Topsy and the Ten Shilling Notes...... [Part 2]

[continued from Part 1]
I certainly noticed, I can tell you. I filed that right away in the part of my brain that said, ‘Things never to forget when dealing with Topsy. Stay well clear of back legs. Always. Take no chances.’

….because, at least in her frame of mind at that moment, it was clear that Topsy took no prisoners.

   Topsy actually pouted at her misjudgment. Her bottom lip, trembling slightly, stuck out and stayed there. If the kick aimed at the horsebreaker was intended to be her parting shot for the indignities he’d put her through over the weeks she'd endured the breaking-in process, she’d missed her chance, but not by much. Never in the years I owned her did I dare walk behind her, even though we did come to an understanding about manners eventually, with some compromise on both sides.

   Dad decided right then that she was a bit flighty, and that he better ride her back to our place rather than put me on her. The original plan was that I would ride this smart but docile little filly home bareback, and he’d ride Juno. Given that 'docile' didn't seem quite the right adjective from what we had all just witnessed, I was happy with the switch, even though Juno was a massive horse for me to handle, and had a hard mouth. She liked getting her own way, which was far easier for her to do with me than with Dad – but with Dad nearby, Juno wouldn’t try to pull any stunts on me. 

   ‘I’ll pick up the saddle when we come into town,’ Phil Long said to Dad. ‘Probably better than trying to ride her bareback right now.’ 
   He was pretty inscrutable with his feral moustache and flowing beard, but clearly the lightning kick that sailed past the back of his head had registered with him, a kick that would have shattered any bone in its path, or her hoof would have acted like a biscuit cutter on any soft tissue.

   Dad made no protest. In a saddle, he could handle Topsy no trouble, but funny things happen when you’re riding bareback and your horse throws a tanty, especially a newly broken-in one with what our American friends call ‘attitood’. Trust me. I’d already been thrown from a horse more times than I cared to admit, and well understood the literal meaning of the phrase ‘bit the dust’. Dust is very dusty when you’re speared into it head first, and often stony as well when you’re spitting it out, hoping that the teeth-sized stones aren’t actual teeth. 
   Juno was looking good to me as my preferred mount for the trip back. I climbed up on her [I mean that literally, because with our relative heights I needed several vertical hand and footholds on the saddle to get there]. Dad shortened the stirrup leathers to the last hole to suit my length of leg, and I luxuriated in the comfort of sitting in a real saddle high above the world as if I were on an elephant. Well... let's say, your average Dromedary camel.

   We rode home quietly, side by side. Topsy's legs were very short compared with Juno's, so she broke into a trot now and then and Juno ambled along at a fair to middling walking pace. Dad had a tightish rein on Topsy, slightly in front of me. I dug both my heels into Juno's ribs as hard as I could, so we could ride exactly abreast, even though Topsy’s breast was about half the height of Juno’s. It was then that we discovered a characteristic of Topsy that would be the bane of my existence all my pony club riding days.

   Topsy did not like any horse, whether 17 hands tall or 10, to be a fraction of an inch ahead of her. Not even the width of a cigarette paper. The moment Juno ambled up and stuck her nose in front, Topsy's ears went back, she turned her head and nipped her sharply on the neck. Juno looked surprised at this upstart little filly’s rudeness but tossed her head and once again poked her bib slightly in front. 

   This time Topsy's nostrils flared and her ears flattened so tightly against her head they almost disappeared from view. She squealed in fury and bit Juno on the ear – quite a feat considering their difference in height. Neither Dad nor I saw that coming. Obviously, neither did Juno.

   It was not unlike at the end of Jurassic Park, when the little velociraptor took on the T-Rex. Oh come on, everyone knows that bit. Juno let out a battlecry, not dissimilar to that of the T-Rex come to think of it, and was about to dismember Topsy then and there, but my father was on Topsy’s back, and his roar was even more impressive than Juno’s furious whinny. Juno respected Dad. No, let me tell the truth here, she was as scared of him as everyone else at our place when he had that tone in his roar, and, lucky for Topsy - and Dad - Juno refrained from the attack on his pint-sized mount. ‘Back her off!’ Dad shouted at me as he booted Topsy firmly in the ribs. Juno’s mouth was hard, as I said before, but I reined her in as Topsy took the lead once more by a good half-head, and settled down into a sharp trot.

What might have happened
Illustration by Watto

   You could see the triumph in her eye, though. ‘I have won,’ she almost smirked, looking sideways and upwards at Juno's eye. ‘Don’t mess with me, bitch.’

   It was Juno’s turn to pout. Did you know mares could do that? I never saw it demonstrated so starkly till that morning, twice in an hour with different horses. But in Juno’s eye I could clearly see what she had in store for Topsy. ‘You’ll get yours, sweetheart, the moment these bridles are off us.’ If we could have looked under her back hooves right then, hooves as big as dinner plates - the man-sized ones - I swear we would have seen a very large 'T' on both of them.

   She didn’t get her chance right then, as Dad wisely let Juno go in the paspalum paddock, making Topsy pout once more, even though separating the two had saved her from a right bollocking from Juno, or whatever the equine female equivalent of a bollocking is. I walked beside him as he rode Topsy to the little cowyard paddock and unsaddled her there.

   Dad, Topsy and I were going to have a bit of sorting out to do in the next little while, that much was clear. Important parts of her education had been neglected by Phil Long, or consigned to the too hard basket in the weeks she was with him. But this advice to Topsy was running round in my mind: if you want to have a battle of wills with my Dad in terms of sheer stubbornness, you’d be wise to save yourself a lot of grief and meekly stand second in the queue, starting right now. I might be third in that queue, but I'll guarantee, you won’t be first.

   She had to find that out the hard way. Dad took no prisoners either, specially not an upstart little bay filly used to getting her way from that moment I first saw her, just a week old, mercilessly bullying her mother for milk.

