KEVIN CASSIDY
THE CASSIDY CHRONICLES
Copyright L A Johannsen 2014
Thank you.
National Library Of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data:
Author: Johannsen, Lindsay Andrew
Title: KEVIN CASSIDY – The Cassidy Chronicles
Cover art and design bungled by the author.
Mundanity Filter (final setting): 1400 microbleems.
The novel “McCullock’s Gold” and short stories.
To order the paperback version of McCullock’s Gold or contact the author please visit
www.vividpublishing.com.au/lajohannsen
Dedicated to the memory of our lost son,
whose spirit lives on in these stories.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1 The Adolescent Tarzan and The Fish On The Jetty
Chapter 6 Hell’s Deepest Pit and The Apprentice Self-Reliants
Chapter 9 Gun Riders and The Showdown At Short Gully Creek
Chapter 12 The Legend of The Late Run To Lannercost
Chapter 13 Speech Night and The Spirit Of The Muse
Chapter 17 A New Kid And An Old Bomb and The King Of Ingham
Chapter 18 Westward Ho and All Tickets Please
Chapter 21 The Starship Project and The Burning Pants.
Chapter 26 Solomon’s Gems and The Regular Customer
Chapter 28 The Princess In The Pumpkin Vine and The Boy With The Cross-Legged Gait
Chapter 32 The Four-Gallon Tins and The Chief Inspector
Chapter 38 The Reluctant Sportsman and No. 27 The Sabre Jet
Chapter 39 The Power Of Prayer and Blitz Tracks In The Bush
Chapter 43 The Heart Of A Draught Horse and The Sheltered Life
Chapter 46 Much Food For Thought and The Gates To The Land Of Boyhood
KEVIN CASSIDY
THE CASSIDY CHRONICLES
CHAPTER 1.
The Adolescent Tarzan; and The Fish On The Jetty
When Hiram and Shirley Cassidy decided to move from Brisbane to the Sherbert Valley in North Queensland to work on a new sugar cane project I couldn’t believe my luck. The idea of living deep in the jungle like some sort of adolescent Tarzan, swinging from tree to tree and wrestling giant crocodiles and pythons to the death (theirs) was everything I had ever dreamt about. But let me explain.
The year was 1954, I was thirteen and a half years old and Hiram and Shirley were my loving parents. Like many a Brisbane family of the time, we lived in an average-comfortable old Queenslander on an average-plus gradient street in an average-minus older suburb. Thus far I’d had no cause for complaint, as Mum and Dad had filled my years with all the love and attention an only-child rightfully expects and deserves.
But there was a problem. This seemingly idyllic state of affairs was all so predictable. Day simply followed day, with each of them seeming just a dreary repeat of the previous several million. And I was a boy with a thirst for adventure! So where were the challenges? Where was the excitement?!!
Even mowing the lawns and raking the leaves or doing extra periods of anxiety for the school exams were welcome distractions from what I could only see as this soul-destroying monotony.
My Dad worked in the Tramways Department workshops and had done so his entire working life. On leaving school he’d started with them as an apprentice fitter and over the subsequent twenty-three years had gradually risen to the exalted position of (all bow) … Senior Fitter.
He was content in his work, though. If nothing else, Tramways employment lent a wonderful sense of security and order to our affairs, and that plus my mother’s careful budgeting kept our lives free of any economic stresses.
Yet out in the great universe of the Brisbane Metropolitan Tramways Authority directives were being issued and plans set in motion which would very soon change all of this.
For Mum and me it began one evening as the three of us were sitting in the lounge-room after dinner, listening to the radio. Since my thirteenth birthday I’d been invited to take part in family discussions, my parents now proudly regarding me (despite what seemed considerable evidence to the contrary) as a responsible young adult at the point of entering high school.
My father had put on his “Serious-Family-Talk” face, I’d noticed, and was carefully setting his pipe – two of the little routines which always preceded these matters.
Dad always thought through and rehearsed in his mind what he wanted to discuss, but on this occasion he seemed unsure of how to proceed.
