THE ODD ANGLE

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 39, 16 February 1944, Page 4

THE ODD ANGLE

(By MacCLURE) • THE COALMAN CALLS Hardly had my last column appeared in print when in rushed our coalman, his eyes aolaze, his face all lit up. Instinctively 1 grabbed the fire extinguisher, but he laughed heartily, and as he did so I noticed the bags under his eyes. "Guess what?" he asked. I mentally decided we'd have two of slack and one of kitchen coal, coke, too, if the gas workers would permit. Reaching for my application for a permit to travel, I tore it up and carefully placed it in the cigar box where we keep our waste paper for the depot man when he calls. If he should, that is. Old Alt', dropping in at the moment, caught our mood and smiled too. "What's it all about?" Old Alf asked. "Come, I'll show you," cur coalman requested, and wo followed him gladly. He was going to show us some coal, I felt certain, heaps of it. I sensed it. "There," he said triumphantly, pointing to half a dozen rather dilapidated school books. We were stunned, but examined them to oblige him. They were dog-eared, grubby, and, judging by the prices marked inside, damned dear. "Got 'em all in one shop," he said excitedly, beaming. His wife, stepping in, beamed with him. "Just fancy," she commented. "Miracles never cease. Daddy got them all in one shop. All we've got to do now is to get the others our Jiert needs." Excitedly pouring us a drink apiece, our coalman rattled on. "Funny thing, Mac, two years ago I had three vans on the road and big overhead expenses. Now that my coal business has gone to the pack I'm free to search all day long for the kid's books. To-morrow I'll take in Ponsonby Road, shop by shop, and then systematically comb the suburbs. Life is full of compensations, Mac. If I had been in business 1 wouldn't have had the time to hunt 'em up and the missus would have had to do it all on her own." That, certainly, was one way of looking at it. But it does stamp us as a crazy mob to stand for it year after year. What do you think?

9 XADA THE liILY Leaving them to enthuse over their half-dozen dilapidated literary treasure's procured at such great physical, mental—and financial— expense, we crossed over to the zoo. At a first glance the animals seem naturally well-behaved, even though they had been denied a college education. Bar the monkeys, perhaps,, although, in their case, they wore carrying on perhaps no worse than many of us, despite the so-called ■'■refining influences" of civilised society. Pausing for a moment to gaze at Enzed, the baby hippo, we noticed the fully-laden apple tree that displayed its fruit so temptingly just out "of Enzed and his mother's reach. They were haying the same run as we were, evidently. Nada the Lily, Enzed's youthful and charming mother, watched us suspiciously for a moment. Her small, piggy eyes were red-rimmed, and judging "by the expression on her husband Dinizulu's face they'd evidently been having a ding-dong go-in over Enzed's future. "Bringing a kid up decent these times ain't so easy, ,, she seemed to be trying to let Dinizulu understand. "It ain't every woman would stand for this stick-in-the-mud existence." Ignoring her, Dinizulu watched every move of an American serviceman who seemed to be completely taken up with his wife as she and the kid successfully carried out an amphibious operation on the left bank of her pool, but he adopted a more friendly expression when the Yank threw him a packet of chewing gum as an act of appeasement. "For his birthday; the old boy's eight to-day," the Yank informed us. We'd clean forgotten the fact." "Them Yanks certainly do think of everything," old Alf remarked. A few vards away, in the shade of the old" camphor tree, we found an old Oaklands Park cobber gathering some camphor leaves for his asthma, his coat hanging high in the branches above "to keep the moths away." "With suits at twelve guineas a man has got to look after his clothes these days," he informed us.

9 JOHX WEBSTER'S "LONG TOM" "And that reminds me," our old Digger cobber remarked, "In your last article you said they'd buried old John Webster's 'Long Tom , in Albert Park, along with other guns." I admitted the fact, having stated so alter making inquiries of those who were supposed to know. "Not on your life, it ain't—it's laying over there in the workshop under the pavilion in Chamberlain Park." Thanking him, we hurried through Motions Road and sure enough there was the old gun, Webster's "brass 12-pounder traversing gun" that had seen service on the field of Waterloo, sailed the seven seas in the W r anderer, escorted "gold ships " and looked on while Webster and the two sailingmasters (Ottiwell of the Wanderer and Crawford of her tender the Ariel) established a threeman beachhead on Guadalcanar during those hectic mid-October days of 1851. "She weighs 15cwt" we learned. "The real reason they

buried them other guns was because they couldn't get anyone to even accept 'em as a gift. As a matter of fact all they could get for 'Long Tom' was sixpence a pound—it ain't actually brass, you know. Some of the ones they buried was from the old Fort Britomart. They only saved 'Long Tom' here and them two French guns up in the park by the Princes Street entrance." With the help of a kerosene rub I tried to decipher the monogram on "Long Tom," deciding it Evas "J.M.M.P" As clean-cut as the "clay it was cast one could still see the crest and read the motto—a lion rampant surmounted by a crown and the words "Quae quit valde vult," which I leave to your learned son to translate for you.