Topsy's Dream
Illustration by Watto

[continued] [Back to Index]

Topsy and the Ten Shilling Notes [Part 1]

In an album I still have, there are coins from all the places where I have travelled as an adult – coins of all shapes and sizes. When we were little, it was very rare to see coins from any other country, in splendid isolation as we were. That was especially true of Calliope, an often bucolic 1930s backwater stuck in a time warp, even though it was the 1950s and we’d almost got electricity.

   Consequently, foreign currency always held a fascination for me that would be lost on those in other parts of the world where coins and banknotes from other countries are constantly exchanged for no more than their monetary value. But for me, each exotic coin has its own story. IS its own story, in fact.

   That’s not what this is about. Looking at my coin album, I just wanted to get that observation in somewhere and this looked the perfect spot.

   In this album, there are two very special banknotes. They are both Australian. One is a ten shilling note, and the other is a pound note – worth double the ten bob note for the information of decimal currency babies, some of you now nearly fifty years old. I don’t have three ten shilling ones because I deliberately exchanged two of them for the quid, to have a souvenir of both denominations of our old banknotes in my album.

   This story is about how I came by two of those ten shilling notes. I can’t tell you the story of the third, because for the life of me I can’t seem to remember right now how I got it. It's gone into a black hole somewhere in my brain – maybe one of the bits they chopped out during surgery, but I have this hope that by the time I have finished these two interlocking stories, something will have clicked a tiny neurone in my memory and I’ll know about the third. It must have meant a lot to me not to have spent it. All I feel sure about is that it has nothing to do with horses, but these two do.

If this were the movie version of the Denis Wright saga, we’d now have a ripple dissolve from stills of those two banknotes at this point, for a flashback done in Bogdanovitch Last Picture Show style. There’s a tall, skinny, elderly man standing there near his house on the hill, his wife sitting on the kitchen verandah reading an air-mail letter from her son in New Guinea. Airmail letters are rare round Calliope and they have a distinctive blue and red edged envelope, and this one has brightly coloured stamps of Birds of Paradise on it, much more interesting to the boy than the lines of scrawl she’s reading. 

   The man’s name is Rusty Toohey, owner of the adjoining property to Len Wright. Rusty has his hand on the shoulder of a little boy, maybe 6 years old; Len Wright’s lad, and they are watching the bay pony in the home paddock, with a week-old foal tangling its legs up capering around her and bullying its mother mercilessly into allowing it to suckle.

   ‘See that foal? When she grows up, she’s yours. I’ll get Phil Long to break her in for you.’

   'Don't break her,' the boy says, aghast.

   'No,' he laughs, 'She won't be broken. She'll just be ready for you to ride when you're old enough to look after her.'

   I will never have any explanation for Rusty Toohey’s generosity on that day, but I was pleased. Not everyone had a horse, and from that day on I owned one until adulthood, even if she was just a little brown pony, unaccountably named Topsy. I associated ‘Topsy’ with black, not brown, but it was always what she was called and I didn’t choose it. I don’t know who did, but that was her name and she was mine.

Next scene: Phil Long’s property. A pretty young bay mare with a white stripe down her face is bridled up and saddled, tail swishing away the bush flies. Phil Long is standing, stockwhip over his shoulder, talking quietly to Len Wright, with Len’s nine-year old son beside him. They have just double-banked out the couple of miles to Long’s on the big half-draught horse Juno, and have come to pick up Topsy and take her home. The lad is excited at the novelty of having his own horse ready to ride at last.

   ‘She’s right to go,’ Phil said, intent on attesting to his words by walking behind her rear and passing his hand over her flanks, ‘though be careful. She can be pig-headed now and again.’ His action implied faith in his horse-breaking and acknowledgment by Topsy as to who was boss. He was clear of her by no more than a few inches when she lashed out high and straight with her left leg. It was truly a vicious kick, and her sharp little hoof whistled past his ear, but he pretended not to notice.

   I certainly noticed, I can tell you. I filed that right away in the part of my brain that said, ‘Things never to forget when dealing with Topsy. Stay well clear of back legs. Always. Take no chances.’

[continued] 

home | WHAT'S NEW! | stories from my past
.

Diary Update

A big week in our household, with several HSC exams starting today for Christian. By the end of it, Tracey and he will know more about many things than they ever wanted to. Tracey continues to recover from her surgery while studying with Christian.

• I am ridding myself of the poisons from my system post-chemo as fast as I can. This involves a high intake of water/green tea and fibre.
• I feel good and my right side continues to improve slowly, but it’s as much a brain retraining process as a recovery one.
• The ache in the knee and leg seems to be disappearing and for long periods I am hardly aware of it.
• The intense feeling of tiredness is still with me but that should decrease as the days go by. Sleeping is good though I still want to develop a better sleeping pattern.
• I am getting more use out of my arm though it is still shaky. Continuing physiotherapy is the key.
• Mobility is good.
• The Clexane injections twice daily are a necessary unpleasantness though Tracey does an excellent job. The itchy allergic reaction is annoying but if that’s the worst I have to put up with then I can hardly complain.
• I have now been nearly 6 weeks without seizures, but I am sure that yesterday one was doing its best to happen in my arm. It is encouraging that it didn’t. Well, more than that, it is pretty vital that I don’t get more if I am to improve rather than just attempt to hold the line.

Today we have started a reduction in steroid use. This is incremental and we will have to watch it carefully, as the steroid may still be contributing to inflammation control and reducing it may increase the risk of seizure – but we need to get away from steroids as much as possible. My body shape is taking on that classic look of someone using medical steroids/cortisone - puffiness of features and increased body weight. I don't like it!


There is no doubt in my mind that Avastin is currently my saviour. We can only hope that its beneficial effects continue to flow while we carefully monitor any negative side effects. If we had not gone on a course of Avastin treatment, my quality of life by this time would have dipped under the line. It was getting perilously close to that just before the Avastin treatment, when seizures were pile-driving me slowly but surely into the ground, physically and psychologically. In that sense, everything has changed for the better.

