Jack's Island

by Norman Jorgensen

  ‘We’ll chuck it over the cliffs at West End.’ Banjo was full of good ideas. West End was nice and remote but it was also a long, long way to ride on a rough dirt track with an unexploded bomb in your schoolbag.

  We had a strong easterly wind to help us along and we reached the end of the island quite quickly, even though it felt like forever and our legs ached from riding up all the hills. I think I held my breath the whole way.

  ‘Can I have a look?’ I asked when we finally reached the edge of the tall, circular cliffs surrounding Fish Hook Bay. I’d never seen a grenade up close before.

  ‘Don’t drop it,’ said Banjo, handing it over like a precious diamond.

  ‘Course not,’ I said. But it was surprisingly heavy and I nearly did.

  ‘See anyone about?’ he asked as I handed it back.

  I looked around. ‘Out here? Not a soul. Hey, what’re you doing?’ I said in panic.

  Banjo had pulled the pin from the grenade with his teeth like he’d seen the heroes do a thousand times at the pictures. Then he spat it out. ‘We don’t want any other kids finding a live grenade at the bottom of the cliffs and setting it off. They might not be as sensible as us.’ He flung the deadly weapon over the cliff and into the bay below. It didn’t go very far.

  I fell to the ground, covering my head with my arms. ‘Get down, you idiot!’ I yelled.

  When the explosion went off I nearly died of fright. Loud? I’d never heard anything so deafening in my entire life. It sounded like it had gone off inches away. I slowly opened my eyes, expecting to see Banjo splattered into strawberry jam, bits of him scattered in the breeze. But he was standing at the cliff edge, in one piece but looking stunned. A cloud of dust and smoke and the smell of cordite rose up from the bottom of the cliff.

  My ears rang when I stood up. I saw way off in the distance a khaki army truck winding its way up the two-rut road towards us.

  ‘Banjo,’ I shouted. ‘We’ve got to get out of here. Now! They’ll see us. We’re in for it.’

  Banjo didn’t seem frightened, but then nothing much ever seemed to scare him.

  ‘Quick,’ I yelled. ‘Over the edge. Down the wallaby track. There are some overhanging rocks down by the water. They won’t see us there.’

  The truck rumbled closer and closer.

  We grabbed our bikes and stumbled down the steep track towards the little beach. My bike felt like it weighed a ton as I struggled to haul it along. The spokes kept catching on shrubs but I tugged them free, not caring. Several times my bare feet skidded on loose rocks and I overbalanced, nearly plunging to my death. I might as well have been dead if anyone found out we’d let off a real grenade. What had we done?

  It felt like hours. We sat still, hardly daring to breathe, hidden by the overhang. Over the noise of the waves we could hear the soldiers talking on the cliff top above us. An officer was yelling orders but none of them came down the steep, almost vertical track.

  Eventually the truck started up and roared back down the road. As I stood up I saw something hidden behind a boulder near the next overhanging rock. It looked like someone had emptied their guts and covered it with sand. And just beside it, leaning against a rock, stood a rifle. I moved over to take a closer look. It looked like a real rifle. On the sand next to the rifle butt lay a helmet. I gasped in surprise. The helmet was Japanese. I instantly recognised the shape of the helmet from all the newsreels I’d seen at the pictures, and the Japanese writing on the inside headband was clear. The sand hadn’t blown over them so they couldn’t have been there very long.

  ‘Banjo,’ I whispered, ‘look over here, by the overhang.’

  The Jap gun and helmet were obvious enough but where was the Jap who owned them? I looked over my shoulder, half expecting to see the whole Japanese fleet on the horizon. Had the invasion started? Flaming hell! The towering cliffs surrounding all sides of the narrow opening of Fish Hook Bay would be a perfect place to hide a boat, especially a Japanese one that didn’t want to be seen.

  ‘Come on, we’ve got to get out of here,’ I whispered.

  Banjo nodded but walked towards the helmet.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ I cried. ‘We’ve got to get out of here. What if they come back?’

  ‘We have to souvenir them,’ he said. ‘It’s our duty. They’re spoils of war.’

  At any second we were going to be shot dead by a patrol of Nips. That was for certain. Or worse, captured and Japanese water-tortured.

