Laneways

Reading Sea's blog about her dh refencing the back yard reminded me of the laneway that ran at the back of our first house in Cohuna. Although we had moved the dunny from the back fence and brought it up closer to the house so that Stan the Dunnyman had to come in from the front of the house and up the driveway. That annoyed him a bit, 'cos he couldnt do two dunnies with one trip at our place. He used to do three, one can on each shoulder and one on his head until one day the bottom of the can on his head gave way and he couldn't lift it off without the remains of the bottom cutting his throat. So he had two options a/ He drowned in somebody elses poo, or b/ he leant over far enough to tip the contents out on the pathway after he had released the lid and then he'd have to clean it all up. He chose to clean it all up which I thought at the time was probably the better move. But after that he only carried one on each shoulder.
Anyway, this is digressing from the subject of laneways. The laneway wasn't paved anywhere, just plain old Cohuna clay, which meant that it was a boghole in winter. The sort of place where a full grown horse could dissapear from sight and not leave any trace. We used to approach it with the sort of fear and trepidation that engenders its own sense of excitement and adventure. The journey down to the box trees that grew at the far end of the lane was as much fun as the building of the tree house in those self same boxtrees. We had to be very careful where we trod on that journey, one wrong footed move and you were covered in thick sticky clay mud that was harder to get off than beetroot stains on mum's good Sunday tablecloth.Next door but one to our place lived Len Erbacher, commonly known to us as Earbasher. Now Len was a nice enough feller, but his dog was another story. It was the size of your average horse and jet black apart from the inside of its mouth, which was big enough for Len to have parked his old Pontiac in there. We never did find out what its name was, I believe to this day that it never had one, it was just Len's dog or sometimes just the dog, in capital letters. Now, THE DOG didn't like boys and was very territorial. THE DOG also regarded the back lane as it's personal area of responsibility. This led to a certain conflict of interest betwee us boys using the laneway and THE DOG'S attitude towards us using it. Not only did THE DOG have a mouth the size of a railway tunnel, it had a grark appropriate. For those of you not familiar with the term, a grark is a combined growl and bark. The local glazier loved that dog. It made him a very wealthy man with its window shattering explosion of noise. Weak and faint hearts had no place living in that neighbourhood.
So imagine, if you will the scene. We have four boys creeping along the laneway trying to, a/ avoid slipping over and be sucked down in a glutinous mass never to be seen again, and b/ desperately being as quiet as possible while we on the ground so as not to disturb THE DOG. Suddenly there is a despairing scream as one of the boys slips on the wet clay and thrashes about frantically trying to avoid the sucking down fate. This alerts THE DOG to the fact that some unauthorized persons are invading the lane and so he starts complaing about that. The combination of grark and scream is simply too much for the rest of us who abandon our comrade to whatever fate THE DOG and the clay has in store for him and run for the safety of the treehouse. W all arrive there at the same time and all try to climb the ladder to safety also at the same time. Now the ladder was, at first, just the usual sort of thing, a series of short boards nailed to the tree trunk. But we were made of sterner stuff and it was replaced with a rope ladder we could climb at great peril and pull up after us. Old Ma Easton never did find out what happened to her clothes line. But the ladder, although adequate to most demands, was simply not designed to handle the stresses involved when three boys each try to be first up it and under the combined mass of a trio of all in wrestlers, it decided that enough was enough and parted company with the tree. As the three of us landed at the base, we were passed by the fourth member who, after extricating himself from his mirey fate, had seen our vain efforts to reach the safety of the tree house and had decided to continue his westward course until he reached the safety of the next street. Probably a wise decision on his part. We never knew he could run that fast. Encouraged by his stirling example, we followed suit and eventually we regrouped about three blocks away, shaking inside but still telling obvious and patent lies to each other about how brave we all were.
Someday, I'll tell you about the lane in summer time, when it changed from a boghole to a dustbowl.