Bimbo, the Blitz, and Tobacco [Final Part]

[continued from Part 2]
His dad appeared from round the corner. Bimbo’s reflexes were pretty quick and I marvelled at how the tail end of the durry between the fingers of his right hand instantaneously disappeared under the mixture of loose dirt and decomposed horse droppings we were sitting on....

   ‘What are you pair doing?’

   ‘Nothing,’ said Bimbo airily. ‘Just talking.’

No doubt the smell of cigarette smoke hung in the air – probably even a wisp or two of smoke, but it wasn’t a matter Bimbo’s father thought warranted further investigation. He had probably noticed that he had little need to clean out the ashtray of the Blitz over months or years, and was just yielding to the inevitable. 

   ‘Go and get the wood in,’ he said to Bimbo, who might otherwise have argued the toss, but he was in a position of weakness regarding the suspicious aroma hanging over us both, so got up quickly.

   ‘You too, Denny,’ he growled at me. ‘You’re supposed to be home lighting the stove, aren’t you? Get going.’

   I was not a well boy, pale under the tan. I struggled to get up, and went in a rather wandery odyssey towards home, over the gully, the creek and through the paddock before climbing the hill. I stopped at the creek and drank some water on the way, in a vain attempt to get the vile taste out of my mouth. I never liked the taste of creek water, though it was crystal clear, and it didn’t improve the feeling of rising nausea in my stomach. An occasional cough still escaped my lips.

Neither Mum nor Dad was yet home from the cowyard, for which I was grateful. I set the fire in the cooking stove, purposely getting some smoke from the burning morning wood on my person to mask any smell of tobacco. At least, that was the plan. But I felt crook.

   Mum had made a stew late in the morning before going to the dairy after lunch and it now started to reheat as the stove warmed up. It smelt nasty to me, especially as it was mutton, bought cheaply from Les Archay’s butchery. We were cattle people, and anything to do with sheep, especially for dinner, was not in favour, even when I was hungry.

   I was not hungry. I regarded mutton as food for the cattledogs. No euphemisms about ‘lamb’ either, thank you. This was the mortal remains of a tough old wether who’d evaded the butcher for way too long. Sadly he had got his comeuppance right then and ended up in our big tin stewpot. Poor timing, I thought.

   Mum and Dad arrived home together from the cowyard, pleased the yard work was done and glad the dinner was on. We would have the stew with bread, and finish with a trifle Mum had made from stale cake and custard and jelly, which would more than compensate for the plain fare with the stew. Mum smiled at me, then frowned. ‘Are you sick? Come here.’

   She went to hug me. I resisted. ‘You’re green about the gills’, she said, with mounting suspicion. ‘What have you been eating? Come here!’

   With understandable reluctance, I Came Here. She felt my forehead, which was the quick way to test body temperature, and then got a whiff of my befouled breath. ‘You’ve been SMOKING!’ All sympathy from my beloved mother had evaporated in a flash. ‘Where? Who? I’ll bet…. I BET it was with Bimbo Brown!’

   How could I deny it? My only faint hope was that she might feel I had been led astray by my year-older cousin and that some of the blame would shift to his shoulders. As much of the blame as possible, in fact. But I was feeling too sick to muster the energy to be scared, even of my father, standing behind my mother, hands on hips.

   Dad was not really a smoker, yet he was, occasionally. It was a habit derived from tedium of working firstly as a fettler on the railway and in the army during the war. He would buy a pouch of Log Cabin tobacco and for a few weeks have a smoke after milking, then get annoyed with himself for doing so, and would give the remainder of whatever tobacco he had to a cousin or neighbour, and not smoke again for months; maybe longer. Right then he was probably near the end of a smoking phase. He got out the tobacco pouch, pinched up a lump of fine cut tobacco, and stuck it under my nose.

   ‘Len, don’t….’ said my mother.

   ‘Do you like that?’ Dad asked me with a look on his face that scared me.

   ‘NO’, I wailed, ‘I hate it. It makes me sick. I want to lie down!’

   ‘Don’t you want to smoke it?’ Dad made as if to pull out a cigarette paper.

   ‘Len…..’ Even my mother didn’t know if he was serious or not, but we both knew he could be.

   ‘Smell it again.’ Dad shoved the tobacco under my nose again and held it there.

   It was, mercifully for me, too much for Mum, watching this torture of her errant little boy. Besides, if I threw up, she would be the one who had to deal with the mess. ‘Get to bed!’ she ordered, one of the very few times ever I remember her overriding my father’s actions or commands.

   I staggered off snivelling to my bed on the verandah, and crawled under its mosquito net, then under the sheet. I heard the clinking of cutlery and the scrape of plates, and the chatter of voices; sometimes laughter. The laughter sounded cruel. Even the noise of cutlery reminded me vividly of food, and I couldn't believe that anyone could want to eat that night. The radio came on for the news. I felt horrible and the acrid taste of tobacco was still in my mouth.

I slept.

   Next day, Dad gave the last of his tobacco to our neighbour, Rusty Toohey. I don’t remember Dad ever smoking again.

   Me? I evaded smoking entirely till a memorable night on a train to Brisbane on my way to Teachers’ College at the ripe old age of 16, but that’s another story and maybe worth telling at some stage.

   So many stories, so little time…. and the sordid tale of my entire love life between ages 13 and 16 to go yet.

This is part of a larger picture, but I thought you may like to see Bimbo, centrestage in this photo. Needless to say, we were a couple of years older than this when I was lured by him into trying that first gasper. That’s me on the left, of course, looking a bit odd. Next to me is another cousin, Wayne Wright, who terrified me on that day by pointing out to me that the star on his capgun proved it had real bullets in it and he was going to shoot me, and he chased me round the outside of the house several times before I hid in the bushes to escape certain death. Being forced to break cover for a photo and having to stand next to the would-be killer may explain that look on my face. 

Next to him is our dearly loved cousin Noela Brown, who died tragically from a tetanus infection not very long after this photo was taken.

