Booysens Boytjie captures a small piece of a South Africa that is rapidly disappearing from living memory - a time when life was simpler, childhood was freer, people had less yet, lacked for nothing, and the ordinary things of everyday life were often the things that mattered most.

This is not a memoir. Nor is it simply an exercise in nostalgia.

Told through the wonderfully uncomplicated eyes of a young boytjie, it is a celebration and preservation of South African life - its people, its language, its humour, its peculiarities and its remarkable spirit.

Woven through one boy’s memories are the stories of family and friendship, church and school, mining houses and mine dumps, Karoo towns and Johannesburg streets; of Springbok Radio and LM Radio, drive-ins and keffies, shebeens and Blue Laws, Fanagalo and boerekos; of kennetjie, kaskarre, ketties, kaalvoete and a rich treasury of words, customs and everyday things that once formed the familiar fabric of South African life.

Together they create something of a living museum of mid-twentieth-century South Africa - preserving not merely how things were, but something of how it felt to be there.

For those who lived through those years, Booysens Boytjie will bring back a world almost forgotten. For younger South Africans, it offers a window into the world of their parents and grandparents. And for readers elsewhere, it is an invitation to discover an extraordinary country through the ordinary lives of its people.

Above all, it celebrates that wonderfully resilient South African spirit - the ability to make a plan, endure the difficult, laugh at ourselves, and somehow carry on regardless.

Those were the days.

And they were very, very lekker.