  ‘But we can’t tell anyone we found it,’ I said. ‘They’ll know it was us that caused the explosion. Come on, let’s get out of here.’

  Banjo calmly picked up the helmet and the gun and, as if he was out on a Sunday stroll, put the helmet on his head and slung the webbing belt of the rifle over his shoulder. He coolly collected his bike and started along the sand towards the wallaby track. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he asked.

  We hauled our bikes back up the high cliffs, and pedalled furiously towards the settlement.

  ‘But where’s the Jap who belongs to it?’ I panted. ‘Do you reckon we got him with the grenade?’

  ‘Probably not. I didn’t see any blood or anything. Looks like we might’ve scared the gizzards out of him, though,’ laughed Banjo.

  How could he joke like that when the invasion was about to happen? And what if the Jap was hiding, watching us go? What if he followed us? He might cut our heads off with his samurai sword, especially seeing we pinched his rifle. I pushed the pedals on my heavy old bike even harder.

  The Grenade and the Army

  ‘Jack? Is that you?’ Mum called from the kitchen as I walked in the front door. The smell of baking from the Metters stove drifted through the house. With any luck we’d be having Cornish pasties for tea. In spite of the rationing Mum often managed to make pasties, my absolute favourite.

  ‘Constable Campbell’s been here. He wanted to talk to you. The army thinks Dafty got hold of a hand grenade. Do you and Banjo know anything about it?’

  ‘No,’ I lied.

  ‘There was an explosion at West End and an army sergeant says he saw two boys up there. Just where were you two?’

  ‘We were at the lakes. At our fort.’

  ‘You know I don’t like you playing round there. There are far too many snakes near the water.’

  ‘What’ll happen to Dafty?’ I asked, trying not to go red in the face.

  ‘He’ll be in serious trouble. No doubt about that. Very serious trouble.’ She took off her apron and wiped her hands with it, then narrowed her eyes and gave me a closer look.

  Then Banjo, the idiot, came in through the doorway wearing the helmet and with the rifle still slung over his shoulder.

  ‘What have you two been up to? What are you doing with that gun, Banjo?’ Mum said.

  Before Banjo could even answer, Mum had us both by the ears, out the door and down at Constable Campbell’s house so quickly our feet hardly touched the ground. The constable took the rifle and helmet and laid them on his kitchen table. I could forget the Cornish pasties. Bread and dripping for the rest of our poor, miserable lives. Or bread and water if we ended up in Fremantle Prison, which suddenly seemed very likely.

  Constable Campbell immediately sent for Colonel Hurley, the army commander on the island. The colonel arrived within minutes in a khaki-coloured Wolseley. The car screeched to a halt at the gate. He pulled open the screen door and rushed in. It squeaked and banged shut behind him. I noticed that his collar wasn’t done up properly. Funny the things you notice.

  He nodded at the constable and turned to us. ‘You two, eh? At the West End? Fish Hook Cove? Just over an hour ago?’ He tapped his baton against his leg, obviously agitated.

  We nodded.

  He picked up the helmet and turned it over several times. ‘Jap, sure enough,’ he said to Constable Campbell. ‘Marine, most like. Before I report this to headquarters, Don, I’ll get some patrols out. See just what’s going on.’

  He turned back to Banjo and me. ‘You two
had better come with us and show us precisely where you found these.’ And then he seemed to remember my mother. ‘With your permission of course, Mrs Jones. It is Mrs Jones?’

  Mum wasn’t going to say no. He was an officer after all. ‘If I’ve told them once, I’ve told them a thousand times not to go out to West End,’ she said. ‘There’s no knowing what might happen to them out there. You tell them, Colonel.’ She seemed nervous.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Jones,’ he continued. ‘Constable, if you could have a quiet word round the houses. We don’t want to alarm anyone but there’ll be a lot of movement this evening. We’ll be on full alert until this is cleared up. Oh, and full blackout please, Constable. No exceptions.’

  He touched his hat. ‘Mrs Jones, if you’ll kindly excuse us.’ He indicated the door. ‘Constable. Boys.’ He ushered us outside and into the car.

  Banjo and I walked out with our shoulders back and heads held straight. I stroked my lip where my pencil-thin moustache would’ve been if I’d been able to grow one, and tapped my invisible swagger stick against my thigh. Not only had we escaped getting into trouble for the grenade, but we were also going to get a ride in an army staff car.