Centrestage and right next to her is Bimbo Brown, looking at Noela’s sister Gay. They were first cousins. Behind Bimbo is Lloyd Brown, from yet another branch of the Brown family, who became a pilot. Jan, cheerfully minus tooth, is next to him, and Lyn is beside her. Behind Lyn but half hidden is Judy Wright, the very pretty sister of ‘death-threat’ Wayne; she could sing and dance and probably ended up in a chorus line somewhere.

A final footnote to the story is that by the end of the photoshoot, Wayne had forgotten all about his death threat, but I surely hadn't. I found the capgun on the tankstand and threw it in the dunny. No-one with murder on their mind should have been allowed to have a weapon like that, and though I coveted it with its bright red star, my civic duty [and strong instinct for self preservation] gave me no option but to consign it to that fate. I can imagine Bimbo’s father’s face when the gun emerged from the pan, as the well-digested remnants of the stomach contents of all Calliope township were merged in a very large hole out of town somewhere.


[Back to Index]

Bimbo, the Blitz, and Tobacco [Part 2]

[continued from Part 1]

Frankly, I wasn’t that keen, I confess, for two main reasons. No, three.

Firstly, I didn’t know how to smoke, though I gathered it wasn’t quite the same action as blowing bubbles with a bubblepipe. There was something different about it and I didn’t want to put my ignorance on the line, even to Bimbo.  Maybe especially to Bimbo. He would tell others at school what a failure I was at one of life’s fundamental arts, and there would be much scorn, probably amongst many others who didn’t have a clue about it either, not having the luxury of daily access to the Blitz and the contents of its ashtray.

   Secondly, the thought of the circumstances under which these had been partially smoked by his dad didn’t appeal to me much, and, thirdly and most importantly, if my father found out, I was sure I was in for a belting that would be described in our post-Saddam world as the mother of all beatings.

   BUT peer pressure is peer pressure, and dumb kids are idiots, so off I slunk reluctantly with the master smoker down behind the stables.

   There are two ways you can get your nicotine hit from second hand dumpers from your nearest shitcart – you can simply light up what’s there and smoke them like there’s no tomorrow, or you can also steal a packet of Zig-zags from the Blitz, extract the best of the partially burnt tobacco from the leavings, and remake the durry using a fresh cigarette paper [trade name Zig-zag or Tally Ho]. So a freshly remade durry was my preferred option, but to be truthful, I wasn't keen on either of them.

   Rolling a smoke by hand is an art form, and I would no more have been able to do it than fly to the moon, which in 1955 was regarded as even more impossible than shortly before that July afternoon in 1969. Bimbo, on the other hand, was highly expert at it, looking like a wizened little veteran as he ran his tongue along the gummed edge of the cigarette paper and stuck it down.

   I don’t know about you, but I was very icky about other people’s spit as a kid. If I had to share a bottle of drink with someone, I always wiped off where their mouth touched the top, even other family members with whom I must have shared every known [and unknown] microbe. Others were not so fastidious. Even the fact that Bimbo had freshly licked down the durry wasn’t to my liking, but as there was only one of us capable of doing the job, he made two, noted which one was bigger, kept it and thrust the other one into my hand. He lit up, holding the smoke in the recommended way, and drew on it deeply.

   He looked at me, still sitting there trying to emulate his expert grip on the durry.

   ‘What’s up? Here,’ he said, tossing me the box of Redhead matches.

   Striking matches I was good at. I had nearly succeeded in burning down our house twice even by this stage of my life, but those are other stories and at the rate I’m going I am never going to get to the end of this one. Sorry.

   I put the durry between my lips, loathing the taste of partially burned tobacco, struck a match and applied it to the end of the smoke. It flared for a while but nothing really happened. I did the only thing I knew. I blew gently as if I were making a bubble, something which I was also good at because I had my own special soap formula for producing large, stable, rainbow coloured bubbles.

   ‘Idiot!’ snapped Bimbo, ‘don’t blow – suck on it!’

   That was a revelation to me. As far as I could see, practically every man in the 1950s smoked, as well as some women usually regarded, in Calliope at least, as a little loose of morals if they did it in public. Joyce Moran was one - she was the one who loudly told everyone in the café about her encounter with Charlie Brown in the thunderbox - but she didn't care what anyone else thought about anything. My point here, now almost completely lost I regret to say, is I had never really noted carefully how the act of smoking was done. It just seemed ridiculously easy, like riding a horse - until you try it. Right then I wished I had paid more attention to the myriad of opportunities I'd had in the past to observe the right technique.

   I sucked, just a tiny bit, and blew a thin puff of smoke out straight of my mouth. It tasted even more foul lit than when it wasn’t, but at least something resembling smoking was happening.

   ‘That’s not right! Next time you suck, open your mouth and do the drawback.’

   My English language skills were pretty well developed by the age I was given this advice, so being told to do anything called a drawback seemed counter-productive to me.

   ‘Just get some smoke in your mouth, then open it and breathe in. No, not through your nose, breathe in through your mouth, dopey.’

I did as bidden, hating the acrid taste and smell more and more, and sucked the smoke into my lungs. The effect was indescribably awful. I had a hand grenade in each lung, and they'd both gone off together. 'Drawback' was indeed a good description, though hugely understated as far as I was concerned.

   ‘Jeez! Stop coughing your guts up. You’ll have dad down here in a minute wondering what’s wrong. Stop it!

   Stop your lungs feeling like they were on fire? Shattered into clumps of rapidly dying cells? Are you joking?

   He wasn’t, but nor was I. I stopped coughing finally, and puffed tentatively, and tried to avoid inhaling any more smoke into my protesting lungs, but gave up before half way. I was feeling more than a little ill and must have looked like it. ‘Here. I’ve had enough.’ 

