One night there was a big party at our house on the corner of Winchester and Smythe streets and it finished up with the usual donnybrook and some drunk said, ‘Yuh all pretty stuck up about that Pru being so pretty loike, but it’s my opinion someone come over the wall.’ Another window got christened and you could say the party was over, except for a lot of mumbling and swearing around the house and out in the street too. I tried to figure out what this remark meant, but I dozed
off without solving the riddle. I was glad the party was over, so I could get a little shuteye.
I guess I was pretty dumb in those days. I can see now Leslie Wilson must have been really smitten with Prudence, though he would have died sooner than let on. Sometimes I even wonder if she might have been the main attraction for Les around at our place and not his old buddy, me, at all.
In the dead of night (9.30 or thereabouts) Les and I carried out reprisals and struck as mortal a blow as we could muster at the Victor Lynch empire. Lynch was the master-mind behind much evil in the juvenile underworld at Klynham, so justice was again working along mysterious ways to hit the bull’s eye, but the fact remains, Uncle Athol’s criminal duplicity put Les and me in a nasty spot. Only a seething sense of outrage could have given us the courage to move in on gang-leader Lynch the way we did that Saturday night. The well-known expression ‘taking your life in your hands’ hardly meets the case. It would be more apt to liken it to putting your life in the hip pocket of your pants and going roller skating. Victor Lynch cast a big loop in our little world. Ironically I remember hearing Uncle Athol’s drunken snoring as I crept out of the house.
It was what I always think of as a soft sort of night, warm and dark with a velvety breeze kicking the moonbeams around, and a cannon fired down Smythe Street would not have startled a tomcat. Les was leaning on a garage doorway half-way along and he fell into step with me without saying a word, real secret-service stuff. He had a big bundle stuffed under his arm, so I knew he had remembered to bring the sacks along, as planned. I could have easily grabbed one myself on the way out, but Ma would have missed a sack off the kitchen floor in a jiffy.
Ma was a great one for appearances. I honestly believe if the menfolk of the house had shaken their ideas up a bit, Ma could have made things really shipshape.
Only veterans of such underhand, nocturnal activity will sympathise with how conspicuous we felt as we moved in on our target that night. In theory, sneaking up on the benighted Lynch home seemed as easy as falling off a log, but it got trickier and trickier. All the points we had imagined to be in our favour turned against us. For example, Lynch’s house being on the outskirts of Klynham where the houses thinned out, we found only made us greater objects of suspicion. The street lamps were just as numerous as in the heart of the town, but the bitumen on the roads and footpaths gave out to loose gravel and our footfalls kicked up a row like a stonecrusher.
When we were opposite the drive at the side of Lynch’s house we crouched down for a trembling moment and then made a stooping dash for it. There were two concrete strips for the car, but, in between and at the sides, were strips of lawn which helped. The drive was right beside the house and the going under the high, lighted window on finger-tips and tiptoe was murder. My heart was kicking the sides out of my neck. As soon as we reached the lawn at the back of the house we made another dash for the garden and the shelter of the hedge. We were in. But no one was more aware than I of the fact that we were not out again and safe.
Les was leading the way because he was delivery boy for his father some Saturday mornings and, standing on Lynch’s back porch, he had spied out the land for no real reason, except that this was enemy territory. His curiosity was paying off now. It was pitch dark, but Les took me right to the fowlhouse door.
The fowlhouse had been built just where the garden began to fall away steeply down into a deep gully. It was a real job, not just a poor old coop like we had built. It was not very high or deep, but it seemed about twenty feet long and was stoutly built of timber and corrugated iron. There was a big bolt on the door, but no padlock.
The bolt creaked as Les drew it; a fowl made a sound something like Uncle Athol between snores; we froze for a moment, and then stepped inside smartly. We half-shut the door behind us quickly, but not quickly enough to beat the creaking hinges. The fowls clucked sleepily. We stood like statues.
