The trouble with the Poindexters was ready cash and Athol Cudby. We had no ready cash to speak of, but we had stacks of Athol Claude Cudby. It has long been my contention that the constant presence of that man had a more degrading influence on our household than any other factor.
Apparently, while the slump was playing fortissimo and I was playing cowboys and Indians, we became locally celebrated for not paying the rent, chopping up partitions for fuel against the wintry blasts, boozy parties, and the girls getting into the time-honoured spot of bother. Both Winifred and Constance got married the bumpy way and these things take living down in a place the size of Klynham. We also had quarrels. We lived in a whole series of houses and every one of them had a window, or windows, with a large star in the glass because somebody ducked. The house on the corner of Smythe and Winchester streets, which is where we were living in the early autumn of this memorable, nay, unforgettable, year, featured two such windows. However, by this time, things were brightening a little. We had a good-natured, easy-going landlord, and money was not playing quite so hard to get. There was even some talk of taking the owner up on his offer, paying a higher rent and making the old shack our own. Things were looking up, but we still had Uncle Athol.
Uncle Athol is a bludger, a prize bludger, the soft voiced, ‘thank-yuh-kindly’, hat-touching type whose answer to flood, famine and plague is a mackintosh. If Athol C. Cudby ever whipped up a bead of honest sweat in his whole life I would appreciate finding out just where and when in order to send it to Ripley. It is not a bit of use telling me it was losing an eye that soured him against toil, because he had both his eyes right up to the time when, strictly from hunger, he undertook to go on a fencing contract somewhere in the back of beyond, with two cronies. First time up he took a blind swipe at a post with a hammer; and a piece of No. 8 fencing wire promptly took a swipe back and scored a Lord Nelson. On the strength of his glass eye (whoever matched that fishy eye was a craftsman and is almost certainly still whistling for the price) Uncle Athol has been known to attend an Anzac Day parade wearing an army overcoat he got from ‘Clem’s Wardrobe’, an establishment now liquidated on account of greater universal prosperity. Consider a man, who has never been closer to the army than a secondhand overcoat, attending a sacred ceremony like an Anzac Day parade just for the booze he can get out of it. This will serve to illustrate his attitude and lack of principle. ‘Bull’s wool rules the world’ is his motto and sometimes I am inclined to think he could be right. He certainly seems to have pulled the wool over a lot of eyes in this town in his time. When I was just a kid he had me bluffed too, but those days are gone.
Uncle Athol took a great interest in the hen-coop Leslie Wilson and I built when we got bitten by the poultry bug. Les was a great buddy of mine in those days when we were in short pants. We went collecting cones from pine plantations weekend after weekend, tore our pants on barbed-wire fences, fell in creeks and fell out of trees and braved all manner of hazards, including being bitten by dogs, when we hawked the pine cones from door to door, and all to buy half a dozen Black Orpington fowls, which the auctioneer said were pullets. Looking back with a certain sourness, it is my contention that the auctioneer used the term ‘pullets’ the way a drunk would yell out ‘Hi girls’ to a busload of grandmothers on a conducted tour; but, be that as it may, those chooks belonged to Les and me and when we found a brown egg in the coop which Uncle Athol had given us advice on how to build, to say we were walking on air is to be guilty of withholding the true facts. Saturday morning Les turned up with a book on poultry farming and now it did not seem as if anything was going to prevent us making a fortune.
‘There sure musta been fowls around for some time,’ I said, looking through the book, which had no cover and seemed to be written in copperplate on parchment. At a glance it might have been a first edition Chaucer. ‘’Stonishin’ to think of ’em having fowls way back when like this.’
‘Don’tcha worry yuh head over that,’ said Les, reclaiming the book. ‘There weren’t too many flies on these old-timers. This old geezer here with the beard musta known fowls like the palm of his hand to write this book. Way I look at it, with a book like this to refer to and study, we’d just be wasting our time going on to the Tec. With a book like this and the super strain of fowls like we managed to get for a kick off, there just isn’t any point in wasting our energy on anything else. We’ll be able to retire and just spechlise in breeding before we’re any age at tall.’
‘Seems funny those chooks are still in the box at the back at this hour,’ I said, poking a stick through the wire netting. ‘Seems like they’re sleeping in pretty late for a Saturday.’
We were so dumb in those days it was ten minutes or thereabouts before we got anxious enough to investigate. Les’s bottom jaw fell so low, I thought maybe he was going to eat the handful of black feathers which was all we found.
Chord in E minor, please, maestro.
Well, there was only one crowd that was capable of a crime of this magnitude and that was the Victor Lynch boys. We both thought the same thing at the same time, but neither of us mentioned the dread name. In the end Les beckoned me to follow him and when he finally stopped down by the rhubarb, he said, ‘Victor Lynch.’
I remember we sold our remaining sack of pine cones that morning and we went to see a Hopalong Cassidy in the afternoon. We walked slowly and purposefully, loosely, ready to reach for our guns at the drop of a hat, speaking only in condensed, staccato bursts, these men are dangerous.
While we were in the theatre watching the screen grimly, Uncle Athol was raffling those fowls, twenty tickets a time, sixpence a knock, in the Federal Hotel. Whenever I hear that song, ‘I’ll be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You’, I think of that man.
