All the men stopped work and looked at the box with the curtain and stage attached; they had a good laugh, and Toby and the rest of us had to put up with some digs that might have been good natured or might have been, now I look back upon it as an adult, nasty and belligerent, meant to pull a kid down before he got ideas of show business and artistic grandeur. Was it our first experience of the tall poppy syndrome? Was it our first experience of the Australian intolerance of anything or anyone different, especially of someone with a glimmer of artistic aspiration?
We kept on going, and, as we went, Toby told us all the names and occupations of the puppets he had already made and would make. He explained the mysteries of paper mache, attaching strings, making different voices for different puppets and the skill of throwing one’s voice from behind the big wooden box so it seemed as though the voice came from the puppet on the small stage.
It was an artistic vision, a creative calling for Toby. It may have been primitive, and maybe even unworkable for a ten year old kid, but it was something different, something that caught the imaginations of the rest of us. We didn’t really understand Toby’s influence, or his seemingly cracked enthusiasm, but all of the carters of the box were fired by it. Nothing the pottery workers said or any other adult said could dampen our enthusiasm.
I lost contact with Toby after primary school. I heard about him from a friend, who was the barman at the Merewether RSL. He told me that Toby drank at the bar every night, knocking back ten to fifteen schooners of beer every evening. He had a manual labouring job somewhere.
The last I heard was that Toby died from his alcoholism, not yet forty years of age; but when he was dead, and his mates gathered at the RSL to remember him, a tape recorder was brought out from behind the bar and switched on.
“Come on, yer bastards, it’s your shout. How about buyin‛ me a beer?” came Toby’s voice.
The recording was made on his death bed; his idea of a joke. And, I suppose, it was the last remains of his aspirations in theatre; just one final grand entrance, except he wasn’t there to acknowledge the laughter and applause.
I wondered about him. Where had the kid with the enthusiasm for puppets gone? How had he become a bloated alcoholic? Was the fault within his character or had the shadow of the pottery worker, knife in hand, sarcasm on his lips loomed too heavily over Toby?
REG BOGAERTS
11
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