Aunt Effie and the Island That Sank

by Jack Lasenby

  “The starting gun!” shouted Jazz. Uncle Chris opened the throttle lever, and we rolled away, silent but for the crunch of the wheels over the frosty grass. The pressure gauge on the dashboard read: “800 lb p.s.i.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Race to the Waterfall; the Phantom Drummer’s Dirty Tricks; Green Liquid Cow-Muck; Cheating and Letting Down Our Tyres; the Flax-Stick Raft, and the Booby-Trapped Bridge.

  “We’re off! Hooray!” Gliding silently the Stanley Steamer climbed on to the Turangaomoana road. We could hear a blackbird cluck in the hedge. Frost had lifted the gravel so the tyres crunched it, rattled it under the mudguards, and chucked it out behind.

  “Banana Bob’s stalled! He’s getting out to crank! Hooray, Banana Bob!”

  “Be quiet!” we all told Alwyn, and Peter said, “We’ve got a long way to go.” But Alwyn bounced and shouted. “Look at Banana Bob shaking the crank-handle at us!” He pointed and giggled just like Uncle Chris the first time he saw our travelling cowshed.

  We had to join in. Then Uncle Chris spluttered and chortled. He giggled till the fireman’s helmet fell over his eyes and he had to pull up.

  “Let me remind everybody, this is supposed to be a serious race!” said Daisy.

  “You’re right.” Uncle Chris opened the lever so steam filled the cylinder. Chuckling, he drove on round the Springs Corner.

  Ah-oogah! Ah-oogah! The Model T cut past on the inside. “Gruff! Gruff! Gruff!” The two gorillas in front jumped up and down and beat their chests.

  “Boom! Boom! Boom!” The one on the back threw a four-gallon tin of green, liquid cow-muck. Plop! Squish! It was lucky we’d put up the windscreen, but we lost time, stopping and using a steam hose to clean it. Windscreen wipers hadn’t been invented yet.

  “That means we’ll have to stop somewhere for more water,” said Uncle Chris. “I told you we’d have to watch out for the Phantom Drummer’s dirty tricks. Alwyn, when will you learn to shut up?”

  “Up shut to learn,” said a little voice.

  “Look at the white goose and the weeping willow by the pond,” said Jazz, but nobody took any notice.

  Going down the hill to the Opal Springs we steamed past the gorillas – Whooo-oop! The Phantom Drummer tried to lasso Alwyn, but the loop fell over a fence-post. We thought he’d be pulled off, but the Phantom Drummer was so strong, he pulled out the fence-post. The Model T roared and spun its wheels, and the engine stalled. Banana Bob got out to crank it. We would have cheered, but we were getting scared of the powerful Phantom Drummer. Even Alwyn was quiet.

  We rattled over the loose planks across Mr Firth’s bridge. The burner came on with a thump. The Stanley Steamer wailed like bagpipes as we climbed the other side. We helped by holding our noses and whining like bagpipes, too. But the Model T was coming fast. They were going to pass us. The Phantom Drummer threw something, and there was a huge bang.

  Alwyn shrieked with laughter and pointed. “You’ve got a blow-out!” he shouted. “A bit of tin, a bit of board, wire it together and you’ve got a Ford!”

  “Boom! Boom! Boom!” The Phantom Drummer leapt off the Model T, and held up the back while the Sideshow Man changed the burst tyre.

  “That saves them time,” said Peter, “not having to use a jack.” And just then there was another bang!

  “They’ve had another blow-out! Ha, ha, ha!” Alwyn pointed. “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  “It’s not them, it’s us!” Uncle Chris pulled up on a level bit. “That was a length of barbed wire the Phantom Drummer threw under our back wheel.”

  Peter and Marie jumped off, got out one of the timber-jacks, and started changing the wheel. Jazz topped up the boiler with water out of the drain. The burner came on, the steam pressure built up. Peter was just bolting the spare wheel on when Ah-oogah! Ah-oogah! Ker-rang! Clang! Clang! the Tin Lizzie climbed past.

  “Gruff! Gruff!” laughed the Phantom Drummer. “Boom! Boom! Boom!” and he tipped a box of tacks on the road.

  Ah-oogah! Ah-oogah! and the Model T shot over the top of the hill. It took us ages, crawling on our hands and knees, to pick up every tack.

  “Beats me how they climbed that hill without backing,” said Uncle Chris.

  “They must have put a valve in the screw-cap on their petrol tank,” said Peter.