Les nudged me. I took the sacks. We had this worked out like a bank robbery. With one sack under my arm I held the other wide open with both hands. Les took my arm and I stepped up close behind him as he groped nearer the perch. The fowls seemed to have dismissed the sounds of our presence as just cats or something, and be dozing off again, and for the first time I really began to think we were going to get away with it. In a lot of books I had read, I had noticed that the hero or heroine felt an insane desire to giggle. Right then I knew just how they felt.
When I heard the first fowl going into the sack, I heard Les snigger and I gritted my teeth and made a sort of sizzling noise through my nose like a slow leak.
‘Shut up, yuh bastids,’ said Les. The agitation along the perch was spreading.
‘Next bag,’ he hissed.
‘Hang on, hang on.’
I could see his outline clearly now, as I gathered the top of the sack together and whipped the string tight. A fowl jumped down and scuttled around, somnolently hysterical. I propped
the first sack against the wire-netting and stumbled after Les with the next wide open. By now the noise in the fowlhouse was in the uproar category. A huge fowl flew into our faces, giant wings beating.
‘That’s it; let’s go.’
‘C’mon, we’re gone.’
When we were outside the door, we saw the torchlight coming down the garden path. I fled down into the gully. I was carrying the second sack, which was only half-full. Les told me he went along the back of the fowlhouse and over the fence into the neighbour’s yard. He went down the path to the street and lit out into a four-minute mile, sack over shoulder and all. I should have gone with him. It must have taken me twenty minutes to cover three hundred yards of gully bed. A blow-by-blow account of my travail in that virgin gully is to be avoided at all costs. Only three out of six big, strapping fowls survived the journey. Whether they drowned, suffocated or just plain had their brains beaten out is anybody’s guess. At last, exhausted, via swampy, never-used lanes, watched by spooky trees, I reached our secret hideout in Fitzherbert’s shed.
There had been eleven fowls crammed into Les’s sack. When I arrived they were dozing fitfully up on the old gig in the back corner of the big shed, like flooded-out campers billeted in a grandstand. Les had lit the candle, thereby summoning up a sinister gallery of hooded, bobbing figures to join the spiders around the walls.
I was drenched from head to toe and stiff with mud and blood. I stripped clean off and we washed every stitch of my clothes in the trough behind the shed. The night did not seem so warm, stark naked, but the breeze was velvet. The moon was
in the gutter of the sky with its parking lights on and the pines grouped around the stile and along the fence between the paddock and the ruined Fitzherbert mansion were skinny old men leaning on their walking sticks.
We wrung the clothes out and hung them from rusty nails around the walls of the shed, and I went and sat in the pile of lucerne hay. Les and I had gone swimming in the ‘nuddy’ time and time again, but it had never given me a feeling like this before, a feeling too delicious by far to be anything but evil. I wanted to make the feeling get worse, so I lit a cigarette, completely unconcerned whether tobacco stumped your growth or not. The school of thought which maintained tobacco stumped your growth was probably quite wrong anyway, I thought to myself. If you believed everything you read about what to eat and what not to eat, don’t do this, don’t do that, and you listened to everything every screwball told you, a guy was going to end up too scared to move, I reasoned.
A watery solution of mist and sunlight grudgingly included Smythe Street in its early morning tour of inspection. It winced as it itemised, in a slapdash fashion, the rusty tin bath-tubs, stoves, lavatory pans, hot-water cylinders, etcetera, which cluttered up our yard behind the house. The square concrete building across the street from our tumbledown dwelling was fleetingly beautified with a lemon sheen. Soon it became possible to read the inexpertly painted inscription on the double doors of the big shed down at the end of our yard.
D. H. POINDEXTER ANTIQUE DEALER AND VALUER
. Although energetic efforts at erasion had been made it was also possible to discern in larger letters,
DESERT HEAD FOR JUNK
. We never found out who had the nerve to paint that derisive slogan on our shed. Actually the D. H. stood for Daniel Herbert. Some democratic birds began to bang snails on such parts of our roof as they considered
in good enough shape to withstand the impact, and it could be said the business of seeing through another day had been officially opened.