“…I, er, think you should know, Shirley,” he mumbled hesitantly, “...and er, Kevin, of course ... that um —
“—Now look, dear. All sorts of things are being talked about down at the tram yards, you know, and erm…
“Of course it’s mostly just talk and none of it should affect my job … for the time being, at least. But the way things seem to be going ... in the long term, that is ... it looks like... Well it’s possible my chances of being kept on are not very good.
“—But you mustn’t worry about it, dear,” he added hurriedly. “As I said, it’s not going to have any affect on... Well not immediately, anyway. I’m just letting you know so we’ll have plenty of time to plan for the future.”
Mum seemed a bit dazed by all this. She wandered out to the kitchen and had a quiet weep as she washed and dried the dishes, while Dad pretended he’d heard a disturbance in the yard and went outside to “investigate”. I just sat there in our old brown lounge-chair, staring at the worn patch in the lino and trying to comprehend what he’d told us.
I had no real idea of what losing his job might mean for us. He’d been with the tramways my whole life, after all. I’d known nothing else. My father was the Brisbane Tramways.
And my certainty was absolute. In beavering away at his great turning-machine I saw him as being responsible for the wellbeing and efficient operation of every cable, track, switch and tramcar in the city, along with the co-ordination and management of the entire system.
Gees, I kept thinking, how could they give him the sack? He was their mainstay; how could the trams run without him?
That night, as Mum and Dad talked softly in the dark, I went from awake and listening to asleep and dreaming in a seamless transition. In my dream I was looking at a huge impressionist painting. Our whole neighbourhood was there – people, houses, washing on clotheslines in well kept gardens – and all were wondrously arranged and permanently fixed.
There is the house where the Cassidys live and there are the Cassidys. Here are the school buildings and over there you can see children running in the playground. The sun is shining and there’s a storm on the distant hills.
It never comes closer.
While I’m standing there a tram conductor arrives. He swings the painting away from the wall as if it were a huge door. I try to see what lies beyond it but the conductor says: “Just wait your turn, son. You’ll find out soon enough.” Then he slips through and pulls it shut.
I wait for a moment then swing it out myself. Behind the painting is just blank wall.
...Silly, really.
Time went by and very little changed. Dad still went to work, the tramways kept running and the world kept going around. The only difference was that for the first time in our lives my father began browsing through the Positions Vacant pages in the paper of an evening. Sometimes he’d read the ads aloud to himself while absent-mindedly puffing on his pipe.
“Hmm...” he’d mutter. “‘Senior clump-press operator required. At least two years experience on Wurtzburg servo-pneumatic controls’. Pshh, what a dead end job.”
(Pause, shake the paper, focus
on the small print.)
“…Mmm. ‘A position exists for a maintenance engineer with a long established toggle-cam volute reconditioning company. The successful applicant will have fifth-year certification in quantum mechanics and his own car’.
“—Five years!
“…Here’s one that’ll do, Shirl! ‘Sandwich cutter required at busy city milk-bar. Must be experienced. Apply with references to the manager, ninety-eight Queen Street’. That would certainly be a change.”
Then one day I noticed my Dad was no longer bothering with the jobs part of the paper. Shortly after this he came home from the tram yards with a dog-eared and grubby-looking manual for the old Ford, and from then his spare time was spent in the back shed, tinkering with the car.
Sometimes of a weekend I’d be conscripted, my job mostly being to clean the pitch-like coating from the strange mechanical objects he’d produced from underneath. Next came the object’s dismantling, followed by a wear-inspection of its various parts (often better described as its destruction and a “where” inspection for its various parts). After being checked, reconditioned or renewed, the item would be reinstalled.
On other occasions I was required to fetch and hold spanners. The problem was I could never come to terms with the different sizes.
“No, son,” Dad would say patiently. “That’s a Whitworth spanner. I need a nine-sixteenths SAE spanner.”
I’m not sure how I was supposed to judge which spanner my Dad actually wanted, as he seemed totally oblivious to the fact that most of the information inscribed on them during manufacture had long since disappeared. They had, after all, been purchased during his apprenticeship, second or third hand.
