Four Fires Read Free Page B

chuffed at being called 'dirty garbo!' Nancy said it could have been worse, we could have been the nightsoil collectors and that when the previous operator, Fred Bellows, had died tragically on the job and the contract was up for grabs Tommy had put in an unsuccessful bid for that job as well. His crook shoulder and one eye probably ruled against him this time around.
    'Don't know how the silly bugger thought we'd manage both,' Nancy remarked. 'He was full of grand schemes when he first came
    back from the war. "Waste disposal, it's the coming thing, the average person creates fifty pounds of waste a year and that's only human waste, shit and piss! Then there's all the stuff they throw out. "It's a business that's never gunna run out," he'd say, "like being an undertaker only you don't have to handle stiffs."
    '"Yeah, only turds," I said.
    '"That's just it, Nance, that's my very point! In Borneo, the villagers use human waste to grow their vegies, nothing to stop us doing the same, dry it into briquettes and sell it to farmers, make a fortune, eh?"'
    Tommy, of course hadn't taken the advent of the flush toilet into consideration. A sewage works had been started before the war but it hadn't progressed very far and the shire council was yet to restart it.
    But sooner or later it would be completed and that would be the end of Tommy's dream of briquettes of dried shit for the local farmers.
    Some people though did have septic tanks. The Templetons and the Yerberrys and Oliver Twist were supposed to have flush toilets inside the house but nobody we knew had ever seen them. The dunny was still out the back and an indoor toilet was a real status symbol. In fact, we had never been into anyone's house that had one. Our dunny, like almost everyone else's, was out in the yard with a little lane leading to the back of it from the street. It had a small door that opened up in the rear so the nightsoil collector could place the can under the toilet seat.
    A lot of people in Bell Street and elsewhere used torn-up squares of newspaper in their dunny but Nancy said we had to draw the line somewhere and the line was our bums. Somehow we always had shop bought toilet rolls. Mind you, they had one distinct disadvantage, the paper was shiny on one side and soft on the other and, if you forgot, the shiny side would slip over your bum without getting a good grip, which would often result in a bit of you-know-what ending up on your fingers.
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    It was not until much later that I discovered there were toilet rolls with nice soft paper. Ours was the same as we got in the school dunny so I suppose it was the very cheapest possible but still not newspaper.
    Fred Bellows, the dead nightsoil collector, had always been a bit of a loner, a huge bloke who could cart nightsoil all night but didn't have much to say for himself and liked to work on his own, using a huge Percheron, a large grey draughthorse, to pull the wagon that carried the night cans.
    Nancy explained that Fred wore this oilskin headgear that fishermen use in storms and you see in pictures on sardine cans. It fits over your head and covers your neck and shoulders. Over this he wore a flat-top tin hat so he could carry the full nightsoil cans on his head.
    The replacement cans came with a lid, which was removed and placed on the full can so there would be no spillage if Fred happened to stumble in the dark. The lid screwed round the rim and locked firmly into a groove to become watertight.
    Well, one night, Fred Bellows removed a night can that must have been pretty damn full and, as usual, he locked the lid into place before he swung it up onto his head. The bottom of the can was rusted and his head, tin hat and all, went straight through it, with the container jamming down onto his shoulders. The oil-cloth headgear prevented much of the contents from leaking out but the rust hole refused to widen and, with the additional aid of the oilcloth, it gripped vicelike around Fred's neck.