MAKE B E L I E V E
Wild West Days
As kids in the 1960s, we grew up on a diet of westerns. Without
television, the outdoors in the sprawling Victorian bungalows with its large
trees, bushes and stables that were once used to pull in horse-drawn
carriages, was where most time was spent making believe we were cowboys and
cattle rustlers, good guys and bad guys. All summer the house resonated with
the sounds we made – whooping cries, feverish chases, gunshots and desperate
shouts as life imitated art no end. We’d jump off slung tree branches, hide
in bushes to ambush stagecoaches or stalk the neighbour’s tabby cat. Our
fingers and fists served as six-shooters and shots came out of our mouths.
Sometimes we’d use rifles – hockey sticks or even grandfather’s walking
stick. For the better part, it was our vocal chords that ricocheted loud and
long on the hot afternoons until some killjoy elder put a lid on the
shenanigans. That was when we’d play out romances under the guava tree. We’d
hug and smooch large pillows secreted out from the bedrooms, pretending they
were Piper Laurie or Jane Russell. The inspiration for the shoot-outs, the
gunslinging, the showdowns and the romance came from different sources, the
comic books of Hopalong Cassidy and Lone Ranger, the movies of John Wayne
and Kirk Douglas and later the novels of Zane Grey and Louis L’amour.
With that software wired in, we took turns to be the gunfighter, a
lonely rugged man with the harshness etched on his face, riding into a dusty
little town on a long broom. The ‘town’, incidentally, was where my
doctor-father had his practice closed for the afternoon. Somewhere an old
uncle reclining on his easy chair snoozing with newspaper covering his face
became a ‘hombre’ taking ‘siesta’. Then, as the stranger with a Stetson, an
old neighbour working in the rose garden would lean over and ask if he could
leave a message for dad. It was not easy to ignore the intrusion, as Mr
Lopes would instruct the gunslinger, “Tell dad i’ll be coming in at 6. OK?”
Brushing aside the interruption, you knew you had a serious job on hand. It
wasn’t easy fighting villains with neighbours trying to use the sheriff to
get a doctor appointment. In the evenings, the cowboys gathered around a
bonfire in the far corner of the bungalow, singing with a ‘guitar’, except
it was dad’s tennis racquet. Ah, those Wild West days of childhood, those
were the days!
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