  “What does that do?”

  “You pump it up with a bicycle pump. The air pressure makes the petrol keep going through. Even when the tank’s half-empty and you’re going uphill.”

  “I’ll bet the Phantom Drummer thought of that,” said Uncle Chris. “It’s typical of his dirty tricks.”

  “Smart, though,” said Peter.

  We drove in their dust, catching up. We held our breath, pulled our goggles tight, and Uncle Chris drove so fast we were almost touching the back of the Model T, but the dust also hid us. Through a gap in its cloud we saw the Phantom Drummer dancing in his gorilla suit, thumping his chest, and laughing, “Boom! Boom! Boom!” because he thought we were miles behind, tyres full of tacks.

  Still hidden by their dust, we came to the top of a hill. The boiler gauge read 900 lb p.s.i. Uncle Chris said, “Now!”

  Marie pulled the cord on the steam whistle. Bleee-wheep! Whooo-ooop!

  “Kreeeg-ah!” The gigantic gorilla on the back of the Model T fell over the side. Hanging on by his black fingernails – running in huge bounds – he pulled himself back on board.

  “Ha! Ha! Ha!” Alwyn laughed and pointed as we swept by. “Silly old Phantom Drummer!”

  “You invite ill fortune on every occasion you do that,” Daisy told Alwyn, as we splashed through a stream that came out of a flax swamp and across the road.

  Climbing another hill, we looked down and saw Banana Bob had run off the road and gone into the drain. “It’s that side-sway a Model T gets,” said Peter. “With any luck, they’ll have bent their front axle.”

  “We’ve won!” Alwyn shouted and bounced.

  But the powerful Phantom Drummer lifted the Model T out of the drain with one hand, and held it up while the Sideshow Man pulled out the axle and belted it straight with the back of an axe. Then we were over the top of the hill and they were hidden.

  “What’s that thundering?”

  Uncle Chris pointed. We looked up, and there was the Waterfall. “Aunt Effie said we’d be coming here,” said Jessie. We knelt by Waterfall Creek, dangled our dusty tongues in the cold water, and washed them clean with handfuls of sand. We pulled off our goggles and laughed at the white circles around each other’s eyes before we splashed our faces.

  “What are you doing, Uncle Chris?” Lizzie asked. He was laying a green leaf on a grey stone above the creek.

  “Back in the olden days, this was a track over the Kaimais to Tauranga,” said Uncle Chris. A little girl travelling with a missionary was murdered here. Whenever I visit the Waterfall, I put a leaf here to remember her.” For a moment we all felt cold, then the sun shone warm again.

  He refilled the boiler. Ann and Becky topped up the kerosene reservoir. Marie filled the Old Puckeroo bottle with sparkling Waterfall Creek water. Isaac and Jane scrubbed the patches of dried cow-muck off the radiator.

  Jazz sandpapered the punctured tube, and glued a patch over the hole while Bryce cut a boot from an old tyre, and put it inside the rip in the cover. They got it all back together, and pumped it up. We cooled our feet in the creek, washed the dust off our goggles, and climbed back up the bank to the Stanley Steamer.

  “The dirty crooks!” said Uncle Chris. “They’ve been here while we were down at the creek. They’ve filled up their tank and gone!”

  We saw the empty Big Tree Motor Spirits tins the gorillas had just thrown down anywhere. “They must have filled their radiator from the drain,” said Uncle Chris.

  “They must have filled their bottle from the drain, too!” said Daisy. “The rules said they had to fill it from Waterfall Creek.”

  “I warned you about the Phantom Drummer’s dirty tricks. How will Mr Firth know they
didn’t fill it from the Waterfall Creek?” asked Uncle Chris. “They’re such terrible liars.”

  “Drive on!” said Jazz. “We can still beat them.”

  “Something’s missing,” said Lizzie, and she pointed. “The Phantom Drummer’s pinched our steering wheel!”

  We all cried, Uncle Chris loudest of all. “Boo-hoo!” he bawled and rubbed his eyes. “Aunt Effie will give me such a hiding if she comes back and finds I’ve lost Alwyn in a race.”

  We were so sorry for Uncle Chris, we all cried, too, and held his hand. We didn’t want him getting a hiding, and we knew Aunt Effie could get pretty fierce.

  “There must be something you can do.”

  At the sound of Daisy’s sensible voice, Uncle Chris stopped crying, and Peter said, “You’re right! Everybody look for a crooked tea-tree! Quick!”