Theatre is dignifying Klynham’s cinema somewhat. It was a big draughty barn of a place, but many happy hours we spent therein. The building has had a great face-lift recently, but I recall it fondly the way it was in the days when Les and I sat enthralled by a serial picture called ‘The King of Diamonds’, and the kids stamped on the floor and whistled at each certificate of approval, unless it was a travel film and then they hooted and groaned. There was always a chance of my bare arm brushing against the electrically charged flesh of Josephine McClinton again as we crowded down the stairs at interval, or even maybe, some day, fluking a seat alongside her. There were big pictures of Tom Mix and Robert Montgomery and Dolores Del Rio and young Jane Withers on the walls of the stairway. My crush on Josephine was top-secret stuff, but Les and I openly admitted that we thought Jane Withers was a bit of all right, even if she did have a double chin. It was only puppy fat, Les reckoned.
After the flicks, Les and I cut out what was left of the cone money on a milk-shake. We took our time and there were not many people left hanging around when we came out from the soda fountain. We walked the length of the main street and we met Prudence.
At one end, the cinema end, of the main street, is a band rotunda into which people throw the paper off fish and chips. At the other end is a giant elm tree fenced off with wrought-iron railing. These two features of Klynham stare along the middle of the main street at each other in the frustrated but resigned manner of pensionedoff cannons in a park. The sun rises behind the elm tree and sets behind the band rotunda, its slanting rays at sundown imparting to this edifice a minaret-like appearance. At the western end are not only the band rotunda and the cinema, but also the billiard saloon. My big brother, Herbert, spent more time at the billiard saloon than he did up at our house on the corner of Smythe and Winchester streets. On Sundays, Herbert hung around the house and talked about the billiard saloon and people called Kelly and Jack Glenn and Hodson. The other end of the main street was, and still is, popular with the farmers on market days. They used to park their Dodge tourers around the big elm tree and sit on the running boards, or on the leaf-strewn, shadow-dappled grass and eat pies.
On the main street were two butchers’ shops with sawdust on the floors and one o
f these sold the finest sausages in the world it was generally understood. The other butcher had the best steak. Everybody knew that this was so. There could be no gainsaying it. Even the children knew that one butcher was renowned for his sausages and the other for his steak, because they had heard it stated so often and so positively by their elders. This conflicting appeal to patronage could complicate shopping, but we were unaffected inasmuch as only the sausage master was willing to extend credit to the Poindexter family. We were resigned to gnawing away at the most gosh-awful steak. However, as Ma said, ‘What yuh lose on the swings yuh get on the rouseabouts.’ Good old Ma! There were several confectionery shops with counters and tables for sundae and milk-shake consumers, a chemist, a saddlery ironmongery, two grocery shops, two banks, and an old-established drapery business. Dabney’s, the undertaking and furnishing business, half-way along the street, was a very old-established firm, but it was shut as often as not; either that or there was no answer, and people never went there to buy furniture. They went to Hardley & Manning.
Hardley & Manning was our really big store and no shopping expedition was complete without using it as a short cut between two streets. The adventure of going right through Hardley & Manning, using it as a short cut, never palled. One emerged on a wide, dusty back street which commanded a fine view of the misty hinterland. It also featured the defunct Jubilee Hotel. There were three other hotels at Klynham, a number said by some to be ridiculous for the population while others bemoaned the days when there were four, before they shut down the Jubilee. Too many pubs or not, the big-bellied licensees, who wheezed masterfully in those open doorways were recognised as men of affluence, but they certainly spent no money having the litter swept up from the bare corridors between the bars. Except for the hotels, such two-storeyed buildings as the street boasted were unoccupied upstairs and some even had the top windows boarded up.
The main street always looked desolate at this hour on Saturday as most of the shops closed at mid-day. Walking late on a Saturday afternoon the only person one could ever really count on meeting was Sam Finn, the local halfwit, another attraction Klynham ran to in those days. Poor Sam Finn. When I think of him I feel as if I am looking back at the town through the wrong end of a telescope. And it feels odd to reflect that I, alone, probably hold the key to the secret of his disappearance, even the secret of his grave. But Sam Finn and the equally ill-fated Mabel Collinson, the music teacher, part and parcel of this story as they may be, will have to wait their cue. As I said the main street of Klynham looked desolate this Saturday after the cinema had closed. There was a sniff of dark smoke from the railway station in the air. The afternoon seemed reproachfully old. I would not have even seen Prudence who was diagonally across the intersection from us, I was still so burnt up about the raid, but Les nudged me and said, ‘That’s yuh sister, Ned.’
We stopped only because Les stopped, and Prudence came across the street slowly, shielding her eyes from the westering sun. When she reached the shadow of the big elm tree her squint became an engaging grin. She was two years older than me and she always looked to me as if she had a dirty face, but I realise now that everybody must have been right when they said she was ‘real pretty’. I think everybody was downright puzzled too at one of the Poindexter girls turning out a beauty, because no one else I can recall in the family was any oil painting.
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 halffull. 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 round the walls.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 77