Lantana Lane (24 page)

“He could get hung up in that good and proper,” said Doug.

“Too right, he could!” said Wally.

“Monsters! “screeched Aunt Isabelle.

“Now if it were a bull chasing him instead of a bulldozer,” observed Henry with detachment, “a fence would be a help. But Barry'd drive that little runabout of his clean over any fence without even knowing it was there.”

“
Fi, donc!
”raged Aunt Isabelle, stamping her foot at him. “For shame I Shut up! Oh-h-h-h—it moves faster! . . . See it breaking down all before it! Henri, you must prevent this disaster! I command it! Ah, my poor Ken, my poor boy! . . . He stumbles! . . . It overtakes him! . . . Release me, Suzanne, or he is lost!” But Gwinny and Sue had her by the arms like wardresses, and she struggled in vain.

“Lost? Not he!” scoffed Aub. “He's holding his own, I reckon, don't you, Wally?”

“He's doin' all right if he don't trip too often. Put on a bit of pace, there . . . musta struck a clear bit. . . .”

“Cripes, he's down!” cried Aub. “Okay, he's up again, and moving pretty good, too. Watch your feet, son! It gained on him then—eh, Doug?”

“Run, my poor Ken!” screamed Aunt Isabelle. “Faster, for the love of God—faster! Ah, that terrible machine—
quelle abomination!
”

“Come on, boy!” yelled Doug. “Put on a bit more speed!”

“He's drawing away!” cried Aub. “Fence must be gone, Jack—he never stopped. Fifty yards more and he's out in the clear! Jeeze, he nearly took another header then! . . .”

“He did!” Joe cried excitedly. “He must've done—I've lost him. . . . Or d'you reckon he's found a place he can crawl off at the side? . . .”

“No fear,” said Jack, “he's still going. Bit of a bend in the track, that's all. See, there he is again. . . .”

“That'll lose him a few yards,” remarked Henry. “Tough luck.”

“That's right,” agreed jack, “the 'dozer travels straight.”

Aub was bouncing at the knees, and his hands were sawing on invisible reins. Clearly he was back on the racecourse, and he had his shirt on Ken. Voices rose exultantly in chorus:

“Come on, Ken!”

“Boy is he moving! . . .”

“Keep it up, sport, you're doing fine!“

“Stick to it, Ken!”

“He's coming up the straight! . . .”

“
Courage, mon cher
—you arrive! . . .”

“Finishing in style, too, I'll say that for him!”

“He's home and dry!
Hooray!
“

Ken shot out into the clearing, veered sharply sideways, and staggered to a halt, flailing his arms in groggy gestures which, at last, Barry could see. Leviathan wallowed out of the lantana, stranded on the sward, and stuttered into silence, Aub cupped his hands round his mouth, and shouted : “Nice work, feller! Nice work! “

Ken was seen to turn and stare upward. He waved, and shook his clasped hands over his head. He hadn't much breath left, but he used what he had, and his meat-day pæan came faintly up the hill. “I made it!” he proclaimed triumphantly. “I made it!” And everybody cheered.

Everybody, that is, except Aunt Isabelle. She was very cross.

“Make no mistake,” she scolded, “I write
to
the Government about this outrage! I write to the newspapers! I write to the Bishop and the Agriculture! I ask is it permitted that these wicked machines crush into the earth like an ant so good a boy as Ken? Tch! tch! He is not crushed—I see it—am I blind? This is only because he is of a type the most athletic, and has great resourcefulness. Not all possess these qualities. Are these others to be squashed while
tout le monde
stands by making the buffoonery? It is a scandal! I write to the Prime Minister! I demand the investigation! I write to the criminals who make this bull-roarer. As for that Barry there, I tell him off—I give him the works on the carpet! Figure to yourself—a youth, a
blanc-bec,
a veritable child like this to be entrusted with such an engine of assassination!”

Marge murmured sympathetically. She perceived that in future there would be one other person in the Lane who did not regard a bulldozer as a Christmas box from Providence.

I
T IS
a fact worth pondering that the trials heaped upon human beings by nature rile them far less than do those which they devise for each other; which makes it all the more peculiar that they should so assiduously seek to abolish or mitigate the former, while applying themselves with ever greater zeal to an endless multiplication of the latter.

Little as we Dillillibillians like the cyclones which periodically come ashore on our part of the coast, and play merry hell with our affairs, we prefer them to certain recurring, man-made afflictions which we have to endure—as, for instance, income-tax returns. This is quite reasonable. A cyclone gives you a sporting chance, which the Taxation Department never does; for though potentially disastrous, it is, like Macbeth, infirm of purpose, which the Taxation Department certainly is not. Even after our wirelesses have warned us in calm and cultured accents that a severe cyclonic disturbance is reported off the coast, we know that it may dither about for days before deciding exactly where to go. At noon, the news that it is moving south-west may make us look to our roofs and window fastenings; by evening we hear that it is veering northward, and begin to hope that someone else may cop it after all; next morning we learn that it is heading out to sea again—but our sighs of relief are premature, for in the evening we are informed that it has mended its pace, increased the velocity of its winds, and is charging straight at us. Even then there is still the possibility that it may miss us.