  We searched the scrub along the side of the road. Jazz found one, cut it off with his pocket-knife, and came running. “Will this do?”

  “Just the thing!” Peter said.

  “I see what you mean,” Uncle Chris called. “We’ll steer with a tiller!”

  “Here,” said Marie. She was good at knots and lashings. She lashed the bent end of the tea-tree stick down the side of the steering shaft. The other end stuck up to where Uncle Chris stood at the back on the luggage carrier.

  “I’ll work the throttle,” Peter said. “I’ll work the brakes and whistle,” said Marie. “Ann and Becky, you sit in the front seat, too, and turn on the burner if Uncle Chris yells out. The rest of you perch where you can, but watch out for the tiller – it could sweep you off.”

  We remembered how an elephant and twenty powerful gorillas were once swept off the deck of Aunt Effie’s Ark by the tiller because it had too much weather helm. We stood on the running boards, wedged ourselves in behind the mudguards and the headlamps, and perched on top of the bonnet so we’d be out of the way.

  “Let off the hand brake! Open the throttle!” We torpedoed back down the road. Whooo-ooop!

  But Uncle Chris had trouble with the steering, and there was a floppety noise from the tyres. The Phantom Drummer had let them down. He’d even stolen the pump. Uncle Chris tried filling the tyres with a steam hose from the boiler, but the steam melted the inner tubes. We all stared at Alwyn whose face was turning white.

  “This is what you do.” Peter tore up some old sacks and told us to get armfuls of grass off the side of the road. “You stuff them!”

  The stuffed tyres weren’t as soft, but they worked. We hung on tight and drove fast. Whooo-ooop!

  Where a little stream came down across the road, we had to stop. The Phantom Drummer had dug out the hillside and collapsed it to make a dam. Alwyn tried wading through the mud, but went in over his head. He came up mud all over except for his eyes and his mouth – when he opened it. “At least his face doesn’t look white now,” said Ann.

  Marie dragged him ashore with a stick and tried for the bottom. “There’s ten feet of mud,” she said.

  “Remember the rafts we saw at the museum,” said Ann. “Made out of flax-sticks.”

  “You mean korari,” said Daisy. She never lost a chance to air her knowledge.

  “You can call them koraris if you want to,” said Ann. “I mean flax-sticks!”

  We tied thousands of them in bundles, tied the bundles together with flax leaves, and made a huge raft. Uncle Chris drove the Stanley Steamer aboard. Alwyn was covered in mud already, so he swam ahead with a rope. He took a couple of turns around a strainer post, and we pulled the raft across.

  Whooo-oop! we were off again. Nobody wanted to sit beside Alwyn, so he hung on to the luggage carrier behind Uncle Chris.

  Banana Bob’s Tin Lizzie stood facing us at the other end of Mr Firth’s bridge over the Waihou at the Okauia Springs. The Phantom Drummer was tying our steering wheel to the side of the bridge. Smoke came out of his ears when he saw us. He bent down to what looked like a piece of wire, gnashed his teeth so sparks flew, and ran and jumped on the Model T. Ker-rang! Clank! Clank. Ah-oogah! The Model T sped off up the hill backwards.

  “Good!” said Peter. “That means the valve’s not working, and they’re running out of petrol.”

  “I’ll get our steering wheel!” Marie jumped down and ran.

  “It’s a booby trap!” shouted Uncle Chris. “Another of the Phantom Drummer’s dirty tricks. Touch the steering wheel, and the bridge will blow up.” We looked and saw wires leading from the steering wheel, over the side of the bridge, and down to red sticks of dynamite tied to the wooden legs.

  “That’s why he was gnashing sparks off his teeth!” said Jazz. “Lighting the fuse.” He pointed at a spark burning along a length of fuse towards the dynamite.

  Even the mud on Alwyn’s face turned white, and he trembled with fear till the Stanley Steamer shook so much we had to hang on tight.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Driving Across the Stringers; More of the Phantom Drummer’s Dirty Tricks; A Bottle of Waipiro; the Runaway Wheel; a Daniel Come to Judgement; “Explain Yourselves!”

  As we backed away, the bridge blew up. Our steering wheel flew high in the air and out of sight.

  “How are we going to get across the river?” we all wept. Uncle Chris bawled loudest of all.

  “I put this in just in case,” said Peter. He pulled a cross-cut saw out of the big black box on the back. We felled two huge pine trees across the river, and jacked them so they lay a few feet apart. Almost out of sight below, the Waihou roared in its gorge.