   ‘Well, give it to me and I’ll finish it off.’ Bimbo had absolutely no qualms about other people’s spit so he dragged on it till almost the end.
   His dad appeared from round the corner. Bimbo’s reflexes were pretty quick and I marvelled at how the tail end of the durry, loosely held between the fingers of his right hand, instantaneously disappeared under the mixture of loose dirt and decomposed horse droppings we were sitting on. 

"Drawback Denis" illustration by Watto

[continued] [Back to Index]

Bimbo, the Blitz, and Tobacco [Part 1]

Bimbo Brown was – and still IS – my third cousin. I say ‘was’ because I can only think about him as a kid, one year older than I, but he’s now a grandfather and still kicking round Calliope and I hope he never gets to read this, or he’ll probably kill me, if he doesn’t die laughing instead.

Now I know these days a bimbo has a completely different connotation than then, but in the 50s anyone called Bimbo was a boy, not a failed cheer leader with passable legs and a brain permanently new out of the box, so to speak. Any time I mention my cousin Bimbo, Tracey doubles up with mirth at the idea that someone so called could be anything but a cardboard cutout of Paris Hilton that’s been left out in the rain a bit too long. Not so. In 1955, Bimbo was a boy, perhaps heavily suntanned and usually depicted with dark fuzzy hair, but strong in the x chromosome department.

Bimbo Brown had acquired the nickname from a song popular when we were about 5 or so. I just googled it and was pleasantly surprised to find out things about the song I didn’t really need to know, but Google’s imprimatur means people will probably be more familiar with it than I thought.

          Bimbo, Bimbo

          Where you gunna go-e-o?

          Bimbo, Bimbo

          What you gunna do-e-o?

          Bimbo, Bimbo

          Does your mummy know, that you’re going down the road

          To see your little girly-o?

As you can see, this established without question the macho status of Bimbo, and later in life Bimbo proved that status with prowess I won’t go into here for fear of being sued or badly maimed.

Bimbo’s parents were a lot better off financially than we were. That was mainly because we hardly had a brass razoo to our name, while Bimbo’s dad had the lucrative contract for nightsoil removal for the town. While being the dunny man lowered the family status for Bimbo somewhat, it was more than compensated for by the fact that his dad had racehorses and cash, and his father scrubbed up quite well after the night’s adventures with the lavatory pans, redback spiders, snakes and startled early morning toilet users. ['Hell, Charlie, get outa there and let me finish in peace!' snapped Joyce Moran when the back panel of the space for the pan suddenly burst open and she was left hanging in mid-air, as it were.] 

But back to Bimbo and financing matters of the heart. Having the actual sixpence to buy a sixpenny sundae topped with raspberry cordial essence at Barlow’s shop won over many a fair lady’s heart, and Bimbo did have the actual sixpence; in fact, he could find a shilling for two of them if required. His family’s horse-racing nouse had taught him how to hedge his bets if not on a certainty. 

If the lady was about Bimbo’s age, and if she had either had been guaranteed that he hadn’t helped with the nightsoil collection the night before or she was untroubled by the thought of it, the sundae usually did the trick. The lure of the taste of raspberry essence seeping into melting vanilla icecream in a short-stemmed sundae glass and eaten with a long silvery spoon does put things into perspective when you’re about nine years old.

The preferred vehicle for nightsoil collection was the 24 Door Austin. They were all the rage in Gladstone in the Sanitary Collection community. Do I need to explain why the 24 Door Austin was so named? Just use your imagination if the question hangs heavily over you – like the aroma of the 24 Door Austin itself.

Actually, Bimbo’s dad’s vehicle for collecting the toilet pans was a wartime Blitz army truck, converted for a more humble occupation than when it had been at the Enoggera Barracks in Brisbane. Maybe it never saw wartime military action other than to be full of Diggers trying to outflank American soldiers in Brisbane in a race for available girls. To entice their prey, the Yank soldiers had the huge advantage of a smart uniform, heaps of money and, so it seems, access to the babe magnet of an inexhaustible supply of nylon stockings, but that’s another story and before my time, so let's leave it right there.

The Blitz, more popularly known in less polite circles [i.e. most of Calliope] as the shitcart, was parked through the day next to but an olifactorally sensible distance downwind from the Brown household, its nocturnal goal achieved; that of replacing full nightsoil pans with empty ones in some part of the town. Our 600 acre farm was outside the town limits, so it was not a service provided by the Shire Council for us. We managed our own sanitary arrangements, which is definitely not what you want to know about.

When Bimbo came home from school and his father was sleeping, he usually sneaked into the Blitz and extracted from the ashtray as many dumpers as he could locate. For the uninitiated – and I accept there will be a few – a dumper is a partially smoked roll-your-own cigarette, and the stop-start work of removing and replacing lavatory pans meant that Bimbo’s dad started many a smoke that he didn’t quite finish. This meant that for Bimbo, there was a reasonable choice of partly smoked durries on offer. Bimbo had been smoking these ever since he was big enough to open the door of the Blitz and forage for them. Probably the age of 6 or so.

One afternoon he offered to allow me to accompany him behind the racing stables to partake in these goodies. Illicit smoking is more fun in pairs, so it seems, and somehow less suspicious-looking if his dad should walk around the corner of the stable after his nap. Bimbo had a keen appreciation for the science of risk management before they invented the term.

Frankly, I wasn’t that keen, I confess, for two main reasons. No, three. 
[continued] [Back to Index]

Diary Update: medical notes

Avastin and chemotherapy over for the month. Always a difficult time for the household, complicated by HSC exam preparations and post-op recovery for Tracey. But we're getting there.
No complaints about the treatment - the hospital oncology staff fantastic as ever. Good veins discovered 3 times out of 3, not much nausea so far and Avastin is already improving mobility, along with physiotherapy on the right arm. Right ankle still swollen but clot-ache in the leg is receding and I think with further Clexane and a little exercise can only get better.
The household will be pretty much in lockdown for the next week or so. We'll see what emerges from the chrysalis after that.

Stories from my Wicked Past: Caned at 6 - [Final!]

