house. We were used to it by now but most of our school friends found it odd that we fended for ourselves until six o’clock when Mum arrived from the bus stop.
During school holidays, Jenny and I had way too much unsupervised time to ourselves and this led to some pretty mischievous adventures. On one particular occasion, we decided to catch the bus to Roselands Shopping Centre. At the time, it was the largest retail centre in Australia. Our mission was simple:
We’re off to do a little shoplifting.
Just small stuff like chocolates, sherbets and any little toys we could smuggle under our clothes. I was nine and Jenny was ten years old. We certainly weren’t the brightest of criminals and definitely didn’t think things through – because Roselands was where our Mum worked as a preschool teacher. We were heading into dangerous territory.
On arrival, we quickly scoped out our target area, the confectionery counter. Things were going okay for a while, the odd cobber, freckle or redskin fell into our pockets but, like all petty thieves, we got greedy and were eventually caught by the shop security guards. I’m sure they were holding back laughter when we caved in and told them that Mum worked about twenty metres from where we were caught. Bonnie and Clyde, we were not.
I’ve never seen Mum more embarrassed than when we were marched into the preschool. We spent the remainder of the day with the toddlers in her care. Needless to say, we copped a sound belting from Mum and then another later that night when Dad got home. Sadly, we didn’t think of the consequences for our poor mother.
I remember her crying that night and saying to Dad, ‘I spend my days looking after everyone else’s bairns but cannie look after ma own.’
It wasn’t too long after that she quit the preschool and took up a job in a local factory with more forgiving hours. I’m still not certain that our little escapade was the only reason but I’m sure it influenced her decision. As I grew older, I also chuckled at the hypocrisy of Dad punishing us for being light-fingered. For as long as I can remember our house was adorned with beautiful little clocks and interesting mantel piece ornaments. Every now and then a new little bauble or trinket would appear, seemingly out of nowhere. Whenever I asked, ‘Where did that come from?’ Dad’s standard reply was …‘It fell off the back of a truck.’
Apparently, if furniture and other items were abandoned or left in storage for too long, his company would put them up for auction. I believe some of the workers may have participated in a little pre-auction ‘shopping’.
After all he was in the furniture ‘removal’ business.
Not all of our misadventures ended in punishment. Thankfully my parents sometimes saw the funny side but were usually reluctant to show us their true feelings.
Once again, around the age of ten or eleven, I was obsessed with making toy weapons; a spear, a catapult or a bow and arrow. My arsenal was made from the bits and pieces lying under our house. The manufacturing process was crude but I was happy as long as they worked and there was something to shoot.
Our home at Greenacre had several peach trees in the yard. One spring morning my sister and all the neighbourhood kids decided to pick the partially ripened fruit and throw them at me in retaliation for a recent attack with my homemade weapons. I also picked the fruit and threw it back at them if my aim was poor with the catapult. After a few hours, the trees were stripped bare and smashed peaches were lying all over the yard.
‘Oh well, no harm done, no-one eats them anyway,’I thought.
Later that night – I’m not sure of the time but it was dark – Dad arrived home from work. Just before we went to sleep he entered our bedroom and handed us an almighty lecture. He told us, ‘Don’t pick any peaches, leave them to ripen, yer Mum ’n’ me are gunna be eatin’ em and making jam and we’ll be giving some tae a few friends so dinnae be picking ’em. Leave them alone.’
My sister and I were shaking in our beds.
Dad hadn’t been out the back so he hadn’t seen the hundreds of mutilated corpses strewn across the lawn. After he said goodnight, Jenny and I hatched a foolproof plan. As usual, Mum and Dad were off to work early in the morning and as it would still be dark we had all day to put our plan into action.
Once they’d left, we scurried out the back in our pyjamas and picked up the squashed and disfigured peaches and quickly dispatched them over the neighbour’s fence. Anything left over that even resembled a peach we picked up, dusted off, and using sticky tape, began to attach them back onto the branches of the tree.
What a plan!
It would be weeks before Dad would notice and, who knows, they might even start growing again.
Pure genius, we’re brilliant!
A few days passed and nothing was said until one night we heard Mum and Dad in fits of laughter talking about our peach regeneration program.
‘Can ye believe what they bairns did? What were they thinking aboot?’ Dad chuckled.
Nothing was ever said to us at the time. It was never spoken about until years later when we all had a good belly laugh about it.
And, no, they didn’t grow back.
~
The year was 1966 and the Bruce family were going on their first road trip/holiday since arriving in Australia. Now, my parents were both clever people in their own right; Mum was quite well educated and Dad was worldly and experienced, so for the life of me I can’t comprehend why they didn’t realise that a mile is the same length in Scotland as it is in Australia.
We were about to drive to the centre of Queensland to a place called Anakie and go fossicking for sapphires. A friend of Mum’s had recently returned from a similar trip with a bunch of stories and a pocketful of sapphires. The plan was to travel north up the east coast of NSW and Queensland to Rockhampton then head west through the town of Emerald until we reached the gem fields, where we would all have a great time scratching around in the dirt like silly Scottish chooks. Who knows, maybe we would find our fortune and live happily ever after. This was all to happen in two and a half weeks during the heat of an Australian summer. Mad Dogs and Englishmen had nothing on the Bruce family.
Oh, one other point that my parents didn’t think through: our car was way too small for our Leyland Brotherish adventure. Months earlier, Dad had purchased a shiny new Morris 1100. No doubt a terrific car but it wasn’t much bigger than a Mini Minor, had no off-road capabilities, and a family of four leprechauns would struggle to squeeze into it with all the camping gear we were to carry. The sticker on the rear window said, ‘It floats on fluid’ (which meant, it was equipped with the latest hydraulic suspension). I think Dad was floating on fluid when he decided it would be suitable for our long trek north. Nonetheless, I remember how excited I was that we, the Bruce family, working-class migrants from Letham, were actually having a real vacation. I thought, wow, how good is Australia?
A few weeks before our departure, my parents were busy buying, borrowing or, in Dad’s case, ‘acquiring’, any camping gear they could get their hands on. Now this was 1966, so everything was made from timber, steel and canvas. Pop-up nylon tents and reinforced plastic camp beds were years away. We ended up with a twelve-by-twelve canvas tent and its associated timber tent poles, steel pegs, guy lines, ropes and springs. A twelve-by-twelve canvas ground sheet. Four canvas and timber camp beds, a couple of tilley lamps, a portable
