This article was taken from our archives. It first appeared in the March 1990 issue of The Bermudian. It appears here exactly as it did originally.
One nice thing about having younger siblings is being able to make things for them.
When they’re really young, you can palm off on them any project that didn’t work as planned. They need never know the difference.
My sister Sylvia was born when I was already nine years old. I started making toys for her right away.
She didn’t care how well they worked or if they worked at all. If I made it and said it was for her, that was enough. She believed I could do nothing wrong – what a gift for a boy going through the ugly duckling stage of his life.
I made toys for her that moved, some that made noises, some that didn’t exist in the established world of known toys. She wasn’t picky. Even when I made something for myself, she’d be happy if I would just let her play with it.
My favourites were airborne toys. I enjoyed any device that would spend time off the ground.
The easiest airborne plaything was a ruler or a slat from the window shutters. I’d hold one of these a certain way and launch it into the air. As it flew it would rotate and make a business-like humming sound.
I think sometimes the noise was more fun than the acrobatics.
Parachutes were another favourite.
They sold fancy parachute toys in the stores, but the permanent no-money-to-spare state of my household meant either I do without or make my own-which I did quite nicely. A handkerchief swiped from my dad’s pocket with strings from the corners tied to a stone did the job.
After wrapping the stone, strings and chute into a tidy bundle, I would hurl the package into the air. Sometimes the bundle would neglect to unfold or become tangled. That was the time to run for cover. Even a rather small one stone would hurt if it bounced on my head. This I knew from experience.
But usually the bundle would unfold at the zenith of its path and float gracefully to earth to the delight of this small boy and his adoring sister.
It wasn’t easy, though, to teach a four year old the proper way to launch a ruler or hurl a folded parachute straight up into the air. My sister’s throwing arm was powerful but her aim was scattered. Then too, her style of giggling wildly and hopping up and down while trying to throw ruined her launch accuracy.
Window panes in the vicinity often rattled sharply from the caresses of her misguided missiles. Fortunately none of them ever broke.
The one thing Sylvia asked for that I had trouble making was a kite.
I had just never learned to make kites.
I guess it was natural, given my family circumstances. I didn’t have an older brother to learn from and my dad, being blind, didn’t make kites either.
I tried hard enough. Year after year, long after kite season was over, I’d be tying sticks together and plastering brown or newspaper onto the frame. My earliest kites never flew.
It was customary for me to make my kites after the season had passed. My supplies came mostly from the lost or cast off kites of others.
There were some guys who had endless schemes for causing kites to transfer ownership. Some of these raiders did so because they couldn’t afford kites of their own; some just enjoyed the scheming more than the making and flying.
I always heard guys talk about putting razor blades in place of the hummers on their kites and using them to cut the strings of other kites to send them plummeting. I never saw it in practice and suspect it was more a fantasy than the facts. Truth is we had little enough control over the direction a kite moved; oftentimes too little to guide them away from kite-eating trees.
Raiding of kites wasn’t my style. I knew there was sure to be kites abandoned for one reason or another. My skill was in being more persistent than the original owner in than the original owner in extricating a kite from its ensnarement.
But this one year, with the help of my good friend, Leon “Spike” Jones, I made two neat kites, one for my baby sister and one for me.
I remember it was the first time my sister was old enough for just the two of us to go kite flying on our own. We were living on Victoria Street in Town, across the street from “Kite Hill”
Kite Hill was a wonderful coral mound that rose up above the buildings in the city of Hamilton. It has since been bulldozed into a parking lot and is the site of the Victoria Street Health clinic. In those days it was the ideal place for kite flying because we could launch our kites without fear of them fouling in trees and electricity wires.
I was so proud. Here I was as guardian and idol of my precocious sister.
I launched her kite and tied the string around her middle so she wouldn’t lose her kite if the string slipped out of her grasp. Then I put up my own kite.
Of course, not much time passed before Sylvia’s kite came down. I gave her my kite to hold, again tying the string around her middle, while I trotted off to rescue hers.
Well, I don’t think I was neglectful, not really. I collected her kite and proceeded to wind up the string and the tail and — all of a sudden people were screaming. I looked up and saw my little sister wheeling down the slope toward the edge of the hill where there was a thirty or forty foot drop. I yelled at her to stop— no luck. She was being pulled along by my kite which was bigger than her and her kite.
She ran; I ran; lots of people ran to catch up to her before the edge did. We didn’t make it.
Fortunately, along the perimeter of Kite Hill there were scruffy stands of sage and other scrub brush. My little sister was dragged into and through one or two of them and finally captured.
Sylvia was okay. She was scratched from plowing into the bushes. She was frightened by the scolding I got from the adults who had seen the vignette. She was even crying a bit. But you know what?
She wanted to do it again.
I was scared stiff. I knew what might have happened and I knew somebody would tell my Mom. I held her hand tight and didn’t want to let her out of my grasp. There was going to be trouble when I got home.
My sister thought it had been a wild and fun adventure. She loved it. And In her eyes, I had arranged it all. She was sure I wouldn’t have let anything bad happen to her. She asked me if I would teach her how to spread her arms like wings so next time she’d be able to careen off into the sky like the kite. What guts!
When we got home, before I could think about what to say, Sylvia spilled the beans. She told about flying her own kite and the string around her waist and about how she almost went for a ride up in the sky on her big brother’s kite. And about how next time I was going to teach her how to fly.
You can’t help but love a little sister like that.