Initially Mum and Dad withheld from me their plans of selling up and moving to North Queensland, as finding a high school that suited their requirements was taking longer than expected. Then, after a time, they discovered that a small boarding college for secondary boys existed in the upper reaches of the Sherbert Valley, in the Ingham hinterland’s Parish of the Upper Sherbert.
The school occupied an old farming and grazing property that was situated near the far end of the developed agricultural land. Gower Abbey College it was called and, while its main purpose was to provide boys from the valley with an agriculturally-orientated secondary education, enrolments from farther afield were accepted whenever possible.
The buildings there included the presbytery and parish chapel, Junior and Senior classrooms, a dormitory, a workshop and a number of other structures.
Sugar cane was grown on the river flats, a modest herd of cattle ran on the larger undeveloped back end of the property, and pigs, poultry and milking cows were kept for the school’s own needs.
Overseeing the whole affair was a strong-minded down-to-earth parish priest called Father O’Long, ably assisted by a certain Brother SanSistez. Lay teachers taught one herd; a manager managed the other.
Generally speaking Mum and Dad found the school ideal, though its location and distance from our new home and Dad’s workplace was an inconvenience that would require my being enrolled there as a boarder. They were well aware of my ambitions and my grandiose sense of adventure, however, and knew that I would happily approve of these arrangements. Contact was made, negotiations entered into and a place for me was found, with their darling son only being told of the arrangements once everything had been settled.
And it was wonderful to contemplate. At my suburban Brisbane primary school I’d been just another skinny undistinguished Grade Seven kid, the only one in our class without a “cross your heart and spit your death forever even to the bitter end” oath-sworn ally. I was also the only boy on our team not to have scored a single try during the whole of the year. More regrettably, though – on a personal note – I was one of the many Grade-seven boys who’d never won the heart of the fair (to be fair) Francine Grout.
Francine’s father owned the local milk-bar, and certain uncharitable and certainly unchivalrous boys suggested this comprised a goodly portion of Francine’s charm. I mostly remained aloof from such talk; these were essentially those rough fellows whose suits had also failed to find favour – and quickly received abrasions and a black-eye on the one occasion I did not so remain.
Back in the hurly-burly of the schoolyard I was transformed at once from this anonymous nobody to one who bathed in the manifest envy of all. But it was now the last week of the school year and little time remained to enjoy the attention brought about by my coming adventures.
Francine, on the other hand, now seemed to regard me with regal favour. She was standing beyond the rowdy circle of my classmates and quietly smiling at me, turning my composure to jelly while I tried to appear as Jungle Jim incarnate.
“Gees, Kev! I read in the Reader’s Digest that the Sherbert River’s full of giant crocodiles!” (…R.D. being, for us, the ultimate authority on everything).
“Yeah, Kev! But they’re nothin’! It’s the cassowaries that’ll getcha! They got claws like a razor! They can rush out of the bush and rip out your guts with one kick! —before you even see ‘em!”
“Oh yeah? What about the taipans! When one of them bites you y’ve only got thirty seconds and you’re dead!”
“Yeah! They reckon they’re the world’s most deadliest snake! They’re even more deadlier than a golden cobra!”
“I know! They reckon they can run faster’n a man, too!”
“Garn, Jacko! Snakes can’t run!”
“Kev knows what I mean, don’tcha, Kev! They reckon the cane grass is full of ‘em an’ they always chase you in pairs!”
Throughout all of this Francine continued watching me with open admiration. It was a total reversal of her previous attitude and had my insides flopping around like a fish on a jetty.
My classmates assumed this studied self composure was simply me being heroically calm in the face of imminent death, though with Francine looking on the discussion raging around me on my chances of surviving more than a few weeks seemed less real than the previous night’s dreams – which, as I recall, featured a number of steamy and complicated scenes involving one’s self and Francine.
Regrettably, though, it was all too late. Only three days remained to bask in the glory of her blossoming affection before our undying love would be tragically terminated by my departure to the Darkest North.
But then I realised; it was the age-old story:
A Man’s Gotta Do What a Man’s Gotta Do.