a string between both and spoke into them. We believed our voices travelled along the string. Our first cellphones!

And, of course, we carved two hearts, intertwined, on the trunk of the trees in the schoolyard to demonstrate our love for the pretty girl we fell in love with when we were ten years of age, began writing her as ''your b.f.' and receiving letters from her which came from 'your g.f'.