One :
That morning in 1962 the bushfire swept up the hill and fed on the other side in its sweep to consume my grandmothers house.
I awoke to hear not the birds or the rustling of nature but a silence intruding like a vaccuum sucking everything and anything in its way.
But there was a crackling and a smell of no air and a wisp of doubt in my mind.
There was no wake up call at the door from grandma and no rattling plates and pans promising a bush breakfast in a brick house at the top of seven acres of cleared bush dropping to creek that gouged its way down the hill and formed a damn in summer.
I appeared on her front porch little dressed and distressed that the homely charm was threatened.
And there she was, frumpy in a cuddly domestic way, in her morning dress swirling about her running uphill from where I paused and considered the delightfull essence of panic.
She is running uphill carrying two buckets of water slossing at their brim to throw the remainder at the fringe of licking flames crackling through the undergrowth and oblivious to the sooty grey cloud insidiously enveloping the mountain.
Never before had I known fire, I had not seen even a lit match other than the friction between my parents.
But I was struck and was motionless watching my grandma resist the flames that would consume her life and leave me amazed at my small six years of age that her swirling skirt and dogged determination would beat the heat and the crackling and the smell and the lack of air as fire lapped at the boundary of her significance.
I was small and adults were larger and could do things that I could not but grandma was hanging a dress from her hips as though she were encouraging danger as she rushed from burning patch to smouldering soil pouring water whilst slapping licks of fire from her waving frock.
The more she ran the faster her skirt furled and the more her mind unravelled like the curling twigs and bugs and leaves that peppered her life.
I contributed only two pails of water ansd then realised that were some things that must be bigger and stronger than me and just not worth fighting.
The harder she tried the more insignicant she became, her loss of energy from fighting the fire depleted her ability to look after herself.
But the fire maintained its ferocity and veracity and continued to roar across the mountain in its quest for air whilst my grandmother ignored the flames licking at her skirt.
The flames subsided and the smell deceased but the smouldering bush marked the hill for ever.
As a child forever was tomorrow, today was endless and yesterday never happened so I indulged in ignorance. My grandmother was obviously stupid in trying to rescue something that she could not identify and never realised that her actions were grand but her motive lacked discretion.
The fire stopped at her boundary as though it had little point maintaining its rage and then retreated to seek a weaker foe.
Two :
Grandma was delighted and accepted the battle as a minor threat. She resumed authority over nature and ventured into the chicken pen shuffling through the smell whilst scattering feed to the chicks.
But Larry would not often agree and was determined to run faster than the chicks who swarmed around his paws as though all four were trees offering nesting comfort.
He poised afront the netted door to the chook pen and waited for the wave of furry balls on sticks then shuffled them into contingents beckoning for his nurture.
Chicks could only scamper but the resolute pecking at his ankles by their mothers encouraged him to desist herding and lay down and enjoy the rumpling patter across his coat.
Larry was an Alsatian taller than a bush and as raggedly as a badly washed rug with an attitude to match.
The ground was not for him and he flew over the seven acres surveying all his unfenced territory always returning to nest comfortably on the porch watching me play.
He never needed to return home for food but only for love and the chicks and grandma and me.
He may have not been a dog but a whirlpool of tail and dust barely on the ground.
But he was always around pestering my feet and travelling off to follow his nose.
Until a snake slid over my desert booted feet whilst awaiting the bus to school stationary at the bottom of the drive. I was waiting to travel again, the repetitive journey to school was a chore and I waited for any opportunity to be small in attitude and magnamimous in heart.
The morning the snake poised on my boots he did not attack me, he could not leap, he wore no boots.
Movement for him was an endless wiggle through dirt that was no obstacle and my boots seemed to be a source of comfort for their warmth even in the heat of summer.
I needed to be early for the bus, it gave me time to decide if I should return uphill to the house and do nothing, there was no plan, things needed to happen, I was bored.
Often I walked to school rather than wait for serpents to slither around, walking was faster.
Forty minutes it seemed to take which seemed nearly half a day but my lunch sandwiches flapped at my hip and were cooled with air rather than the heater of the bus.
The journey was too quick, I had just awoken and needed to be at school hoping for a morsel of learning that was significant to a skinny kid in shorts, and I wondered what was required of me to be able to wear long pants.
I had legs and could walk in shorts or trousers and saw bigger taller people doing the same.
