Читать книгу Cops, Crocs & Leopard-Skin Jocks - Bob Magor - Страница 9

We headed out from the protection of the river to the milky waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria. It was a windy morning making the water choppy, but thanks to an intimate knowledge of the area and the wooden posts his workers had planted at low tide to mark the passages Roy effortlessly manoeuvred his aluminium craft through the maze of sandbars. As far as I could see we were heading aimlessly into open water when, all of a sudden, a long line of coloured floats materialised in our path. Roy swung alongside the first and yelled at me to check the pot hanging underneath.

‘How?’ I asked. Which seemed to me to be a reasonable question.

‘Pull it in, you dickhead!’ came the mixture of answer and order. Not needing, or wanting, any more advice I dragged at the rope below the float and up came a wire mesh cage containing seven confused mud crabs of various sizes.

‘Hand it here,’ ordered Roy. He opened up a trapdoor and tipped a couple out into the boat next to his bare feet. They brandished their sizable nippers, which Roy informed me could take a toe off. I lifted my legs up quickly onto the seat. Roy grabbed each crab from behind and squeezed the shell to see if it was full. Softies and female “jennies” went back and the males that were big enough went under Roy’s big flat foot. Showing years of experience, he tied them quickly with string. The upset crabs soon had their defence mechanisms tied to their bodies making a neat package so they couldn’t hurt their captors or each other when they were stacked in their plastic crate.

Sixty pots later the morning work was done and we sat drifting as we admired the catch.

‘You always lived up here?’ I asked, as I swung my eyes from the mangrove shoreline in the distance to the odd tropical island that broke the pale turquoise horizon. I couldn’t see any palm trees but I could almost taste the pina colada as I swung in my hammock, caressed by tropical breezes.

‘Shit no,’ Roy grinned. ‘I started life down in your soft country. As you’ve probably heard I’ve been in trouble all my life and it all started down south. It was the old man’s fault. He was a loose cannon and I inherited his genes.’

The wind had dropped so we had a reasonably flat sea with a low swell as we headed back to shore. Roy began to tell me how his grandfather had been killed in the First World War so his old man never knew what it was like to have a dad.

‘After the war,’ Roy yelled between swells, ‘the family moved from Adelaide to Port Noarlunga. Now it’s a suburb, but in my days it was a little town where the coastal boats came in to the jetty and where all the locals wet a line. That’s where young Lloydie, as the old man was always known, developed his love of fishing. I reckon that was about the only thing of any value he passed on to me. That and his rebellious spirit perhaps. Apparently the old man was good looking and became a bit of a ladies’ man. There you go,’ Roy blurted out. ‘Something else he passed on. Never thought of that before. Thanks Dad,’ he grinned as the mischievous look came back to his face.

Roy continued, adding that besides fishing Lloydie’s other love was one of the local lassies, Myrtle Sweeney.

‘She hated the name Myrtle and was always known as Jean. Jean set her sights on young Lloydie so it wasn’t long before they became an item. They were both only sixteen and, while the young stud was by all reports clean-cut and a hard worker, Jean’s family reckoned he was from “the wrong side of the tracks” and wanted better prospects for their Myrtle. The friendship was banned.

‘Now madly in love (or lust), they packed their bags and hitched a ride over the hills to the little farming community of Inman Valley. The old man reckoned the local Methodists were a bit thick because they accepted them at face value and took them under their wing. That comment was probably ungrateful because the same locals found them somewhere to camp. Jean worked in a local tearooms while Lloydie got a job on a dairy farm. The old man always laughed that they were trying to blend in and that was the first and last time he went off to church on Sundays.

‘Their honeymoon was cut short after a few months when a bus driver from Port Noarlunga stopped at Inman Valley on his regular bus route and recognised the two runaways. He spilt the beans and my future parents were dragged back kicking and screaming to Port Noarlunga in disgrace. Their parents were also in disgrace because extra-marital behaviour out of wedlock reflected badly on the families in those days. It was even frowned at in my days,’ Roy muttered as he shook his head. ‘Not that it ever worried me much,’ he grinned.

‘Where was I? Oh yeah. They were forbidden to see each other again but having had a taste of “married life”, anything less was not an option so a few weeks later they packed their bags again, jumped a train to Melbourne and eloped. With a few lies and a bit of forgery they became man and wife and started their official married life together. The old man got a job driving a taxi. It wasn’t his taxi but he made a lot of money. Apparently not all of the fares went to his boss! On my birth certificate it said that the occupation of my father was “chauffeur”. He’d obviously come up in the world by then!

‘Life for my parents had apparently gone well, until Black Friday 13th in January 1939. A kid called Roy James Wright came into the world. Of course I was cute, but my proud parents had no way of knowing at the time that their sweet little bundle of joy was going to create problems wherever he went for the next seventy years. If they had known they might have dumped me in the Yarra in a bag with a rock.

‘Two years later Kay was born and then, during the war, the old man moved his family back to his old stomping ground of Port Noarlunga. Every couple of years another baby arrived. Anne in 1943, then Marie, Lee, Leon, and finally Brian, or Sab as we always called him. He was another madman like me. But the brood was now complete.’

Roy grinned as he headed the boat up a creek.

‘You did all right for a Southerner. We’ve got time to wet a line for your pay.’

I soon had a bite and hauled up a sizable fish.

‘Bloody catfish,’ Roy growled. It looked okay by me but the ‘Captain’ hit it with an axe handle and dropped it overboard. As I baited up again I asked,

‘When did all your trouble start? These days everybody blames their upbringing.’

