Читать книгу A Life of Pride - Alan G Pride - Страница 14

Dad being, as I said, a workaholic and reluctant to pay anyone to do anything he could do himself, liked to ‘relax’ with physical work after a day of supervising at the mines. I had to be his labourer and we built walls, paths and a large garage, from stone and cement. He wouldn’t buy gravel to go in the cement: instead he took the back seat out of his 1939 Oldsmobile, lined it with a tarpaulin and drove up Rocky Hill. There we filled buckets with rocks, drove home with the car’s rear bumper almost dragging on the ground and tipped them out, next to a hammer and sieve. I then had to break them up and put them through the sieve, so there’d be a pile ready to go in the cement mixer when Dad came home from work each night. This seemed to go on for years and I hated it, but there was no arguing with Reg Pride.

307 Oxide Street, with the garage we built from those smashed stones!

He also used the Oldsmobile for theft, constructing a rig underneath it to hide lengths of metal from the mine! He’d fasten them into the rig and drive coolly through the exit gates. He scrounged scrap materials from Broken Hill tip, too, and from it all made a chookpen, Mum’s clothesline, the woodpile frame and other household necessities. Apart from this, he rarely drove the Oldsmobile: it only had about 30,000 miles on it when he sold it.

As well as the stone-breaking and cement mixing, it was my job to remove a huge palm tree stump from the garden. There were 3 palm trees in front of the house, one right in the way of the garage he wanted to build, so it had to go. Dad got someone to cut it down and remove the pieces, but he wouldn’t pay to remove the 3-foot stump. I was given a pick, shovel and crowbar. I had to do it, however long it took – from memory, 2 months digging and chopping every night after school until the stump could be pulled out. It really annoyed me that I would also have passers- by leaning over the front gate, smoking cigarettes and trying to be funny: ‘You missed that bit’, ‘There’s still a bit over here’, etc.

Finally, the job was done and I came home from school to find that Dad had borrowed a truck from the mine and the stump was gone. I’d no say in any of this at the time, but I rebelled later on!

[Marilyn writes: 'Marie told me that Reg used to beat Alan with a belt, and once even with a chain – on a gravel rash, after he’d fallen off a motorbike. Gloria tried to shield him, one reason why she was his favourite sister. Audrey denied that the beatings took place, but she left Broken Hill early and wasn’t as close to her family as Gloria, from whom Marie heard these stories'.]

Gloria, my favourite sister and myself on the front verandah, circa 1946.