Peeling Potatoes 45: Marbles, Mud Cakes, and Missing Roots

A Peeling Potatoes reflection on childhood games, memory, and belonging

There are some conversations that begin with a simple topic and then quietly open a door to somewhere much deeper.

This one started with play.

A new month. A new theme. The first of May. International Labour Day, which of course meant that everyone was working hard, because that is how life likes to make jokes at our expense. Fruitloop and the Mayor were live, slightly disorganised, properly caffeinated in spirit if not in fact, and ready to talk about the games they loved to play as children.

At least, Fruitloop was ready.

The Mayor, by his own dramatic admission, had been in a “heightened state of trauma” ever since the topic was chosen. Not because childhood games are frightening in themselves, but because memory is a complicated thing. Some people remember games. Some people remember friends. Some people remember the smell of the garden, the sound of dogs, the colour of the soil, or the way sunlight fell across a courtyard.

And some people remember that they never quite had the rooted childhood that others did.

That was where the conversation slowly went.

It began, as these things often do, with a question.

Fruitloop asked the Mayor what he played as a child. He did what the Mayor does best: he answered the question by walking around it, opening cupboards, checking under the carpet, and eventually finding a story somewhere in Adelaide in the late 1960s.

He remembered West Beach. He remembered a rented house. He remembered an Italian family nearby, the Cusaros, with children he used to visit. He remembered a shaded courtyard with vines overhead, a chicken coop, and children playing marbles.

But the marbles were not really the point.

The point was the atmosphere.

The Mayor admitted that he was probably the worst marble player in history. He was not focused on winning. He was not even especially focused on the rules. What stayed with him was the scene: the courtyard, the shade, the feeling of being there. That is how his childhood memories often work. Not as a list of games played, but as fragments of place, mood, and texture.

Then came the bicycle.

Or rather, the attempt to jump over a bicycle.

There are some childhood ideas that seem perfectly sensible until the moment gravity joins the meeting. The Mayor, not being the most sporting child on the planet, caught his foot on the saddle, tipped over with the bicycle, and went home with half his face transformed into raw flesh. It was, in his telling, a tragic opera of screaming, injury, and maternal clean-up.

Fruitloop, naturally, responded with sympathy.

And then with a correction on facial anatomy.

Because this is Peeling Potatoes, and even childhood trauma must pause occasionally for basic English vocabulary: chin, cheek, eyes, nose, mouth.

From there, somehow, the conversation found its way to “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” Coco Melon, Zumba coordination, and the possibility that Fruitloop’s struggles with dance movement might have been prevented by more nursery rhyme training in childhood.

This is the beauty of a Peeling Potatoes conversation. One minute you are bleeding from the face in 1960s Australia. The next, you are discussing whether children’s songs are the missing foundation of adult Zumba performance.

But then Fruitloop began to remember.

Her childhood memories felt different immediately. They were not floating fragments. They had roots.

She remembered a house from when she was four or five years old. A big garden. A flower bed. Trees. A huge rock — not a stone, a rock — that came up to her shoulders when she was small. She would climb onto it and play there with dolls.

On the other side of the house were two dogs. In the backyard was a large kidney-shaped swimming pool. Her baby sister would float in the water, wearing a hat, napping in a floaty while Fruitloop played nearby and her mother watched over them.

It was hot. It was summer. It was ordinary. It was magic.

She remembered moving towns. She remembered kindergarten. She remembered meeting her best friend Anja in the sand because a teacher told her, “Play with Anja.” So she did. And just like that, a friendship began.

There were neighbours with a trampoline. Fruitloop and her sister would jump over the wall to use it, and in return the neighbour children would come over to swim. It was a fair trade. Childhood diplomacy at its finest.

There was a treehouse her father built. Sometimes it became a classroom, complete with blackboard, paper, crayons, and books. Fruitloop and her sister would play “school-school,” taking turns as teacher and pupil. One of the books from that time, bought by her grandmother in 1994, still exists. It is taped up now, a little tired, but still intact. Fruitloop is using it today to help her own son read.

That is not just nostalgia. That is continuity.

A book passes from grandmother to granddaughter to great-grandson. A childhood game becomes a real lesson decades later. A pretend classroom becomes part of an actual child’s learning.

Then there were mud cakes.

The treehouse classroom could become a kitchen. Grass, leaves, mud, and whatever else could be found became ingredients. Children are very good at this. Give them very little and they will build a world.

Under the beds, Fruitloop and her sister made Barbie houses. They had Barbie cars, horses, possibly even a boat. They did not have proper Barbie beds, so they made beds out of whatever they could find. Their grandmother bought or made clothes. Another grandmother knitted tiny outfits. Their mother also made dresses.

The Mayor was, naturally, fascinated and mildly jealous.

He imagined having a heart-to-heart with his own mother about why she had not produced more children or knitted dresses for his toys. This is perhaps not a conversation his mother was expecting, but Peeling Potatoes has a way of creating late-life family issues out of nowhere.

Fruitloop’s childhood also had danger, but the good kind. The kind that becomes a story.

There was Park Street, with an uphill climb and four Scottish terriers. The dogs were behind gates, but somehow they got out. Fruitloop and her sister would try to cycle up the street as quietly as possible. If the dogs heard them, they chased.

On one memorable day, Fruitloop’s sister was wearing flip-flops. The dogs came. The girls pedalled for their lives. Her sister lost both shoes and cried at the top of the hill. Fruitloop, being the brave older sister, had to go back and rescue them.