‘Nah. Nothing to do with my childhood. Looking back I was just a dickhead. I couldn’t take anyone telling me what to do. I had to do my own thing and any beltings I copped I didn’t care about. I showed no pain so nobody could hurt me. I made damn sure of that. This made most situations worse but that was other people’s problem. Stuff ‘em!

‘We were poor but so was everyone. The old man was a good provider. He grew veggies on a vacant block next door to where he lived and had different jobs for a few years. He was a sandpit operator and a powder monkey in the local quarries. He also worked with explosives while they built the Myponga Reservoir over the hills. During this time he studied medicine part-time. He had dreams, the old man. He did very well in the written exams, but, as he had a stutter, he couldn’t express himself properly in oral examinations when he was nervous. He eventually gave up his dream of becoming a doctor.

‘Luckily he loved horses and became a reasonably successful shonky owner/trainer of trotters. He won lots of races in the country and even a few in the city. I used to help him when I got big enough.

‘His first love, though, was fishing. This was something that started off giving him pleasure and fed all of us but soon became his profession for most of his life. The Wrights were a typical family of these times. The old man always made sure we had plenty to eat and Mum was a great home-maker. In fact our lives couldn’t have been better. That was with the exception of one thing in the old man’s life that was causing him a lot of grief – me!

‘They said I always had too much energy for one body and was always on the go. These days they’ve got poofy names for that sort of thing and give you tablets. But I had the best medicine of all – a beach and the river on my doorstep.

‘My barefoot life began at the Port Noarlunga Primary School. My clashes with authority started early. Being a smart-arse who always spoke his mind meant I was always on a collision course with teachers. I wagged school a lot because of all the bullshit. The stupid teachers assumed that I did everything that went wrong at the school because I said I did it. In reality I wasn’t any worse than anyone else. I just took the rap to get my mates off the hook. I could handle the punishment where they couldn’t.

‘Leaving for school was one thing. Getting to school was something entirely different. Picking up a fishing line from under a bush meant that I could spend the day pursuing my favourite pastime.

‘I also enjoyed Aussie Rules footy and, while I wasn’t a star, I loved being part of the team. I’d learnt to use my fists by now but it was funny that with such an aggressive contact sport I never got into any trouble. I just took the rough and tumble as fun and never considered it necessary to thump anyone in retaliation.

‘I’ve never been frightened of work. As a kid I hunted rabbits with ferrets around the town and made plenty of pocket money selling them to the townsfolk. Rats were always a problem in the sandy, built-up areas so I made more money by eradicating the rat population. I’d flush them out from their holes with a garden hose and kill them with a length of fencing wire. The local council gave a bob (or ten cents) a rat in the late forties. That was a princely sum for a young boy so I caught heaps of rats.

‘There was a lot of fun to be had in the outside world during the day but there was at night too. So after dark I’d sneak out for adventure. The old man would get shitty when he’d find me missing and started chaining me to my bed with a dog chain and a padlock. This plan worked for a while until I started smuggling hacksaw blades into the bedroom and I’d escape into the night again.

‘I got heaps of floggings from the old man with a length of water hose. Most of them were for not going to school. The teacher would call the old man in and then I’d cop it. I’d just grin at him during the beltings and that made him worse and he’d belt me some more. When I got into trouble at school and be about to get the cane, I’d drop my daks and show them the big blue bruises on my bum from the old man’s latest attack. Quite often the teachers would feel sorry for me and let me off. He’d be put in gaol these days for doing that. What a load of crap! All kids deserve a hiding occasionally. He tried to teach me a lesson but unfortunately for the old man it had quite the reverse effect.

‘My sister Anne reckons we had a great childhood. My brothers and sisters never had any trouble with other kids because, with my growing reputation, just the threat of telling their big brother sorted things out. I don’t know why they still talk to me. I’d say to the girls, “Wash my clothes or I’ll belt you!” I wouldn’t have, and never did, but the bluff always worked. I loved them all dearly and would have murdered anyone who touched them.

‘It was tough love because I was always playing pranks on them. I eventually had motor bikes (no licence of course) and when I’d be fixing one up I’d say, “Give me a hand and hang onto this.” I’d get one of my sisters to hang onto a wire, then I’d kick over the motor and give them a shock. Great laugh.

‘If I came into the kitchen late I’d look out of the window and say, “Look at that big rat out there!” They’d run to the window to look at nothing and by the time they turned back I’d be sitting in the best chair eating the best breakfast. Life was one big joke then that we still laugh about today.

‘As I got older the old man lost control. One day he got so frustrated that he shaved my head into a Mohawk. This was supposed to annoy me. We were all wearing our hair combed back like Elvis at the time. I thanked him nicely for my new hair style which didn’t help the situation much. Another time he took all my clothes off when he found me in town instead of school and paraded me down the street in the nude in front of all the people. I waved to all the old ladies and the only one who was embarrassed was the old man. Poor old bugger!

‘Finally there came the day when the old man went to flog me and I grabbed him by the throat. I patted him on top of the head and said, “Your days of dominance are over old man. It’s never done either of us any good.” I then officially came and went as I liked. I had just turned eleven. I wandered into school and told the teachers what I thought of their school and all the dickheads running it. Nobody invited me to stay so I left for good. My real education started the same day. Look out, world!’

The motor sprang into life at the back of the boat.

‘All you’re doing is wasting bait, you wanker. Don’t take up fishing to make a quid,’ Roy grinned. ‘Let’s get back to camp and see what those other lazy bastards got in their pots. You haven’t caught any breakfast but I s’pose I’ll find you something!’