Growing up with four brothers was truly a special treat. In the 10 years of those inter brother wars, we managed to split pretty much along party lines. That is The big guy David had to stick up for the little shrimp Pip, which left the two welterweights, Tom and me, as the defaulting pair. So when the team events were on this is the way it divided up. I guess that’s why David and Pip took up fishing and me and Tom played silly buggers! See Pip took after David and Tom, sadly, took after me. So being team leaders from fiercely opposing teams seemed to called for just a little I’m cool and arms length behaviour. But, I got to tell ya, there was this one time when I got really close to my big brother David. So close in fact that we were as they said back then, as one. Pull up a chair and let me tell you about it. See, David had found two huge steel wheelbarrow wheels, out in the back yard at Albert Street Rockhampton and, turn as his brain does, he decided to designed and build a Billy Cart. I just watched in awe as he turned these wheels and bits of timber and a couple of small wheels off Mum’s wash cart (she’ll never know) into a supercharged, V8, hotrod, flying machine. No sense in just looking at it let’s try it out! So we pushed this monster out onto the road and up round the corner to the top of the street. Lets give it a try, David says as he jumps in to the high sided box that he had specially constructed. He then beckons me to join him on the narrow axel leading to the front wheels. We sat there doing the mission control check reigns, check brake, check wheels, check it out as I looked back and saw those huge wheels up over David’s head. Well, the jobs were allocated he got reigns (nothing new here), I got brake. Well you folks might call it a stick but David said it was a brake and that was good enough for me. Moments after – we were moving off on the maiden voyage of another great adventure. The big metal wheels on the raised rocky ground gave that rolling, rumbling grinding sound as we picked up a little bit of speed we did we picked up a little bit of speed we did – we picked up a little toooo much speed we did we were in a lot of trouble we did BRAKE SAM BRAAKKKEEE! and break I did with the top half of the brake firmly in my grasp and the bottom half embedded deep into bitumen at Albert Street to this day. Now I have never been as close to David since, as I was that day. I don’t know how it was going to save me but I was pushing back as hard into David’s box as I could get. Somehow we missed all the cars at those intersections – Somehow David managed to keep it all upright Somehow I managed a discomfited smile when David said Again?
