A Life of Pride. Alan G Pride

      Chapter 2

       Make Your Own Fun

      School was hot and boring, but I had plenty of friends and we made our own fun. No TV or computer games then! We had a lot of freedom to go out by ourselves and I almost came to a bad end in my billycart, at about the tender age of 6. I used to pull it up the steep lane near our house, then ride it down straight onto Oxide Street, at great speed. This time, I went right under a Model T Ford and I still remember a pattern of stars and lights as my head clunked on the car’s gearbox. It must have scared the daylights out of the poor bloke driving. He picked me up and carried me home to my horrified mother. No doctor or hospital came into it, I was cleaned up and put to bed while the driver hovered around, hoping I wouldn’t die.

      Luckily there were no broken bones or brain damage (some of my friends would disagree!), but it was the first of my motor accidents and Lucky Escapes; so many that I’ve always felt something or someone was watching over me.

      Another time, my friend Wally Williams and I decided to make a canoe. It was 7 feet long, with a frame nailed together from scrap timber. On Thomas Street there was an abandoned house with canvas window blinds, so we cut these up to cover the hull. It turned out that the fabric was very old and the water would probably go right through it, so we found some old paint to waterproof it. Then – where to sail it?

      Near the edge of town, there was a racecourse with a dam. My bike had a carrier over the back wheel, so we made a tow-bar and attached a set of pram wheels for the canoe to travel on. Off we cycled to the deserted racecourse, launched the canoe and had a great time swimming and paddling around. It wasn’t until the dam dried up, years later, that we realised the risk we’d run. The bottom was littered with tree snags and covered in long, slimy weeds. Nobody knew where we’d gone and we could easily have been tangled up and drowned.

      We also caught yabbies at the dam. They’d grab hold of some meat tied to a string and I would pull them to the surface and net them. This experience helped me years later, when I motorcycled to Menindee Lakes, hundreds of miles from home, made a proper trap and caught lots of yabbies very efficiently. (Note, 1 mile is about 1.6 kilometres .) One risky thing I used to do, with my parents’ full approval, was go rabbit-shooting and trapping alone in the desert. When I was 13, my dad showed me how to use an old ’22 rifle safely and I practised with it at the racecourse. The rifle’s chisel-point bullet extractor was so worn that I had to use my pocket-knife to pull out the spent cartridge case. This meant a reprieve for any rabbit I’d missed on the first shot. I’d also cycle down the Steven’s Creek Road after school, several miles out of town, hard-pedalling on the rough dirt road, and set up some rabbit traps Dad had given me. Early the next morning I’d go back and check them, kill the rabbits and skin them quickly.

      You kill a rabbit by stretching its neck. I got very good at doing that. Rabbits were all over the place, eating the land bare, before myxomatosis cut their numbers down in the 1950s. We often had rabbit for dinner and I would sell the skins.

      Later on, I used to shoot kangaroos too. There’s no way I’d trap or shoot anything now (except for feral cats), but back then we thought nothing of it.

      A good example of the difference between my 1930s childhood and the present day, would be the Saturday afternoon movies. I loved the cinema and if Wally wasn’t around, I’d go by myself. We had two cinemas within easy cycle-range of home, ‘The Ozone’ and ‘The Johnson’. Children could go into any movie if accompanied by an adult, so I’d get my ticket - 3 pence for a front seat – then wait until some decent-looking character came along and ask if he’d take me in. Lots of kids did this and once inside, we’d leave the adults we came in with. If we’d only paid 3p, we had to sit down the front, and the kids up the back would throw things at us. Forget Jaffas, it was common to be hit in the back of the head by half a pie.

      Or they’d bite the bottom off an ice-cream cone, blow hard through it and send a lump of ice-cream sailing down, to splat on our heads.

      I remember seeing ‘The Green Hornet’ serial, and ‘The Mummy’s Hand’ scared the daylights out of me. I’m sure we saw some very unsuitable films by tagging along with strangers.

      The ‘Ozone’, in Chloride Street, was an open-air cinema which only showed films at night. The seating consisted of canvas deckchairs, which worked because it rains so rarely in Broken Hill. There were two other cinemas, one in west- and one in south Broken Hill, and they used to share films.

      These were in large canisters and at intermission a motorcyclist had to ride between cinemas with the reels! Later I occasionally did this job myself.

      I had to help Dad when he came home from work each afternoon, but before he arrived I might squeeze in some cricket or football with friends, on the quiet dirt road of Thomas Street near home. Wally lived two doors up, Pro Hart was in Thomas Street, plus the Davidson brothers, who used all this practice to become pretty good cricketers.

      If it was windy, we’d make kites from sticks and brown paper, with bits of calico for tails, and fly them from a nearby hill. When the kite was flying we’d thread squares of newspaper onto the string and let the wind blow them up to the kite. We called this ‘sending messages’.