  “Where are we going to get the planks from to make the rest of the bridge?” asked Daisy.

  “Jump on,” said Peter, “and sit still. If you move, you’ll tip us over!” Uncle Chris pulled his fireman’s helmet down and drove the front wheels on to the two stringers. Inch by inch we edged across. Daisy started to have hysterics but, fortunately, they turned to the vapours, and she slumped unconscious.

  “The stringers are giving way behind us!” Marie shouted.

  “Open her up!” Uncle Chris said to Peter. “Give her all the steam we’ve got!” We had just enough speed for our front wheels to get on to the bank. We all leaned forward, and our back wheels grabbed and held, then spun and drove us up the Springs Hill.

  Daisy woke just in time to look back and see the two stringers falling towards the river. “Oh!” she said and turned up her toes again.

  Halfway to the Springs Corner, we saw the Model T stopped, Banana Bob changing a wheel, and the Sideshow Man pouring a tin of motor spirits into their tank. As we laughed and swept past, our old steering wheel came down out of the sky and thumped Banana Bob on his pointy head.

  “Hooray!” we yelled, and Alwyn shouted, “Serves you right!” The dried mud cracked all over his face as he laughed.

  “Shut up, Alwyn!” we all cried.

  “Cheats never prosper, Banana Bob!” he yelled, and just then the Stanley Steamer slowed.

  “We’re nearly out of steam!” Marie tapped the gauge. “The boiler’s empty.”

  “And no more water all the way to the Tower.” Daisy spoke gloomily.

  “We’re beaten,” said Ann.

  “I’m eaten,” Alwyn cried.

  “I saw something on the way out,” Jazz whispered. “Green and white. A weeping willow, and a – a white goose, I think.”

  “You’re right, Jazz!” Uncle Chris drove off the road and across a paddock. “I’d forgotten it: the duck pond!”

  The last steam just got us to a weeping willow by a pond where a white goose stood on green grass. We’d lost the kerosene tin, so we knelt, filled our mouths from the duck pond, ran, and spat the water into the boiler. Then we remembered our motoring caps and Uncle Chris’s brass helmet and filled them. That was much faster. The burner roared, the water heated up, and the gauge read 500 lb p.s.i.

  It reached six hundred. We had enough pressure to cross the paddock very slowly, and to drive up on to the road. Clank! Ah-oogah! Ker-rang! The Model T shook and trembled past.

  “Bo
om! Boom! Boom!” The Phantom Drummer smashed a bottle on the road in front of us.

  “Ha, ha, ha!” Uncle Chris laughed and drove on. “Our tyres are stuffed with grass, so we can’t get any more punctures!” But Daisy insisted that we stop and pick up the broken glass.

  Half a mile along the Turangaomoana Road, we caught up again. The Model T lay on its back like a black beetle, wheels spinning in the air.

  “Too much side-sway again,” said Peter. “Model Ts do that.”

  The three gigantic gorillas were lifting it back on to its feet. We shot past shouting, yelling, holding our hands over Alwyn’s mouth. Whooo-ooop! went the boa constrictor. Whooo-ooop! We laughed and took our hands away.

  Alwyn laughed. Before we could grab him again, he yelled, “Hooray, Banana Bob! We’re going to beat you!” At once, the Stanley Steamer slowed down, fluttered, and sounded as if it was going to be sick.

  “The burner’s gone out!” yelled Uncle Chris. “Give us the matches.” But Alwyn had used the last of them lighting his acorn pipe and smoking dried dock leaves.

  “Get two dry sticks out of the hedge!” Peter cried. We knelt in a circle. He rubbed the sticks together, puffing, grunting, sweating. Something shimmered above them. Haze. A thin line like a thread of white cotton floated and untwisted on the air. Peter rubbed harder, faster. The thread of white cotton thickened to smoke.

  The powdered wood glowed as Marie breathed on it. Isaac held a dead leaf against the glow. It flickered. Just long enough for Jane to light a straw. Ann got a bundle of dry reeds going from the straw. Becky lit a twig from the reeds. With his pocket knife, Jazz carved a splinter of totara off a strainer post, and got it going from Becky’s twig.

  “Hurry!” said Uncle Chris. Jazz handed the burning totara splinter to Becky who handed it to Ann who handed it to Jane who handed it to Isaac who handed it to Marie who reached up and handed it to Uncle Chris. He lit the pilot light, the burner thumped, and the boiler began to heat up.