Sunday was always a pretty grim morning for D. H. Poindexter (my old man) and my big brother Herbert, and Uncle Athol, but this Sunday I was right up with the field. While my eyelids were still at half-mast, recent events and the pending repercussions thereof hit me like a wet spade. Les and I had worked out every detail, but it took my subconscious mind to single out the key point of the whole manoeuvre. Hate and excitement can foul up anyone’s judgment, but that old subconscious sure knows its onions. How, it said to me, spreading its hands pityingly, how in the name of God do you expect to get away with it? Victor Lynch takes your chooks Friday night and Saturday night you take his. Who else? Elementary, deah boy!
My clothes were steaming away on the end of the bed in the morning sun and I clambered into both of them. Someone leapt across the washhouse and held the door when I got there.
‘It’s me.’
‘Why don’t yuh say?’
I went over to the tap and did my best to get what looked like plasticine to look like my hair again.
‘Whatcha been up to?’ asked Prudence, pulling her dress down.
‘Mind yuh own business.’
‘Don’t look at me in that tone of voice,’ Prudence said haughtily. ‘And please leave that seat up. There’s too many one-armed drivers around this dump now and that’s fuh sure.’
She crossed to the tub, over which a cracked and spotted mirror was tacked to the wall, and combed her wealth of dark, gleaming hair. All along the window-sill were the discoloured
butts of roll-your-owns the menfolk had put down while they were shaving. There were some matches on the copper and I debated whether I should have a quick smoke or not. I decided not. I was not so cocky this morning about this growthstumping business. Rumour had it the Victor Lynch gang smoked like chimneys, but I had a sneaking desire to be a big guy some of these days.
About ten o’clock Les came around, looking surprisingly confident. We squatted down, down by the rhubarb, and I passed on my fears.
‘I can’t understand why we didn’t see it that way yesterday, Les. Of course they’ll cotton on to who did it. They took ours and we take theirs. We’ll have to watch our step, boy, we’re in for a bashing any day now.’
‘It might be more than that, Ned,’ said Les. ‘Old man Lynch’ll call in the cops over this for cert.’
My brain must have been addled on the Saturday not to think of these angles. We were right in the cart. It was only a matter of time.
Despite the shadow hanging over us, Sunday must have been a big day, romantically speaking, for Les Wilson, because Prudence came with us to the Fitzherbert shed where we headed automatically to discuss our predicament. It was the first time and I do not know now why we let her into the secret. Maybe we felt past caring or maybe Les worked it cunningly somehow, or she could have just latched on to us, but she came anyway. Prudence was a great scout and, although she thought we were a bit cracked, she played along with the way we hid behind hedges and kept doubling back to corners to make sure we were not being followed.
When we found eight or nine eggs in the shed Les and I were really rocked. I think we felt a bit small remembering our one brown egg.
‘Just can’t credit they lay like that all the time,’ Les said. ‘Maybe it’s just nervus reactshun after last night.’
I had a sinking feeling that we had betrayed a trust in letting Prudence know about the shed but I had to admit having her with us brightened us up. I still maintain she had a dirty face, but I was coming around gradually to admitting she was ornamental in her own way. She was full of fun and Les seemed a new man, so, in the end, I was getting quite perky myself and beginning to feel we might get away with the big fowl raid. Before long, what with some pears from the overgrown Fitzherbert orchard, and the last of the Ardath cigarettes, Les and I were right back to normal and planning how we would sell the eggs and use some of the money to buy wheat. Prudence was a full-blown member of the gang now with her arms around her legs and her chin on her knees and a lock of hair over one eye.
‘Anyway all gangsters have molls,’ I said to Les, when we were in the orchard but Les was up a tree and said nothing.