Every childhood needs a dragon. Fruitloop’s dragon was apparently a pack of Scottish terriers.

The Mayor understood the challenge. He has cats, and cats have supernatural hearing. He knows that trying to sneak past an animal is usually an illusion humans tell themselves.

As the conversation moved on, the contrast between Fruitloop and the Mayor became clearer.

Fruitloop’s memories were filled with siblings, neighbours, cousins, school friends, parents, grandparents, pets, gardens, streets, and swimming pools. Her childhood was not perfect, because no childhood is, but it was socially woven. There were people everywhere. There was place everywhere.

The Mayor’s childhood had movement.

Germany. Japan. Australia. Adelaide. Sydney. Saturday German school. British-style private schools. Single-sex schools. Friends who lived too far away to visit easily. Children he saw only when parents arranged it. A local boy across the road because there was nobody else. Cricket games he mostly lost. Batman and Robin games where, of course, he was Robin.

It was not a deprived childhood. In many ways, it was privileged. He saw places. He experienced cultures. He crossed worlds.

But then he said the thing that changed the whole conversation.

When people hear about his childhood, they often say it must have been fantastic. And yes, he said, it was a privilege.

But there was one huge thing missing.

Roots.

Fruitloop knows where she comes from. Her roots are deep. She grew up in places she can still drive past. Her son now attends the same school she attended. She can point to classrooms and remember: this was grade one, this was grade two, this was where we sat, this was where we played.

Her childhood extends into her son’s childhood.

The Mayor does not have that in the same way.

He described himself as a lily floating on a pond, or perhaps a piece of seaweed floating in the ocean, carried by currents. It was funny, because he made it funny. But it was also sad, because the image was true.

That was the emotional heart of the conversation.

The episode was about games, but really it was about belonging.

What does it mean to grow up in one place?
What does it mean to grow up across many places?
What do we gain from movement?
What do we lose when no single place fully claims us?

Fruitloop’s childhood gave her continuity.
The Mayor’s childhood gave him breadth.
Both are gifts.
Both have costs.

The conversation touched, gently, on South Africa too. The Mayor asked about growing up during a time of enormous social change. Fruitloop answered simply and honestly. As a child, she was not focused on politics. Children usually are not. But she remembered that schools were still largely divided. There were only a few black children in her Afrikaans school at the time. Now, her son has black classmates who speak Afrikaans fluently. One of his friends, Langa, went to preschool with him.

It was a small detail, but a powerful one.

History does not only happen in speeches and elections. Sometimes it happens in classrooms, in playgrounds, in the language children speak to each other.

The conversation also returned again and again to the difference between then and now.

When Fruitloop was a child, there was no Netflix, Prime, Disney Plus, or endless screen entertainment. There was no reason to stay inside. Children improvised. They played outside. They made roads in the dirt. They built Barbie houses under beds. They created classrooms in trees. They rode bikes, swam, climbed, ran, invented, and negotiated.

They even, on one unforgettable summer day, used a stranger’s swimming pool.

Fruitloop and the neighbourhood children told one set of parents that the other set knew the pool owners. They told the other set the same thing. In reality, nobody knew the people at all. The children went swimming anyway. They left everything clean and tidy. Nobody chased them away.

It was wrong, of course.

But also, somehow, very childhood.

Today, the world feels different. More watched. More dangerous. More enclosed. Fruitloop’s son still loves playing outside. He drags his trampoline where he wants it. He hates coming in when it gets dark. That is a good sign. But now the trampoline is positioned where she can see him.

Freedom still exists, but it has a longer shadow.

Near the end, the Mayor asked Fruitloop what childhood game she would return to for one afternoon, if she could. Her answer was not the treehouse, or the swimming pool, or Barbie dolls.

She chose the red soil at her grandparents’ place.

She remembered playing with toy cars in the mud with her sister and two cousins. They made roads, water pits, ramps, and little worlds in the dirt. The soil was red and stained everything: shoes, pants, shirts. If she went back, she said, she would wear old clothes.

That image lingers.

Children sitting in red soil, building roads with toy cars.

It is simple. It is beautiful. It is everything.

Then, because Fruitloop is Fruitloop, she asked one final question: if the toy cars suddenly turned into tiny jumping frogs, what would the Mayor do?

The Mayor, who lives in France and has eaten frogs’ legs but does not particularly like them, decided he would not eat the frogs. Instead, he would protect them from his cats and carry them somewhere safe, somewhere with water.

This led to mice, cats, snakes, birds, kittens, and the mysterious “cat distribution system,” by which cats apparently deliver new cats into human lives whether humans are ready or not.

It was a perfectly Peeling Potatoes ending: strange, funny, tender, and somehow exactly right.

Because maybe memory works like that too.

It arrives unexpectedly, carrying something small and vulnerable in its mouth. A marble. A mud cake. A lost flip-flop. A Barbie dress. A Saturday football game. A book from 1994. A red-soil road. A courtyard in Adelaide. A school corridor. A floating baby sister in a swimming pool.

And then we have to decide what to do with it.

Laugh at it.
Protect it.
Tell the story.
Carry it somewhere safe.

This episode was different. Still funny, still wandering, still full of old goats, cats, frogs, and Fruitloop questions. But underneath the playfulness was something tender.

It reminded us that childhood games are never only games.

They are the first places where we learn rules, friendship, risk, imagination, courage, negotiation, defeat, and belonging.

Some children grow up with deep roots.

Some grow up carried by currents.

And sometimes, years later, two friends sit down together, press record, and discover that the games they played were really the maps of who they became.