Memories

I do remember that clothesline, vaguely, buried somewhere deep in my subconscious (not the clothesline, just the memory of it) along with all the other things I thought I had blotted from consciousness for reasons like guilt is a terrible burden to carry around so best dump it somewhere ASAP. Deny everything immediately before it's had time to lodge like a cuckoo's egg in the brain only to hatch one day into something unexpected.

I remember the clothesline to be a brown colour, maybe it was rust or primer. Probably primer in this instance because it hadn't been around long enough to rust. That's where my recollection ends. I have no knowledge of any subsequent attempts to test its ability to withstand the weight of two children swinging from it. I believe this to be a thinly disguised attempt by my sister to implicate me in something I had nothing to do with for iniquitous reasons of her own. Probably in retaliation for the time I chased her up the road weilding the first thing that came to hand which in turned out to be one of mum's stilleto heeled shoes.

Back to the clothesline. Things are coming back to me. Yes, it was definitely brown. I can see my sister swinging on it but I am nowhere in sight. She jumps up and down doing her best to test its lateral and vertical stability and yes, there it goes flying over the fence. My sister runs away. I am still nowhere in sight. That's all I remember, I swear!

I do remember a poster of a giant rooster that was in the process of being burned in the wire cage we used for an incinerator. The incinerator was next to the fence (fence being wooden posts with three strands of wire I think) the other side of which was a whole paddock of dry grass just waiting to be set alight by some unforeseen event like me taking the burning poster from the cage and throwing it over the fence. Thankfully, it failed to cooperate and smouldered away before crumbling into a pile of ashes.

The boy down the road, I can't remember his name, wasn't so fortunate. He set alight a whole suburb of bush and we had to help put it out and he got in big trouble.

On the subjects of go-karts, I remember the time Vicki and I (I think it was her idea) took our home-made cart across the neighbouring paddock to the dirt road (what was its name?) that ran in a steep descent to an intersection with Seventeen Mile Rocks Road, a rather busy main road that ran past the front of our house, which included a diabolical corner that was consistently underestimated by numerous drivers as they attempted to negotiate it at ridiculous speeds before discovering it was impossible just before slamming into the telegraph pole, or opposing cliff face, or missing both and sailing into the bush, or sliding out of control and rolling into the ditch at the bottom of the hill. All in all it probably wasn't the safest place to play, which was more than likely the thinking of our father as he yelled out for us to desist in our quest to kill ourselves. Not quite understanding him as he stood there yelling and waving his arms about we continued in our mad pursuit of ever greater thrills which were about to descend in the form of our father jumping the fence brandishing a piece of wooden fruit box of which there was an iniquitous abundance. The rest is history, as they say. Whoever said history never repeats itself was wrong, wrong, wrong.