So I ignored school. I was there but learnt nothing.
School halls were a place of disorganised rushing and the cacophony of recently ensconsed tapping heels of proud shoes so diligently purchased on a budget of money by dutifull adults who seemed to own me.
I set a challenge for myself of how to survive until the lunch break and not allow my honey sandwiches to crystalize. The only friend was reluctant to exchange food and I contributed my dough to the bin.
When school finished for the day I stayed out of the way watching the excited rush through the halls and the gathering of parents collecting their imprisioned tiny adults from a school cell and home to another style of supervised conduct.
Pacing the school grounds wasted time and I was tempted to climb the fence or simply walk through the gates to freedom but there was none outside and I would eventually need food and a bed so I waited.
I waited alone amongst echoes and odours and the progress of the cleaners sanctifying the halls.
Even after their job was complete I still wandered the sterile vacant rooms, waiting and waiting.
No one rushed to extricate me, the gates and the fences were a boundary to be crossed but the world beyond school and grandma's house was too big.
Grown ups were big, rules were big, fences were big, other kids seemed big and secure in the knowing that their parents were big and would rescue them from this learning playground.
No one was there to rescue me so I walked the boundaries and paced the hall amused with the hollowness of the chamber aisles and the peace of empty classrooms still sticky with the carefully chosen words and sympathetic encouragement that learning would deliver a reward.
There was little reward, even my honey sandwiches could no longer be traded, most kids had worn out their relief that I would soon offer anything different.
I hoped but never begged that I would pop my lunchbox to reveal an exquisite feast that I could share in parts for other food that would nourish me after class closed and sustain my exploration of empty rooms, silent play grounds and odour ridden halls.
Waste bins became entertaining, desolate playgrounds were a source of peace and the trails of youngsters escaping to their homes and dodging enquiries of how much they had eaten from their meagre lunch box.
So much discarded as unuseful for any purpose other than a signal of rebellion against anything.
But I was too small to rebel, I was no longer scared of snakes, they zigzagged across my path but would not sliver uphill as I walked downhill, so I shuffeled my boots through the dusty paths on my way home.
Walking home after school was rewarding, there was nothing there waiting to comfort me.
Stepping cautiously I wanted to avoid snakes that would curl and rest on my shoes obliviously impeding progress and causing me to pause enough to make the sacred walk home a pleasure rather than a duty.
So I wandered the rambling narrow paths up and down and around the mountain at the foot of which nestled my comfortable existance.
The paths wound forever with no destination or beginning - they just were.
How many granmas had wiggled their way up and down and around and these paths, they were defined by the time it had taken to tread there. The paths led nowhere and began nowhere but were hallways through the bush leading past distant verandahs roofs and walls of beaten weathertorn refuges glimpsed within the camoflauge.
It must have taken many feet to gouge a path here and there, a path that I travelled not to things but past them.
The bush reeked of eucalyptus and dirt that encouraged me to inhale deeply the budding growth.
I was reluctant to use my nose at school. The halls reeked of children and shoes and sweaty clothes.
But there was a persistent unerasable smell of warm wet socks and body odour and merely a trace of the odourisers and wax used by the cleaners to eradicate the smell of children.
This was a daily ritual for me, to inhale the freshness of a new day and then feign disgust at the odour.
There were too many people at school and too few to maintain authority.
When I could no longer trade my sandwiches I nested them convincing myself that I must never divulge my disgust to any adult.
Adults were big tall puppets weilded by invisable strings, popping here and there, constantly interfering but eternally prepared to regulate their existance.
I could walk talk decide wonder think dream play lace my shoes pull on my shorts over my skinny legs eat sleep and genourously waste time whilst I waited patiently to grow up.
The blackboards were white with chalk, the bins were brimming with neglected sandwhiches and the halls littered with the innocent power of childhood.
There was no one waiting at home to greet me with hugs and food and I relished the moments of a dog larger than me leaping to greet me with no offering as thanks other than a happy shaggy hound bouncing me to the ground.
Larry owned by dog rules seven acres of land with a brick house of modest dimensions perched atop the slope of which the bushfire would not consume and never again threatened my meagre existance.
He pounced across the land as though on wings but could never remain airborne, his nose was bigger than his brain and it siphoned past presence as a history lesson for small nosed people.
And then he stopped loving and breathing and lay under a bush in the shade and journeyed to dog heaven.
