Two boys grow up as friends on a South African farm near the Lesotho border during the nineteen forties and fifties. One lives in the large farmhouse and goes to boarding school, the other sleeps in the black workers' quarters and works in the farmyard.

From a magical drought-ending to eccentric fruit-crop protection, schoolboy shenanigans and falling beasts, it's all here. Add the medicine man, rural horse-races, a randy postman, and you have life amongst the Basuto people. The arrival of the first tractor, a buried finger, castration day (for the animals), police raids on the farm shop, and the dilemmas of a farm worker whose trousers did not obey the rules of propriety - all these give further insights into the daily farm routine.

The story highlights the colourful Basotho characters with their sometimes strange phobias and beliefs, and their ability to laugh at their own misfortunes. They belong to a vanished world.