Toby
I met him briefly when I was at primary school at The Junction. He was two years behind me, but I’d seen him around in the playground. It was the end of year, the holidays had just begun, but Toby hadn’t left the school grounds. The other kids had disappeared, scrambling away like cockroaches caught out in the open when a light is turned on in a dark room.
Toby Alderman was wrestling with a big wooden box that had a tatty curtain nailed across the front and what appeared to be a small stage attached to the lower front of the box. It looked like a small theatre, and Toby informed me, and a few other stragglers, that he’d been given it by a teacher at the end of year clean out of the school store room.
He was going to turn it into a puppet theatre, a stage for marionettes or maybe just hand puppets, he told us, and asked us to give him a hand to carry it back to his place somewhere in Merewether. The other kids and me were so impressed and so nonplussed by a kid who wanted to use a box as a place to show off his puppets – that’s if he had any puppets – that we picked up the box, a kid on each heavy corner, and started lugging the thing under the command of Toby, who was convinced that he knew what he was doing.
It was unusual for a primary school kid to think independently, to have a type of vision, free of the influence of adults, so we went along with whatever he asked of us even though most of us were older than him. Kids always stuck to their own kind at school, namely their own year, but the puppet theatre, Toby’s conviction and personal belief, broke down that barrier, and, for once, albeit briefly, kids of different forms came together. Besides, all the rest of the students had gone so there wasn’t anyone there to witness our unusual behaviour and hold it against us.
We all knew, as we huffed and puffed our way past the old pottery works, where blokes at large open windows, using their hands and small knives, sculpted earthenware pipes and toilet bowls, that when school returned after six weeks our bond would be broken. We’d go back to the tribal law of sticking to kids from our own classes and forms.
“What the bloody hell are yers doin’ with that?” asked one of the men making pipes and dunnies.
He leaned out of the big glassless window to get a good look at the puppet theatre, and pointed at it with a clay-covered knife.
“It’s a stage, a theatre for puppets. I’m taking it home,” Toby informed him, not pausing for breath before he spoke.
“Hey, this kid’s making a theatre for some puppets. A bit old for that sort of thing aren’t you sonny? You and your mates should be playin‛ footie, not playin‛ at bein‛ sissies,” said the bloke.
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