[Continued from Part 3]
My fingers hurt and then went numb, but the ordeal had passed.

That ordeal anyway.

   I still had another to face; to my mind, potentially just as bad. Maybe worse.

I had to face the unwritten Lore of the Bush – the traditional nexus between parent and teacher on matters of school discipline. The bit that said, if you get caned at school, you must have done something so reprehensible that you can expect strong reinforcement of that punishment when you get home. 
   For the first time, but sadly, not the last, I was in that unenviable position. How I dragged my feet walking the two miles home that day! Would Jan or Lyn tell on me when they got home? I had done enough dreadful things to them in my sinful past to warrant it. Had either of them done to me the evil things I had done to them - with spear grass darts for example, often thrown at the back of their dresses when coming home from school - I might have seriously considered such a satisfying retaliation.

Illustration by Watto

But as it turned out, it was not in their hands. The body language of a 6 year old – and his siblings – rendered any snitching unnecessary. Yet nothing was said. The silence on the matter as mealtime approached was for me ominously deafening. Things were put on the meal table – foodstuffs I’d normally have been first out there for, down at my chosen spot at the pudding end of the table. Everyone else was seated, ready to eat, Jan and Lyn with averted eyes. I slunk into the dining room, last to my plate. If nothing else, that by itself would have been a dead giveaway.

   Food was on my plate. Eating utensils were raised and first portions almost placed on forks when the Sword of Damocles fell.

   ‘Who got the cuts today?’ asked my father casually. Much too casually….

   Had I murdered Brian Koplik, which I had a mind to on many occasions, the effect could not have been different for me if Dad had asked, ‘Who murdered Brian Koplik today?’ and I had actually carried out that cathartic but probably unwise act at Little Lunch.

   It was, I should add, a general question about caning that my father often asked at tea-time, out of interest, as the sinner was usually Kelvin Thompson or Brian Koplik. The number of cuts and the victim’s reaction were often explored with a measure of sadistic glee on my part at the meal table, but on this occasion, the question and its timing carried quite a different ambience, even the studied carelessness in how it was asked.

   There was a decidedly pregnant pause. Jan had been at the High School in Gladstone that day so she had not witnessed the event. Lyn had, I think, seen the whole thing, and would have told Jan no doubt. It wasn’t something we’d discussed on the way home from school, which for me at least had been a long and silent trudge. But the question had been asked by our father and therefore demanded a response, so there was nought Lyn could do but murmur, ‘Denis did’ - softly spoken words that I remember with great clarity even today.

   Not that there would have been any point in her trying to cover for me, for even I was now painfully aware that Pandora’s Box had in any case been sitting wide open since our parents had got home from the afternoon milking; just that I hadn’t yet felt the sting of its former captives.

   Dad turned a steely gaze on me. ‘Why?’

   ‘I talked to Bimbo Brown when Mr Curtis said not to. Well, Bimbo wanted to borrow Lesley Grainger’s rubber and she was sitting next to me, on the other side, so I asked her if she’d loan it to him. Then Mr Curtis came in and I got the stick.’

   Before I go on, let me quickly explain, for the benefit of my non-Queensland friends, that what we called a rubber at our school might well be called an eraser in your part of the world. It seems wise to clear that up.

   To be truthful, I had no idea what Bimbo and I were rabbiting on about most of the time we were being observed by Old Jim, but it was probably as scatological as usual, we being at the age where anything involving bodily functions was uproariously amusing. I had passed on Bimbo’s request, that was true, and it had been abruptly denied by Carol, the owner of the rubber, but I knew this was not the thing that had incurred the headmaster’s wrath. This abbreviation of the truth under my father’s cross examination simply oozed out of my mouth all too easily, without any forethought at all. But the effect, as far as I could see, was amazing.

   ‘How many cuts?’

   ‘Two’.

   Dad was normally pretty stern and never in my life would I have disobeyed him, but oddly enough, he didn’t seem as angry at my being caned as I expected. In retrospect, I am pretty sure he was sorry for me rather than angry. The public caning of a six-year old in exactly the same way as a senior high school boy would have been caned was harsh, no matter what the crime, even when it was only the minimum two cuts that I got; but he just said, ‘Next time listen to what you’re told at school and do it! Now eat your dinner and get washed for bed.’  I obeyed with alacrity. Yet the tapioca pudding, usually one of my favourites, unaccountably tasted like cold unpalatable semolina.

   After dinner, my mother carefully scanned my fingers to see if there was any evidence of any legacy of the caning, but there was none. I knew she was upset. I thought it was about my misdemeanour, but that wasn’t it, of course. It was the caning itself.

   I was upset too. I thought at the time that my deliberate evasion of the full truth had got me off the hook. It wasn’t that. There was never going to be a belting waiting for me when I got home, and the dissembling made me feel more lousy than the two cuts. The caning was, I guess, something of a rite of passage as I was bound to get it at one time or other, but the evasion just made me feel miserable.

   Fortunately, the next day was Saturday, and by Monday, getting my first taste of the stick had receded far into the distance. Probably not far enough, because I got it a couple more times from Old Jim before going to High School - each time, well deserved, I have to admit, at least by the standards of the day. I got it only once at High School, but that was a Matter of Honour, and best left to some other occasion, if ever, to relate.

This was probably about the age of 6, 

my cousin Beth Brown and I ready for the Fancy Dress Ball,

 each elegantly clad in full Chinese battle dress. 

Family off to the Show in Gladstone.

Jan, Lyn, my parents and I. The fact that 

Kay wasn't on the scene means I must

have been about 3 - a year before I went to school.

[Back to Index]

Stories from my wicked past: Caned at 6 [Part 3]

....so I did what any sensible 6 year old scared witless at the sight of the approaching cane would do.

[continued from Part 2]

This is what I did.

   I stuck my left hand firmly to the left side of my face, and continued screaming. Yes, you read that right. This may seem a strange manoeuvre, and I did it as the result of some perverse instinct brought on by an excess of adrenalin and the purest of fear. 