The roof of the shed was at two different levels, but one of the lower beams ran the full width, as a brace, and from this it was possible to hang down and swing by the crook of one’s knees. The beam was so roughly hewn it was almost round, but anyway Les and I had legs like iron. Nothing else for it, Prudence had to be in the act. She tried and tried to gather momentum to swing herself up over the beam, but she lacked the confidence and the knack of whipping the back muscles just at the right instant. We demonstrated the technique until I suspected I had strained my bowels. I excused myself and went
and sat crabwise on the stile into the orchard. When I had been there some time, just staring at the back wall of the shed, I felt a compulsion to return. Prudence had stepped out of her skirt and, in tight, black knickers and blouse, was still attempting to swing over the beam. She just about had it mastered. In the end she did it. Prudence’s legs were gorgeous, full, curving, dusky. Because she was my sister I was a real skeleton at the feast, but I began to get the same feeling I experienced sitting naked in the lucerne hay the night before.
The shed was windowless, twilit, musky. It was an odd feeling to emerge from it and find the noonday sun shining brightly and to realise it was not really late at all, only dinner-time.
When I reached home I missed Les’s company and I began to feel unhappy and apprehensive again. I only managed to shove down half a pork sausage at dinner-time, whereas I usually wolfed everything they gave me.
‘You sick or something, boy?’ said Prudence, spearing with her fork what I left on my plate and getting herself in consequence a dirty look from Uncle Athol. He always looked ten years older on a Sunday, because he skipped shaving and his bristles grew out white. He often left his teeth out on a Sunday too. Herbert had told me on the quiet that he reckoned Uncle Athol had got his teeth from Mr Dabney, the undertaker. Everyone said Mr Dabney was wealthy and sure enough he wore a collar and tie and had a gold watch, but when he got on the scoot he gravitated to characters like Athol C. Cudby and they stayed on the booze together for days. I am not certain whether Herbert had his facts straight, but sure enough it was after one of these jags with Mr Dabney that Uncle Athol appeared with teeth, and started acting in a superior way,
putting on the dog a bit like Pop. Pop was a real character at putting on the dog, but it sort of came natural to him. Even when he was buying an old stove or hot-water cylinder, he contrived to act as if he were only looking such junk over to install it in the gatekeeper’s lodge.
Uncle Athol gave out that he and Pop were partners in the buying and selling business, but Pop introduced him, when he could not get out of it, as ‘Mr Cudby, Mr Athol Cudby, my, hrrmp, contact man.’ I guess that just about sized him up too, always sniffing around on the trail of a yardful of junk somewhere; but, on account of his rupture, he never contacted anything heavy which he would have to heave up on the back of the truck. For the same reason he just stood around when Pop had to change a wheel, which amounted to a lot of standing time, the little old Dennis tip-truck having been known to throw three blowouts in three blocks. One of the standard topics of conversation was five-fifty by twenty-one tyres. If I live to be a hundred years old I am still going to hear voices yak yaking away about five-fifty twenty-ones.
‘Great big pile of five-fifty twenty-ones yuh couldn’t jump over. Been past there hundreds of times without dreaming—’
‘I tell yuh it’s a five-fifty twenty-one, spanking condition, been there for donkey’s years. They’ll never miss it.’
‘Pretty bald in places, but they’re five-fifty twenty-ones awright.’
‘Been a minute earlier it ’ud been worth raking outa the fire. Coulda cried. ‘Course it was a five-fifty twenty-one. Think a man doesn’t—’
And so on.
In a way, I guess, five-fifty twenty-ones were the symbol of
our sort of people. If the Poindexters ran to a coat of arms there would be a five-fifty twenty-one in one corner and a crank-handle in the other. Any automobile with a hint of streamlining had fat, well treaded, remote things referred to as six-hundred sixteens and that was the badge of the people on the other side of the wall.
The girl called Josephine McClinton had been produced by the people on the other side of the wall. Josephine was a blonde, whose smooth and shapely legs propelled a new bicycle down Smythe Street twice a week. I hid behind a stove when I saw her coming with her music case and through the grating I saw her look our junk yard over with a curious and scornful expression that wrung out my innards. She was definitely a six-hundred sixteener.