But once we hear the annual intimation that Forms A, B and C are now available at all post offices, we realise there is no escape. The Commissioner has our address, and we can do nothing to save ourselves, for it is not a bit of use shutting doors and windows. Moreover, waywardly flibbertigibbet behaviour is far less trying than drearily efficient implacability; a certain stimulation may be derived from the unpredictable vagaries of a cyclone, but filling in a dreadful form is just dull agony. So if our bank balances are to suffer another assault, let it, we say, be by Act of God rather than by Act of Parliament.

The proof of all this—if proof were needed—is that no one has ever invented a pet name for the Commissioner of Taxation; but cyclones always have pet names. These—bestowed in the first instance, one supposes, by some waggish gentleman of the Press—are invariably feminine, and usually of the down-to-earth variety. It may not be too fanciful to suggest that they exercise a subtle influence upon our attitude; names such as Annie, Maudie, Bessie and Clara, when combined with the natural characteristics we have mentioned, do seem to transform cyclones from menacing and impersonal meteorological phenomena into romping girls—rough, noisy and given to practical joking, but without malice.

So we accept an occasional visit from one of these hoydens philosophically enough. Recently, however, the Coral Sea spawned no fewer than three of them in three weeks, which was quite abnormal, and due, as everyone agreed, to The Bomb. What made it more abnormal still, and more unbearable, was that (although cyclones usually blow in during the summer, and are the wettest feature of the Wet), these three turned up in July and August, when the sight of those forms lying around the house made us feel that we already had quite enough to cope with.

Worse still, the last was called Celestine. This is a pretty upstage sort of name, and when the newspapers jocosely drew attention to its meaning we all thought they were carrying waggishness far beyond the permissible limit. Such a pleasantry might go over well enough in the city, where walls are thick, roofs are strong, the earth is firmly held down by pavements, and practically the only form of cultivation is indoors, where the more palatial banks and insurance offices go in extensively, nowadays, for potted cacti. But it was coldly received in Dillillibill, and no wonder, because we had already, in the space of three weeks, suffered visitations from the other two girls, whose names were Ada and Bella; we were therefore fed up with cyclones, and in no mood for whimsy. We might possibly have accepted a Maggie or a Daisy with better grace, but we fairly snorted when this third wench was introduced to us, with a broad wink, as, forsooth, Little Heavenly One.

Ada made a lot of noise, blew the roof off the school (of course all the children were safely at home, eating hot buttered toast), demolished a car shed out on The Other Road, and brought down most of the citrus crop; but she never really came ashore, and the full force of her playful energy was expended on the ocean. Bella was rather a weak sister, as cyclones go. Apart from causing a landslip on the Tooloola road, tearing off a great many branches, snatching an old tank from its decent retirement in the lantana, and dumping it on Biddy's vegetable garden, washing out a row of pines here and there, and wrapping a canvas blind from the Arnold's verandah round the top of an adjacent telegraph pole, she did not incommode us very much.

But hard upon her heels came Celestine—and she was a humdinger.

She fell upon us tooth and claw, screaming, raving and carrying on like Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone rolled into one; indeed, those artists who have depicted the Furies as winged virgins with serpents threshing about in their hair as they fly upon their vengeful errands through a sky full of torn cloud and howling wind, might well have drawn their inspiration from the Lane at that time. In a frenzy of destructiveness, the Little Heavenly One uprooted trees, flattened fences, blacked out electricity, silenced telephones, unroofed two houses and five sheds, whisked a chair from the Bells' verandah, and flung it on the Dawsons' roof, snatched up Amy's clothes-prop and hurled it like a javelin into the ground fifty yards away, and tossed a packing case through Herbie's window. She sent torrents tearing down the pineapple drains, turned the paddocks into lakes, and the roads into angry rivers. We could hear Black Creek on the one hand, and Late Tucker Creek on the other, roaring down their gullies to the Annabella River which, rising to unprecedented heights, submerged the railway bridge, and flooded the farms of our lowland neighbours. The Achesons' cow vanished. She was discovered a few days later at Tooloola, but we will not go so far as to say that she was blown there.

During all this commotion we Lane dwellers lay low in our houses, and those whose roofs held were snug enough, except for some leaks in the ceilings. It was very dark, even in the daytime, and very cold. Habit betrayed us into pressing switches for light and warmth no longer available, but when we had found lamps or candles, and set our chairs round the roaring kitchen range, our spirits rallied, and only those irrational folk who expect their fellow-men to be rational at all times, will be surprised to learn that a certain holiday atmosphere began to pervade our be-leagured homes. True, our crops were being ruined. True, it would take us weeks to clean up the mess. True, our careful budgeting would now be nonsense. But there was not a thing we could do about all this at the moment, so we might as well sample the sweet uses of adversity, brew cups of tea, browse through magazines, play a hand or two of cards, make toffee, and discover, in unaccustomed idleness, a curious peace amid the uproar.