   It certainly didn’t come as the result of logical thinking, yet there actually was a sort of logic in it. It went thus: he is not going to hit my hand while it is on my face. [Well, I was certainly counting on that…]  Therefore, as long as it remains there, my hand is safe. I’d never seen Old Jim cane any boy anywhere but on the fingers, so this was my mantra.

   Old Jim took me by the wrist and tried to remove the hand from its hoped-for haven of safety. Fear had given me preternatural strength, and all he succeeded in doing was lifting me bodily off the seat by the wrist, my hand stuck to my face like a leftover bit of an unfortunate Siamese twin. 
   Old Jim put me and the cane down, and wrenched the hand away, but by the time he had picked up the cane again, my hand was clamped back firmly on its spot on my cheek. And before he could grab the other hand, I planted it just as firmly on the right cheek. He wasn’t catching me that way. I may have been 6 but I wasn’t stupid. Just petrified. Literally.

   Old Jim surveyed the situation. It was probably one he hadn’t quite encountered before, but he was a resourceful man and had a few decades of other experience on me – six at least. Once again, he took the left wrist, hand still attached more firmly than ever to face, and lifted me high above the desk.

   And waited.

Illustration by Watto

   If you fall over a cliff and grasp a handy branch to stop yourself dropping into the abyss, this tactic works only as long as the branch holds securely, and you devise a way to get out of the precarious situation you’re in. You can’t just hang on to it forever, hoping someone chances by and rescues you. 
   This was the fatal flaw in my logic. Except for divine intervention, I had no hope of rescue from the situation to which I had committed myself, but as I was the sinner, I wasn't counting on help from above. Still, a smallish earthquake strong enough to distract Old Jim would have been handy if the timing was right. Clearly, it wasn't.

   I began to realise the awful truth. Old Jim was stronger than I was and I weighed little more than a good-sized bag of marbles. Even the desperate nature of my plight gave me no chance of holding on for the infinite length of time required. Not even the ringing of the end-of-day school bell would have saved me, as Old Jim did that himself, and his bell-ringing hand was otherwise occupied. 

   So the inevitable happened at some point. My muscles tired and I slowly sank to the floor, no more tears left as the arm straightened and the fingers uncurled. There were two sudden ‘swippp’s with the cane, and it was all over. My fingers hurt and then went numb, but the ordeal had passed.

   That ordeal anyway.

   I still had another to face; to my mind, potentially just as bad. Maybe worse.

[continued] [Back to Index]

Stories from my Wicked Past: Caned at 6 [Part 2]

[continued from Part 1] 
Old Jim had told us specifically that they had to be finished by the time he came back inside, and there was to be No Talking.

Well, we talked of course, our hands cupped across our faces under the fateful and fanciful illusion that this was invisible from the back verandah. We didn't understanding the subtleties of the Headmaster's Big Room management. As rookies in that department, we were way too optimistic about not being noticed, or simply were unaware that Old Jim saw all from his vantage post and could in any case spot a whisper from forty paces. Thus it was only a matter of minutes before he entered the Big Room through the front door, and walked in silence to the cane rack. 

   Had the Angel of Death appeared instead, but with an interest in the canes, the impact on me would have been just the same.

   The cane was State Department of Education issue; rattan I think, not bamboo, about a centimetre thick and a metre long. Old Jim had three or four of these on a rack on the wall, like billiard cues, and if there was any slacking off on a given day, he would take them out one by one, whip them up and down a little to get the accumulation of chalkdust off them, test his accuracy on an imaginary offender's hand, and then put them back in the rack. 

Warming up
Illustration by Watto

The work rate in the room always improved considerably after those demonstrations. For an hour afterwards, essays on 'What I did at the Gladstone Show' were written with remarkable speed, accuracy and neatness, and times tables were sung aloud with the fervour of students at a Madrassah learning their Qur'an.

   The canes terrified me, especially the guillotine-like swish and howl of pain I had heard all to often when one was applied. Watching a caning [and we all did, for the viewing was regarded as a salutary experience for boys and girls alike] was like attending a public hanging, all the more impressive if you hadn’t being caned yourself, because you knew there were all sorts of reasons why you could be next. 
   Not having been caned, it seemed to me a fate only just slightly less horrific than death. It had all the allure of a serious car accident for those of us who stumble upon them. The main attraction for the voyeur is that not only is it dramatic, it’s someone else and not actually you, though it could easily be.

   Not so for me on this occasion. My time had come.

   I knew what was on its way, for Old Jim was nothing if not fair, and he would have made sure that every boy about to be caned had disobeyed his instruction. By Departmental regulation, only boys could be caned, not girls, up to a maximum of six strokes. For some strange reason, they were delivered in pairs, 2, 4 or 6, and each chastisement was duly recorded in the Punishment Register, against the name of the offender. 
   Had I been given the chance to protest my innocence, I would gladly have yielded up any or all of my classmates to any fate, including burning at the stake or garotting, in a desperate effort to wriggle my way out of the horror that was upon me. But Old Jim was working his way up the row towards me, dragging the left hand of every boy out in front of each yowling child and delivering two cuts to the fingers of the hand. 
   I should point out that they were not actually cuts in the physical sense, but we always referred to them like that – e.g., ‘Kelvin Thompson got 4 cuts today, Mum’ – not an unusual occurrence for Kelvin, who, as a seasoned veteran, took them stoically, with a bit of an affected wince to guarantee he didn’t get more – but it was an entirely novel and terrifying prospect for me.

   What was I to do? Well, what would any 6 year old do in such circumstances? 
   Howl and scream before the event, naturally, in a vain attempt to prove contrition. Some of the others, also new to this form of correction, had even snatched up their slate pencils and were pretending to work out the twelve-fold division of the five quid with its troublesome coins detailed on the uncompleted Sum Card, but it was a forlorn hope. I did not even attempt it. I knew nothing was going to save me. So I did what any sensible 6 year old scared utterly witless at the sight of the approaching cane would do.

