lips parted in horror.
‘Shut up!’ Dad didn’t look at Raymond. His face was red and glistening with sweat.
‘But he’s older.’ I jabbed a finger angrily at Raymond who backed away.
‘Shut up!’ Dad reached out and smacked me again. ‘Never let me catch you with a naked boy again or there’ll be trouble.’
He smacked me several more times. I nodded yes with each smack. I promised I would never ever let him catch me again as long as I lived.
I managed to keep my promise until I was eight.
Dad had built us a fort in the backyard out of some old timber and corrugated iron he’d been given by Trevor Bland. This was completely out of character and something he never attempted again. My father generally didn’t invest time in projects that weren’t directly connected to his personal comfort. He wasn’t the type of father to take his kids fishing or help us with homework. He did things like give us bottles of raspberry drink while we waited in the car outside the pub. This was one gesture I appreciated. Some kids weren’t given drinks. We’d poke out red tongues and wave our soft drinks at them while they died of thirst in their Holden station wagons.
It was a war game that got me into trouble. The boys next door were the Allies and we were supposed to be the Germans. I told my brother John I didn’t want any part of it. I’d only heard bad things about Germans. They were swine.
‘I want to be a nurse.’
‘You can’t be a nurse, stupid.’ John sneered at me. ‘Nurses are girls.’ He laughed out loud and began dancing around me, chanting. ‘Julian’s a woolly woofter. Julian’s a woolly woofter.’
The other boys sniggered.
‘I’m a nurse. I’ll do bandages in the hospital.’ I pointed to the fort. The boys turned to admire Dad’s construction. It was the only one in the street. Everyone loved our fort. It gave us the edge.
‘We need bandages if we’re shot.’ It was little Johnny Hawkins from next door. There were five Johns on our street. It was a very popular name in Ulverston.
Eyes turned to my brother. He was the oldest.
‘OK, you can do bandages in the fort, but you’re a doctor.’ John was as proud of the fort as the next Corkle.
‘I’m a nurse.’ I shouted this over my shoulder.
My first patient was my brother. He came inside grimacing and dragging his leg. ‘Za Brits shot me srew za knee.’
I pointed to the pretty makeshift bed I’d created out of the couch cushions. These were laid out in a line under the sheets I’d hung in a decorative way from the ceiling. It was great to have a fort but having a fort with flair made all the difference.
I put some vinegar on a piece of cotton wool and rubbed around the area where there was supposed to be a wound. John groaned like a wounded soldier. I used the hard plastic snout of the vacuum cleaner to examine the wound. John had his eyes closed and was moaning.
‘I have to get the bullet out.’ Taking a stick I’d found under the plum tree, I drove it in hard under the kneecap.
‘Fuck!’ John had screamed the F word. ‘You fucking bastard.’
‘It’s just a flesh wound.’ I jumped out of the fort and stood on the grass below. I called up to John who was rocking on his back, cradling his knee to his chest. ‘If you hit me I’ll tell Mum you said the F word, twice.’
My next patient was little Johnny Hawkins. He came in doubled over saying he’d been shot in the stomach. I made him lie on his back.
‘Take your shirt off. It’s covered in blood.’ Johnny was no stranger to this game. We often played together in his garage. I undid the zip of his shorts and had just pulled them off when I heard someone outside. I knew it was my brother. He wanted to get me back for the knee job.
‘Piss off, you German bastard. I’m not finished with this John.’
The door flew open and my father stuck his head and shoulders into the fort. He looked at Johnny’s naked body, then at me, then at Johnny again. Johnny’s underpants were in my hand.
‘I’m a nurse, Dad.’
My father reached in and grabbed me by the collar, dragging me outside where I was smacked in front of the other boys. He then marched me to the bedroom I shared with John and told me to stay there until dinnertime. I watched from the window as he cleared out the fort and then went at it with an axe and hammer. It took him an hour to reduce it to a pile of splintered timber. I was crying as he loaded everything on to a trailer and drove away.
A couple of days later I saw Mum rummaging in the cupboard where she kept the cleaning things. She then did a room-to-room search, looking under beds and furniture. She was flushed when she came back to the kitchen.
‘Are you all right, Mum?’
‘I must be going mad. I can’t find the extension to the vacuum cleaner. The little plastic end bit. I’ve looked everywhere.’
John took the loss of the fort hard and refused to talk to me for a full month. This was fine by me because I was busy preparing for the end of year pantomime at St Kevin’s. Mum was thrilled. I was to play Joseph which was a much bigger speaking role than baby Jesus who only got to gurgle. My sister Carmel was recruited to work the pulleys and change the backdrops. Several boys had wanted this job but they were no match for my sister who at the age of nine could already run faster and punch harder than anyone I knew.
My stage debut would have been a triumph if Brother O’Hare had not torn the veil off my head at the last minute. It was Mum’s navy blue chiffon scarf and looked fantastic with the pale blue caftan I’d been given to wear. O’Hare had wanted a bareheaded Joseph but this made no sense when the Three Kings had fancy headgear. He’d stopped me in the wings, insisting that a nativity scene was no place for a lady’s scarf. My cue came and went as I was trying to argue my point. By the time we noticed, Mary and the donkey had been waiting on stage for a full minute. She might have stayed there longer if a familiar male voice had not boomed out over the audience.
‘Move that ass!’ Dad thought he was a funny man.
The laughter spurred Brother O’Hare into action. I was thrust from behind and propelled across the stage, running with my head down as I struggled to get my footing. I heard the laughter even before I hit the donkey head-on and broke it in two. Mary toppled off and fell to the side with a squawk and a thud. The audience roared. The hindquarters of the donkey turned and lunged at me. It was Robbie Skint and, despite the handicap of his donkey leggings, he lunged very fast. The audience roared again as he tackled me and clasped his hands around my neck.
I was gasping for air and twisting my head to free myself when my eyes fell on Carmel. She was standing in the back holding a rope above her head. With a smile she let it go. The backdrop of the stable scene unfurled at high speed and hit Robbie’s head with a bonk.