For we were now able to enjoy the advantages of escapism without incurring its odium. Nothing could get at us except Celestine herself—and so far we were withstanding her siege. No doubt the Great Powers were still snarling insults and accusations at each other in their efforts to reach a peaceful settlement; but we had no means of hearing about it. No doubt depressing reports of prices at the Fruit and Vegetable Markets were being broadcast on the tortured air; but they were not reaching us. No doubt a lot of people had sent us bills; but it was unlikely that the Postmaster General had been able to get them any nearer to us than Rothwell. On the other hand, we were for the present powerless to replenish our larders, but we could open tins : Bruce Kennedy even declared, not without complacency, that if Celestine had to bring all normal activity to a standstill, she could not have chosen a better time to begin than his meat-day.

And when we compared notes later, it was found that although this interlude would have afforded us a perfect opportunity for tackling Form B, not a soul had used it for that purpose.

It seemed very quiet when Celestine had gone. The prophet Isaiah relates that both Ar and Kir of Moab were in the night laid waste and brought to silence, and very much the same thing appeared to have happened to the Lane when we woke early one morning to a strange hush, an almost awesome stillness. In a sky of washed-out blue the sun shone palely upon a world from which the busy stir of multitudinous small sounds and movements had quite departed. On the battered trees the leaves hung motionless; on the sodden ground the grass lay water-logged; no whip-birds called from the scrub, the magpies were mute, there was no aubade from the kookaburras; the dumb inertia of exhaustion lay upon the earth. Goodness knows how long this uneasy spell might have lasted if fowls were not the prosaic creatures that they are; but an egg is an egg even after a cyclone—and perhaps at such a time more than ever worthy of celebration—so when the cackling began, we pulled ourselves together, and prepared to deal with life once more.

There was plenty to do, and perhaps—having heard much of our powers of resilience, and our hard-working habits—you may expect to learn that we addressed ourselves to it without delay. The men did, in fact, put on their gumboots and squelch about their farms looking at the damage, and the women did begin doing their chores in a desultory way; but our routine had been brutally interrupted, and we felt a reluctance to establish it again.

Marge, whose bathroom is under the house, stood in its doorway for quite a long time, contemplating the concrete floor upon which there lay not only an inch of mud, a mass of slimy leaves and the shattered door, but also six worms, a cake of soap, five oranges, two towels, several scorpions, eight aspirin tablets, a broken looking-glass and a dead frog covered with talcum powder. It was while she was trying to overcome a strong disinclination to do anything about all this, and vaguely wondering whether to fetch a rake or a shovel, that Tony appeared at her elbow, bursting with news.

“Hey, Mrs. Kennedy, you know that big tree outside Herbie's place? The old, nearly dead one? Well, it's blown down! “

“So what?” replied Marge, turning lack-lustre eyes upon him. “The wonder is that there are any trees left standing.”

“But listen . . .” urged Tony excitedly, “. . . it's fallen right across the road I Me and Dave Hawkins found it first. Well. . . of course Herbie knew, and I s'pose the Achesons must have, too . . . but we're going round telling everyone else, because you see it's no good anyone trying to drive in to the store, even with chains. Not the slightest bit of good. It's right, bang,
plonk
across the road I We're marooned!” His eyes, bright with pleasure, looked past her appreciatively at the bathroom floor. “Cripes!” he said genially. “You've got a mess there all right, haven't you?”

“Yes,” said Marge.

“I'll go now,” continued Tony politely, “because you want to get on with cleaning it up, don't you?”

“No,” said Marge.

“Well, you better, anyway,” admonished Tony and, like Hermes, lightly departed with his tidings, on winged feet.

There must have been many other trees blocking roads in various parts of the area just devastated by Celestine. Trees are always doing this, even without the aid of cyclones, and it is rarely a matter for concern, or even comment. You can either go by some alternative route, or, more simply still, just drive off the road and find a way round one end or the other; and once such a detour has been pioneered, everyone else has only to follow it until the obstacle has been removed by those whose business it is to do so.

But in a dead-end road like the Lane, offering no alternative route to the outside world, such an event is of the first importance, and if Marge had not been feeling rather punch-drunk, she would have received Tony's news less lethargically. But she soon woke up, and discerned, hidden among its obvious and tiresome implications, others of a quite cheering kind. And, as the word went round, so did everyone else. This fallen tree was a serious matter. It would be sheer irresponsibility not to go and take a gander at it. With a view, of course, to its removal.

One of the rarest and happiest experiences of life is to find duty marching with inclination, and this happiness was now vouchsafed to us. We had been cooped up inside for days, with no opportunity for neighbourly gossip, or even those waves and shouted greetings which keep us pleasantly aware of each other's proximity. Things had happened to our crops, our trees, our fences, our roofs, our cows, our fowls, and we were dying to talk about it all. So we were delighted to recognise a heaven-sent, made-to-order, incontestably legitimate excuse for abandoning the dreary task of rehabilitation, and getting together. We embraced it eagerly. Of course nothing was pre-arranged. No rendezvous was made. But within an hour all the farms were totally deserted, and everyone was assembled at the Tree.