The clothes line

Seems Granddad Graceville & Dad didn’t believe in paying for something you could make yourself so they made Mum a clothes line, well two actually, the first almost drove Mum to distraction. It was the old sort, you know a post at either end with rope between and a really big stick (found in the surrounding bush) to hold the wet clothes up off the ground. You might refer back to booby-trapped grass that Mum spent a fair amount of time picking up the dropped washing to find "the big stick" in the line had fallen over and the washing she had managed to hang out was in the dirt. This caused her to be quite upset & yell at Dad for his continued ineptness in clothes line building.

In fact we kids when tiring of tying the grass in knots would turn our hands at our version of pole vaulting, what you did was take a good run up to "the big stick" & sort of grab hold of it & swing off it & see how far you could get , beats me how Mum or Dad never noticed.

Well anycause Dad & Granddad built Mum a new clothes line along the lines of the hills hoist but made out of rusty pipe & it didn’t have a wind up thingy you just had to stand on the high side of the ground & hope you didn’t misjudge the swing & cop it in the side of the head. This sometimes happened when one of us would "help" Mum by swinging it round for her as she bent to pick up the next piece of clothing to hang up. She got a few clouts in the head because of that , she used to go off a bit at that.

Well anyway like all Australian kids we were warned against swinging on the clothes line or else, you know, hidings, no TV, being grounded (the grounding was the best cause we lived in the bush miles from anyone, with no car, so we rarely went anywhere anyway). But like all Australian kids we took our chances & Bill and I swung on dads dodgy clothes line & guess what? We broke it good & proper. It actually flew off & landed in the paddock next door, lucky we didn’t kill ourselves (as Mum was also later heard to yell at Dad). Fortunately for us a storm came over shortly after , a pretty nasty one as Brisbane can be famous for, but any way we hid downstairs more scared of Mum than then being hit by lightning.

She came found us & got us upstairs. We thought we were in for it but she hadn’t noticed & we didn’t say anything either (we were smart like that) but the next day when she went to hang out the washing she noticed , gulp! But amazingly she thought the storm had caused it to fly off & the only one to get yelled at was Dad! I think she got a real Hills hoist after that. We did tell her eventually when were in our 20's.