In the afternoon, Pop, blowing hard and red-faced from cranking the Dennis, shouted out at me over the noise of the engine, if I wanted to come with him on a trip. It was beginning to look as if something had prevented Les from coming around which left me at a loose end so I said ‘OK.’
Anyone who climbed up into the cab of our tip-truck found himself pretty high up in the world; but the horse-hair sprouting out of the black leather seat and tickling your legs, and having to put one’s feet on the fly-wheel housing because the floor boards were gone, and banging one’s head on the roof every pothole, and having to yell out to be heard, were not aspects calculated to give one a superiority complex. I will admit here and now I was ashamed to bounce along in that old bomb and I was glad when I found we were heading out of town. Glad but worried.
‘Where we headin’, Pop?’ I screamed.
‘Te Rotiha,’ he roared.
‘Te Rotiha? Yuh nuts! It’s miles and miles. We’ll never make it, we’ll never get back.’
Pop now set out on a long harangue about the merits of the Dennis and how it would not be the official vehicle of the firm of Dee-aitch Poindexter if it were not and so on and so on, and how over the years it had etc., etc., and despite what ignorant people said ad infinitum, ad nauseam…I only heard a word here and there. I had only been as far afield as Te Rotiha once before so I consoled myself reflecting that a guy really ought to travel if he ever wanted to speak on different topics with any authority and, also, as Ma was wont to point out, while I was doing this I wasn’t doing anybody else out of anything. But I was pleased and surprised when we actually got to Te Rotiha all the same, as it must have been the best part of twelve miles from Klynham.
There is just a chance that if I had not gone on that hazardous bump-bottom journey that Sunday afternoon this tale would not have been told. As we turned off the crossroads I glimpsed, for the first time, the sinister man.
The Dennis ground its way in low gear down to the station yard and Pop and I exchanged a quick look. Pop was bursting with conceit and trying to hide it. I was beginning to feel a bit proud about the old heap of nuts and bolts myself but as we crossed the railway lines behind the train that was being made-up on the back line I heard the explosion I had been waiting for the whole trip. If there was one word that was completely taboo at home it was the one Pop shouted out at this juncture. I was not too sure what made it such a terrible word but my eyelids went on the flicker.
I think we both panicked for a moment as the lorry slewed around and nearly stopped but Pop recovered his wits and put his foot on the gas and we climbed over the last set of tracks to safety before we settled down. The motor died and a giant despair claimed me for its very own. Te Rotiha! The last place on God’s earth! A flat five-fifty twenty-one at Te Rotiha!
As we climbed down from the cab there was a second explosion followed by a faint hiss which was plainly distinguishable from the hissing of the locomotive at the far end of the shunting yard. A sheep looked down at us from a bracken-covered embankment and munched steadily in a cynical sort of way. Pop leaned against the tray of the truck and hooked his thumbs in his pink underpants which showed over his trousers and for an awful minute I thought he was going to start howling.
‘Neddy,’ he told me, ‘if ever a man wuz dogged by fate and hounded by circumstances beyond his control it’s yuh ole dad Dee-aitch Poindexter. If there’s another man walking the face of the globe who’s seen as many blown out and punctured five-fifty twenty-ones as yours truly muh heart bleeds for him like a stuck pig. Words fail me when I think of the countless ignorant, no-hoper twots running around the countryside on six-hundred sixteens without a care in the world and not a man-jack among them that could tell a Shacklock stove from a worm-eaten dunny seat.’
I could see the iron had entered Pop’s soul in a big way this time. There was nothing I could say which would even begin to cheer him up so I leaned on the tray myself and hooked my thumbs in the top of my trousers. I never ever did find out where we were supposed to be going exactly, but there was a dirt road just ahead of us that wound up through the stockyards to the top
of the embankment and I suppose there was a load of junk up there somewhere that Pop or Uncle Athol had sniffed out.