One of my activities as a young man was to be a youth leader. I was allotted to a group and accompanied them to scout camps. They ranged in age from 8 to 10 and expected to have fun and adventures together. My job was to make fun suggestions. Once, my group of six boys sat in their tent. Other groups of boys sat in other tents around us in a circle.
Everyone was in their sleeping bags, and I heard snores and the occasional groan and shout as I patrolled in the dead of night.
I flashed my torch (the South African name for a flashlight) on the faces of my slumbering heroes. Their heads bobbed up, their hands rubbed their eyes, and they howled at the sudden intrusion.
A spy who knew that one of the other groups was planning an invasion heard details of it. They planned to lipstick us, I announced.
The wise kids thoughtfully made suggestions for a strategy for facing this invasion. This was not a time for sleeping. One bright scout planned to hang a bucket of water over the entrance and pretend to be sleeping. When we saw the enemy at the opening, one of the group would pull the rope and the ice-cold water would put them to flight.
Of course, the alarm was false, and the group stayed awake the whole night, but no enemy arrived. The following day, everyone overslept, went without breakfast, and was determined to carry out an attack the next night on the tent which they decided had plotted the diabolical plan,
The camp kitchen took up one of the places in the circle and operated on a gas range on which pots for cooking various foods and drinks stood. An hour or so before mealtimes, the group chosen for kitchen duty tended the gas burners and mixed the food concoctions. At the sound of the chow gong, boys from all the tents lined up with tin plates, mugs, and eating utensils.
The racket was deafening. The kids laughed, shouted, chatted, and banged on their plates. Each kitchen scout stood by a pot, ladle in hand, one pot containing soup, the other meat, the other vegetables, the dessert, and finally, the coffee, tea, or cocoa.
The kids were always hungry and impatient, and no matter how much food was dished up, they always came back for more. Of course, the taste was never to their liking, and they grumbled and mumbled against the kitchen detail with cries of boo and “we could have done it better”, but they couldn’t, and the insults of the previous day were thrown back at them.
I gathered my gang for a pow-wow, during which each one raised a suggestion for revenge on the enemy. We took a vote and chose the scheme for cooking our victim.
The plan worked like a charm, and raucous laughter echoed through the camp the following day. We had crept stealthily through the camp in the dark, silent hour before dawn, entered unnoticed into the tent and captured one of the enemy. We tied him and gagged him and thrust him trussed up and doused in tomato sauce, like a chicken, into the biggest pot in the chow tent. His friends found him when they came for breakfast the following day. One could say that the goose was well and truly cooked.
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