New life
Free entertainment
Zenga Longmore
0 lumba returned from Nigeria with a very expensive toy for Omalara. It is a mobile alligator which snaps its jaws to the tune of 'Everything's Coming Up Roses' when you press its tail. Needless to say, Omalara merely threw a scornful glance at it and began to cry every time she heard the jangly theme tune. No amount of pleading or cajoling could win her round. So now the alligator (along with the Baby Walker, the musical duck and the Flashy 'Beat me — I'm a tax inspector.' Hip Hop Jive Rattle) is confined to the bottom of my wardrobe, lone and unloved.
Not that Omalara is the type of baby who eschews playing. Far from it. She spends hours of fun pottering around with three-pin plugs, fragile lampshades and telephones. Gone is the golden age of cluttering up my flat with breakable knick- knacks; no more cups of tea on the coffee table, and, since Omalara has learnt to stand against the telly and rattle it, the pot plants have been moved to the top of the bathroom cabinet.
With a bit of luck she'll take after her mother and her aunt, and glean most pleasure from objects which cost nothing at all. As children, Boko and I spent many a long day playing with daisies. Adults, watching us sitting by the pond, would wonder how we could extract so much amusement from this common garden weed. The secret lay in our choice of daisy. Every morning we picked our flowers with special care. My daisies were wholesome golden-and-white sisters called Dona Pepe and Cherry Blossom. They floated around on waterlily leaves and did good to the poor. Boko's brood, on the other hand, were a raggle-taggle one-petal family who resided in the decaying inner shrubbery, They had an ugly, leering quality: the type of daisy you'd cross the street to avoid. Just one glance at them was enough to take you into a dark and dreadful world. Bert and Brutus Daisy, the youngest twins, were desperate criminals, capable of anything. One fateful morning, when Boko was 11 and fast outgrowing her daisy phase, Dona Pepe, when on her way to the dandelion orphanage with a generous donation, was found strangled by her own stem, floating stamen downwards among the tadpoles. Bert and Brutus "adn't seen nor 'eard nuffink' so our game came to an end. Kuba, Boko's five-year-old daughter, a true child of London, upholds England s folklore .tradition by singing clapping games wherever she goes. The latest gem, which she sang to me when I met her from school, begins:
Little Billy (Clap clap clap) Little Jan (clap clap) Take a step (clay clap clap) Like a man (clap clap).
The beauty of Kuba's songs, intricate clapping rhythms aside, is that they are repeated by her three-year-old sister Com- fort, a few days later, for Omalara.s benefit. The hand movements are simply" fied, but the words have far more punch. Yesterday, they came out as:
Little belly (clap clap) Little drunk Can you step it (clap) Like a monk.
Passed on to Omalara, the poem becomes: Aye yah yah yah (clap clap bang).
Long olonngg on meaning.moreaaIntirnagd.ition: short on sense but
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