The Great Dunny Disaster

You know those days when things are just so dull, and you’re trying to read a comic or do a puzzle, but everything is just too quiet and you can count on it that something dreadful has just got to happen? Well, this is about one of those days.

I had only two brothers then, and a little sister who was so soft-fingered and so powdery, milky smelling that she can have no place in this story. It is about my hard, warty-fingered, brown, dusty smelling brothers, covered in boy-germs and completely yucky. And it’s about me. I was a girl with short red pigtails then, and I was eleven. Warren was nine and Peter was seven.

I know you will find this hard to believe, but people in those days didn’t have fridges in their houses. They had an ice-chest and the ice-man came around two or three times a week and sold them a block of ice from his truck. They would wrap it up in newspaper and put it in the top part of the ice-chest. Our father was the ice-man. We lived at the ice-works that was in the middle of a big block of land, mostly covered in long, dry, itchy paspalum grass that was full of bees and fire-ants. Once we even saw a green snake.

Another thing you will find hard to believe – we didn’t have a toilet in our house. Our lav - short for lavatory - was a very small room down in the yard. It was just past the mowed bit where Mum hung out the washing on the long clothesline that was held up with a wooden prop, and just before the long sticky grass. This little place was only big enough for you to go inside and sit on the seat that was a wooden box with a hole in it for your bottom. Under this seat was a metal pan. In the back wall was a trap door where the dunny-man could get out the full pan and put in a clean one.

Hammered into the wall was a nail. Hanging from this on a piece of string were square pieces of newspaper just big enough for you to wipe yourself on when you were finished. Under the paper was a smaller box full of sawdust for sprinkling with a little metal spade into the pan before you left. 

All this paper and sawdust in a small private place was a great temptation for my brothers who were going through a “lets see what happens if we do this” phase.

Anyway, this day things at home seemed too silent and I went down the back stairs and out towards the long grass.

Just then the door of the dunny - another name for the lav - flew open and my brothers burst out carrying between them the box of sawdust. They rushed round to the long grass and started to scoop the burning sawdust out with the little metal spade. Trouble was the grass then caught on fire. 

I grabbed an old hessian bag we used for carrying ice, and Peter ran off to see if he could get some powdered ice which we could usually find under the electric saw that Dad used to cut up the big slabs of frozen water.

By the time he got back Warren and I had put the flames out, so we used the two handfuls of ice to cool our legs down where they had got singed by the fire. We hoped Dad wouldn’t see the patch of burned grass, but he was usually too busy to go to that part of the yard. We kids were the only ones who went through the paddock on our way to school.

Just then our nosy neighbour, Mr Cantwell, looked over the fence. Beside him, three on either side, was his tribe of sharp-nosed kids. They all were small and had skinny faces and small eyes and their clothes were all too small for them. This was strange, because Mrs Cantwell was one of the biggest women I had ever seen. She wore huge dresses with big bright flowers on them.

“I’ll tell your Dad what you kids have done,” said Mr Cantwell, and his kids all got smarty smiles on their faces.

Suddenly I got cranky. “Mind your own business,” I shouted. I was surprised at how game I was because kids in those days didn’t talk back to adults. Then I got nervous. I could feel the butterflies in my stomach.

That night at the tea table we were all very quiet and I was scared. I was frightened that my father, who was very strict, would find out what we’d done and what I’d said. Somehow he knew there was something going on and later he took me aside.

“What’s happened?” he said

I didn’t want to tell him but I knew I’d have to.

“The boys set fire to the long grass and Mr Cantwell said he’d tell on them and I told him to mind his own business.” I was shaking in my boots.

To my amazement my father pulled me to him and kissed my forehead.

“Don’t worry any more,” he said. “You did what you thought was right and stuck up for the family.” 

Boy, was I relieved.

Later that night I heard him say to Mum. “Never did like that nosey parker. Better keep the matches on the top shelf in future.”

He didn’t even go out and check on the burnt patch of grass.