Tales From The Acacia Trees
Page 4
Chapter 4. Mr Cav’s Cool Drinks Factory, And The World’s Biggest Kite
Sometimes when out bike riding after school or of a weekend we’d pedal along the lane behind the local cool drinks factory. Alice Springs and other remote Aussie towns were without Coca-cola et al at that time, to the point where I'd almost achieved teen-hood before getting to taste it.
Cool drinks are mostly water, you see, so the cost of transporting the stuff fifteen hundred kilometres from Adelaide by rail was simply out of the question. And there was no road freight to speak of because there was no road to speak of – just a one thousand-plus kilometre track northward from a two-tin-shed-town called Kingoonya on the Transcontinental Railway Line. Instead, towns the likes of Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, Katherine and Darwin had their own factories, where drinks were made using local water and imported cordial concentrates.
In Alice Springs the factory was owned by a man named Cavenagh. Mr Cav, we called him. He was a grumpy old bloke but he was always happy to take the empty cool drink bottles we’d collected – provided they’d been rinsed properly and were not chipped. Standard 750 ml brown glass they were, like a beer bottle but with a shorter neck. These were the only cool drink bottles in circulation at the time, except in the cities.
As Mr Cav checked our bottles one by one we’d pack them into pine crates and stack the crates by the washing tubs. Most of his crates were in the shed, but there were always a few outside, around the back.
This interesting point came to light one day when he was busy checking our bottles at the factory’s side door. Being a Saturday morning Mr Cav was there by himself and our consignment was larger than usual, comprising as it did about a month’s worth of collecting and stockpiling.
As a result his inspecting and counting was taking him quite a while and I found myself getting bored. And so, on the spur of the moment, while he was thus engaged, I slipped around the back of the shed without his noticing. I was just curious, really, but then took it upon myself to make a discreet reconnaissance of the establishment’s whole hidden-from-sight rear section.
…which is when I saw the extra crates lying around – some stacked, others scattered higgledy-piggledy. The crates themselves were of no immediate consequence, but for some reason a couple of them contained bottles. Further investigation revealed that a number of these, interestingly enough, were full.
…most likely overlooked and forgotten, we decided a little while later in the back lane. And by one of those amazing coincidences it was around about then that we happened to notice something equally as interesting.
It was this: one of the corrugated iron sheets on Mr Cav’s back fence had a couple of nails missing. And when a couple more nails practically fell at our feet after we’d hardly even touched them a potential gap suddenly came into being, between a top corner of the sheet in question and the one immediately adjacent to it, which the first sheet overlapped. A brief experiment then revealed that this latent aperture could actually be opened wide enough for a skinny kid to squeeze through – were a skinny kid to happen by who was skinny enough to consider doing so for one reason or another, and then take that course of action.
And so, on the weekends that followed, whenever we happened to be riding our bikes around from a Point “A” somewhere, to a Point “B” somewhere else (say), and found ourselves coming to a halt in the lane behind Mr Cav’s place for some reason – to check our tyres or put a chain back on its sprocket or even to just catch our breaths and decide on our next destination – we’d tend as well to check whether he’d found time to repair the fence.
Naturally we were discreet enough to umm… “recycle” just one or two of these forgotten bottles at a time, so minimizing the risk of his noticing any slight irregularity we may have created in the bottles’ or the crates’ dispositions, thus sparing him any unnecessary concern such irregularities might cause him.
Curiously though, the bottle population there never seemed to diminish, something we didn’t begin appreciate until our third or fourth visit. Yet even then it never occurred to us to consider what might have lain behind this curious anomaly.
The drinks were simply there, unloved and forgotten, and we accepted it at that. Nor did we wonder why the fence was never mended.
Mr Cav was ancient, see – an old man of at least fifty according to schoolyard gossip. A person that old wouldn’t worry himself with fixing fences. He’d be more concerned about the senility police turning up.
It didn't last though; it was all too easy and in the end we simply couldn't be bothered.
The temperatures were cooling, too, so reducing our need for extra fluids and high-octane sugar fixes. With the breezes on the increase and Gutsy Cravelli's father owing a little timber works we set out instead to construct the World’s Biggest Kite.
We accomplished this, too, after a number of tests and a few disasters. Our success occurred a couple of weekends later, on taking the kite to a clear area near where the Winneke Avenue/Undoolya Road Tee junction roundabout is now situated – in those days a kilometre or so from any houses.
A lightish but gusty south easter was blowing at the time, and for the job we’d obtained a full reel of middling-heavy string. Higher up the wind was smoother and because of this the kite was flying steadily, as a result of which we continued paying out the line. Before long we were soon nearing the end of the reel and, oddly, the kite was almost overhead.
About then the wind began to gain strength so we decided to reel it in. But, with a hundred metres or so to go, an extra strong gust hit. It broke the line, and all we could do was stand there and watch as it disappeared over the distant roofs and treetops – seemingly without losing altitude.
A hasty meeting was called; a resolution to say nothing whatever about the affair was carried, with a rider added that we should await whatever questions might arise before meeting again. Following this we all pedalled home as rapidly as we could via widely differing routes.
Yet neither word of our kite nor evidence of its having existed was ever forthcoming. The thing had simply vanished somehow, most likely carried afar by the wind. Whatever the case, it was neither seen nor heard of again.
Frustratingly, none of our townside schoolmates would believe us when we tried to communicate our achievement. We were just big-noting ourselves and backing each other up, it was claimed.
So okay; and where exactly was this giant kite of ours now?
—Yeah. …Riiiight.