  Making a Hill Trolley

  A few weeks later we were at Crackpot Pete’s old place up from Crayfish Rock at Stark Bay, searching through the rubbish scattered about. Years before, Crackpot Pete had built a shack from flattened forty-four gallon drums and driftwood and anything else he could scavenge. It leaked like a sieve, and stood brown and deserted as it rusted away in a small hollow in the sandhills.

  We prised open the door but didn’t dare go inside. The shed was dark and creepy. There was an old iron bed, and a small table and an upturned chair in the opposite corner. Rags and other rubbish lay strewn across the dirt floor.

  Crackpot Pete had lived here by himself for years until one fine, still day late last summer when he’d sailed out to check his craypots and never returned. No-one knew what had happened to him. His boat was never found, not even any wreckage. Not a scrap. No body, nothing. He’d just disappeared into thin air. The men had searched for him for days but he’d completely disappeared. Since we’d found the gun and the helmet, people had been saying it was the Japs on a scouting party who’d got Crackpot Pete.

  ‘Reckon this place is haunted?’ asked Banjo. He wasn’t keen on meeting any ghosts.

  I wasn’t that keen on meeting them either. ‘It’s ten in the morning,’ I said. ‘Ghosts don’t come out in the mornings.’ I was trying to convince myself. It was bad enough to have to keep looking over our shoulders for Japs without ghosts to worry about as well.

  ‘Hey, look at these.’ Banjo had lifted a sheet of rusty tin and uncovered about a dozen ship’s pulleys. Large wooden blocks with four-inch brass wheels fixed inside them lay scattered about. Termites had made a good feast of the wooden parts. ‘We’ll break ’em open and take out the wheels,’ he said excitedly. ‘We can make hill trolleys.’

  This was the best idea Banjo had had in ages. All thoughts of ghosts and spooky unknown dangers suddenly disappeared as we imagined ourselves racing down hills on the brass wheels.

  ‘Can we go to your house?’ I asked Banjo. ‘My dad gets really mad when I use his tools. He reckons he can never find any of them afterwards. Besides, your dad has hundreds of tools.’

  ‘My dad gets mad whether I use his tools or not, so I suppose so,’ Banjo said with a resigned shrug.

  ‘And we’ll need some fruit boxes,’ I said. ‘For seats. There’s usually some outside the shop.’

  ‘All right, then. You go to the front of the shop and carry on like an idiot as a decoy while I sneak out the back. That should be pretty easy for you—carrying on like an idiot.’

  But Mrs O’Keeffe had run out of things to sell and had closed the shop early and gone home for the day. We took two fruit boxes without being noticed. Then we hung round down by the ferry, watching Little Eric, Red Eric’s son, wash out the deck of the ferry.

  ‘Bugger off,’ he called when he got tired of us staring at him.

  ‘We need some rope, Eric. For steering reins for our hill trolleys,’ I said. ‘Give us some rope and we’ll let you have a ride.’

  ‘I’ll give you a length of rope,’ he called back, flicking us with dirty water from his mop. ‘Bugger off, I said.’

  ‘Aw, come on, Eric. We only need a few feet,’ said Banjo.

  Little Eric pulled out his clasp knife from the leather pouch on his belt and I thought for a moment he was going to kill us, but instead he cut off a length of white rope from a coil near his feet. ‘Here. Go hang yourselves. Now bugger off.’ By the afternoon we’d built the two best hill trolleys the world had ever seen. They each had a fruit box with the front cut out for a seat, a wooden T-shape for steering, and a brass wheel in each corner.

  ‘I reckon we should paint them,’ said Banjo.

  ‘Why? Don’t you want to be known as Chin’s Fruit and Vegetable Market Garden, South Perth?’ I said.

  Banjo looked at the sign stencilled on the side of his new seat and just grunted.

  Racing the Trolleys

  I couldn’t believe the noise of the brass wheels on the bitumen road as we headed out of the settlement and past the Carters’ house, pulling the trolleys behind us. But as loud as the wheels were, we still heard Mr Carter’s 1928 Chevy truck start up. It was one of those models with no doors and a flat tray on the back. The muffler had fallen off years before.