   What would you do? I’ll eat my hat, no salt and pepper either, if you’d have done what I did.

[continued] [Back to Index]

Getting Caned at Six [Part 1], Report to Oncologist

More Stories from my Wicked Past: Getting Caned at Six [Part 1]
The Indians don’t do things by halves. In the spectacular Indian epic, the Mahabharata, the story starts with the beginning of the universe and even the storyteller gets in to the action, because if he needs another character, he invents a gorgeous Indian lady, dallies with her as part of the plot, and they produce the required cast member, tailormade as it were. 

   While this must have had wonderful advantages for the storyteller in all sorts of ways, my history is populated entirely by characters with the genes of their proper mothers and fathers. [Well, not always proper in the societal sense, for even Calliope had its scandals, but let’s not muddy the waters with those now.] Although Calliope had a population of only 321.5 when this story begins, I am not going to complicate things by adding imaginary characters. I already have too many real ones, even if, on occasions, one or two are a little larger than life. So sue me. 

   But I mention this because I do need to start at one particular beginning anyway, or you won’t appreciate the evolution of how I came to have my first caning at school, at the age of 6. Stick with me – I think the ride will be worth it.

   When I started school, Calliope State School had about 40-50 kids scattered over eight grades. Yes, eight! Primary school ended at Grade 8, finishing with the Scholarship public examination. The year I started school [1952 I think] was the one they dropped the kindergarten year in Queensland. I'm not sure why, and it was all a bit vague. I suspect the powers-that-be in the Dept of Education in Brisbane thought kinder was a bit wimpy for Queensland kids and made it disappear. Anyway, schoolbag containing one lunch strapped to back, I was sent off with my sisters Jan and Lyn to school at age 4 [when kids might have started kinder] and began Grade 1 instead.

   By the time it was realised that starting real Grade 1 at four years of age might have been a bit early, the die was more or less cast. He’s managing OK, said Miss Turner, the teacher of Grades 1, 2 and 3. Better than most, in fact. Leave him here and we’ll see how it goes.

   Miss Turner taught these three grades in the smaller room of the two in the school, and the headmaster, Mr Curtis, taught Grades 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 in the Big Room. There was an interconnecting door between them, with glass panes so the Headmaster could keep an eye on what was happening in the other room. There were of course no Headmistresses, for in the early 1950s only a man could be entrusted with the heavy responsibility of managing a multi-teacher school. As well, the status of Headmaster also carried a little financial bonus, and no way was that going to be dangled before women. Women had already made way too many inroads into the national economy during the War for the likes of our State politicians, so such male rights in Education were carefully secured for those whose claim to them needed patriarchal protection.

   In the tropics, the wide verandahs of the school acted as teaching areas for specified purposes, such as rote learning of spelling and tables. Often big girls from Grade 7 or 8 were co-opted to supervise the younger ones in these activities. In fact, with 8 grades in two rooms, the entire school worked on a cooperative basis, with older kids teaching the younger ones parts of the curriculum. There were not many transfers of staff in those times either, so by the time I got to Grade 8, I’d had only two teachers in my entire school career, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. Kids these days might have 3 teachers in the first month!

   In Grades 7 and 8, pupils were bussed to the High School in Gladstone every Friday for the whole day, where girls learnt cooking and sewing [called Domestic Science - great title!], and boys were taught woodwork, metalwork, and trade drawing. 
   This meant that on Fridays, at Calliope, there were two fewer classes for the two teachers to cope with, and Mr Curtis took the Grade 3s into his room so Miss Turner could focus on Grades 1 and 2 for the day.

   This explains why, at the age of 6, on a Friday, I was in the Big Room, in the front row of desks, with seven or eight other Grade 3s a year or two older than me, and I can at last tell the story of my crime and punishment.

   Mr Curtis, better known by generations of Calliope kids as Old Jim [because he seemed to us, and actually was, ancient, and had always been so] had left us Grade 3s with a task, while he supervised some activity on the back verandah with the Grade 6s. The task was the hateful Sum Cards. Each of us had a printed set of mathematical problems on our own card, such a ‘Divide 5 pounds 11 shillings and 6 pence into 12 equal shares.’ These we laboriously worked out to the fraction of a penny on our slates. I loathed them and I don’t think anyone else in Grade 3 was too keen on them either. Old Jim had told us specifically that they had to be finished by the time he came back inside, and there was to be No Talking. 
[continued] [Back to Index]

Diary Update

Here's what I'll tell the oncologist today. A written summary like this can save time in the surgery.

[From top down…]

• Hair – sparse but hanging in where it can!
• Cognitive brain function – normal  - occasional minor headaches
• NO SEIZURES FOR MORE THAN 1 MONTH! This doubles the longest period without seizures since the beginning.  No feeling that seizures may be imminent. Sleep patterns acceptable.
• Lungs – normal
• Heart/circulation – sudden increase in blood pressure – Avastin/weight increase? treated by doubling Karvea dosage. BP at worst 160/90 – currently ranges between 130-140/80. Clearly room for improvement....
• Plumbing – recovered well from last chemotherapy – about to go under attack again with chemo this week
• Right arm – responding slowly to physiotherapy and perhaps Avastin – more control and less palsy. Still a long way to go, but heading in right direction. Occasional shoulder pain but corrected by manipulation of shoulder joint and/or wearing of sling.
• Groin clot – detected 4 Oct – treated with twice daily injections each of 80 mm Clexane. Caused swelling and soreness to right calf and frequent ache behind right knee. Usual mild allergic reaction [itch] to Clexane.
• Still some lack of control over right hip and knee that affects gait and mobility, but the joints are free.
• Increase in weight about 4 kg over 2 months – blaming steroid use but some indiscipline! Diet generally balanced and good.
• Would love to know how much and what sort of safe exercise can be done while clot is being treated by Clexane.