Three :
Grandpa followed him to the grave, not with so little indignity but in a casket within a cemetery on the upper side of a hill. He had lay dead crumpled and cold, collapsed at the foot of the bathroom door wedged against the toilet bowl unable to pee and prone in death, blocking him from the persistent care from grandma. He had been missing for a few hours.
It was a sad way to die and grandma was so angry because she had to break the door down and lift him by his armpits into a more dignified position before the ambulance arrived and discretly shuffled his crumpled fame and then delivered him to a holding bay in the hospital and then to the dirt.
Grandpa had served time as an apprentice and was an accredited Tinsmith in his younger days.
In his older days he drove a taxi inbetween bouts of beer swilling and listening and betting on horse races. His radio was precious to him and he finally made enough money to buy a car - but only one with a radio. He regularly parked on the looping driveway and often settled for an evening tuned in.
Grandpa was known as Pop which seemed fitting. He never uttered profanities and treated Larry and me as accessories to be nutured and guided, not instructed.
Pop was also an accessory to the town. Always ready with his taxi, always primed for conversation.
He was a habitual drinker and loved a natter and a smoke in the pub after a day driving and grandma and I often waited outside to collect him at the call for last beers and his notification from the barmaid to get out and go home.
Driving was good for him, he was an observer and travelled the suburbs helping fallen people to his cab and delivering them to their home comfort and the nuisance of a nagging wife.
When he returned home at the front of a dust plume whipped by his tyres he parked and let Larry roll around the car inside and out until he had licked the windows opaque.
Once home to his dog and grandma's hugs and the comfort of a crackling open fire he succumbed to the beauty of his radio.
It was a transistor radio fitted to his car as an optional accessory, but removable and quite suitable for use while in his lounge chair and tuned to the horse races. He followed by ear and the newspaper form.
We waited across the road and at six o'clock the doors of the drinking den were blocked open and patrons ushered out as though the building was spewing effervesence and Pop was delivered.
Within those hallowed walls stained with smoke and memories, rituals and laughter ran amock.
And Pop was a rolling drunk on wheels of beer and cigarettes and propped against the bar in his usual spot, happy that gran would be there to rescue him.
And she was and we did.
After last drinks were called the footpath outside the main doors became a whirling mill of men.
They spilled forth like a swarm of ants dismissed from the premise of the ruling queen.
Somewhere in the bustle he was and he suddenly presented himself as though he he was reborn.
That was why we called him Pop, he would suddenly appear.
Four :
Old Charlie was a hermit living in a shack he had built from anything available on his treed property and was proud to finally build an outhouse called a bog. His land even though unfenced maintained a boundary around his sanctuary and across the dirt track called a road with no name that dignified his anonymity.
The bog loitered in his yard festering a plague of flies that continualy buzzed around but would never land. There was gold in there but not compressed by nature. The gold squeezed from his bum the more he drank.
Larry stopped prancing for attention and ceased pawing at the ground mining for smells once they were no longer replenished.
Charlie died alone guarded by his table littered with bottles empty as were the glasses and his heart.
He had drunk his existance until his god deserted him, but he surely had dug the greatest poo hole.
Walking worn dirt paths uphill outpacing snakes and hoping to find a window offering some relief.
Occupied with boredom I schooled and walked and taxied and persisted observing granma hauling water chopping wood feeding chicks entertaing Larry collecting a liquid ambulatron cooking food pumping water from the 60 foot depth of her artesian bore and touching her earth between between walking to neighbours with help with water company food and love.
The local council of neighbourhoods decided my granma was worthy of reward but they offered no money or mind.
She was honoured with a plaque and a photo in the newspaper and a ribbon to be worn over her shoulder but carefully arranged to not amplify her breasts even though they had balanced her foot progress. She had smaller feet and her bosom prominently pushed aside the shoulder tall bushes impeding her progress.
Her duties to neighbours were not specified in writing but printed in the tracks she weaved through the bush. She carried water food and comfort for over two miles on weaving paths to others who struggled to survive without electricity, running water or gas.
Granma was an inspiration, she seemed driven by a motor fueled with duty.
Peering from the windows I watched her pumping chopping carrying and trudging up and down the slope in her gumboots and floral dress.
And then before I was seven years of age and curious about the monotony of life, strangers appeared.
TBC