  Mr Carter was the nightcart man. Carter the Nightcarter, we called him. It was his job to drive down the dunny lanes to collect all the stinking dunny pans and replace them with empty ones. What a job. Often they overflowed and a couple of times Mr Carter had even had the bottoms fall out of rusty ones while he carried them. Re-volt-ing!

  When his truck was new, Mr Carter had built a wooden frame on the back to hold the pans. The frame had once been painted white but it was impossible to believe that, looking at it now. Disgusting brown splashes and stains covered every surface. Huge blowflies swarmed around it all the time, even in winter, and the smell was bad enough to stun a mallee bull. Mr Carter smelt even worse than the truck—more like a long-dead, maggot-blown mallee bull.

  We pulled the hill trolleys up towards the lighthouse at Bathurst Point on the road to the rubbish dump, the only bitumen road on the whole island, and the steepest. As we reached the highest point, something rustled in the shrubs off to the side.

  ‘Jack! Banjo!’ Dafty’s head popped up like a circus clown from behind the steep sandbank at the edge of the road. He had a huge silly grin on his face. But then he usually did.

  ‘What are you doing out here, Dafty?’ I asked.

  ‘Nuthun,’ he replied, looking guilty.

  ‘Wanna’ ride?’ asked Banjo. ‘There’s enough room in the seat for both of us.’

  ‘Can we race? Can we race, Banjo?’ Dafty asked, instantly excited.

  We turned the trolleys to face downhill and Dafty scrambled in. He sat with his back against the fruit box, and Banjo climbed in front of him, gripping the reins.

  We moved off very slowly at first, almost together. I pulled on the reins to get clear of Banjo’s cart and then suddenly leaned back in fright as the hill dipped and the trolley bolted forward like it had been fired from a cannon. The roaring of the wheels sounded just like the Beaufort bombers that often flew low over the settlement on training flights.

  I was almost out of control.

  ‘Weeeee!’ screamed Dafty. Banjo’s trolley raced ahead of me, even though there were two of them in the seat.

  ‘Jack!’ Banjo yelled back at me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The bend!’ he said, pointing.

  Two hundred yards directly ahead of us the road turned sharply to the right, away from the cliff edge. Unless we made the bend we’d fly over the cliff and down onto the rocks below.

  The road dipped steeper and steeper. I could feel the steering going, the wheels skidding sideways. Every bump shuddered up into my
seat and chattered my teeth. Now I definitely had lost control. I raced through my options. Tip up the trolley and end up sliding down the bitumen road and have all my skin torn off? Hit the sand on the edge of the cliff and go flying through the air and break my neck? Turn left, go straight over the edge and onto the rocks below and die a horrible, mangled death?

  Suddenly I had no choice. Mr Carter’s truck appeared at the bend, lumbering straight up the road towards us. In seconds we’d all be under the wheels and squashed flat.

  Just before I closed my eyes and pulled the reins hard to the right, I saw Jack and Dafty swerve to the left. They bumped across the flat rocks, shot out into space and plummeted over the edge. My trolley slammed into the sand bank and I felt myself being pitched forward as if in slow motion. I remember thinking how mad Mum would be with me—if I survived.

  Dafty yelled in sheer excitement as he and Banjo plunged to their deaths, just like he was on a roller-coaster at the Royal Show.

  ‘ Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!’ all the way down. And then silence. The only sound was the splashing of the waves. I couldn’t even hear the roar of the Chevy motor anymore.

  I climbed to my feet. My knees were bleeding and stinging, but I ran across the road towards the edge. I felt the blood running down my shins but I didn’t stop to look. I felt sick. I thought I was going to throw up. I expected to see Banjo and Dafty smashed to bloody pieces on the rocks below.

  ‘Hey, Jack!’ From far away, I could hear the sound of Banjo’s voice. It couldn’t be. It was a sheer drop over the edge. He had to be dead. They both did.

  ‘Hey, Jack!’ he called again.

  I peered cautiously over the edge of the rock outcrop. Banjo and Dafty stood up to their waists in water, completely drenched, laughing and giggling. The hill trolley, half submerged, floated upside-down nearby. They waved up at me.

  ‘Lucky the tide’s in,’ called Banjo.