Almanac Life: My Pal Gladden

 

My Pal Gladden

 

It was wet on this Thursday afternoon (in the late 50s)when  I came home from school to find an elephant standing in our yard, a big elephant, a girl one, with bowel trouble, and a man brooming the ground to maintain a mound of elephant excrement and associated liquid. Mum said, ‘I’ll put that on the roses’ She may have.

 

Look I have been to kindergarten, and pictures of elephants are prevalent there, same with zebra, giraffes, and every kind of monkey, fish and bird. But yeah I know an elephant when I see one and I was looking at one standing on the chips around our wood heap. I’m sure of that.

 

It seems the big girl came into town on a truck, and as a good will gesture they had unloaded her from a low loader on the street outside the shire office, there was a photo opportunity with civic leaders and then ‘Gladden’, that’s her, walked with her keepers, two men and a man with a gun (seriously) up the lane to where it is closed off at our back fence and as she couldn’t/wouldn’t turn or reverse they opened the back gate to our place and walked in. There had been thunder and may be ‘Gladden’ doesn’t like that, so they paused and waited for the weather.

 

That’s why she was standing in our yard, over a widening puddle of stuff.

 

Earlier, days ago, the circus parts came to town, mid winter, some of it in a train, in wagons loaded with poles, folded materials which you assumed was a tent, a huge one, and some cage and fence materials. It was not unloaded and it was said the circus had not paid for the use of the wagons and until it did the property remained with the Railways.

 

Then a DC2 and a Tiger Moth flew in, and the little plane towed a banner over town that may have read Circus and a date. You could book a seat at a daily show, matinee at 5.00pm and Circus Grande at 8.00pm. Bookings at the Shire Chambers. Expensive. We didn’t book then, or any time, we didn’t go. People lived, slept, in the DC2 and used the facilities at the airport hall and outside toilet. They had a truck and trailer.

 

Bit by bit the rail wagons were unloaded and this stuff moved to the vacant block diagonally opposite our house, a corner that had just been cleared of a mudbrick building, like a hacienda style series of shops, now a clean block. Three men and one truck and trailer worked for a week or more but got the gear from the railhead to there. More wagon loads had arrived after the first mentioned.

 

Other truck loads arrived, not from the railway but from out of town and from the east, much the same stuff. This was all opposite where I lived and the trucks came regularly, 2 early, 3 late, and there must have been others while I was at school. Some decorative caravans were put into place, like shop fronts, painted gaudily and with flashing lights all over the front.

 

Tent poles and their outside supports went up, one wall along one footpath and another at right angles to that, along a footpath. Material formed the walls and in three days a walled compound was formed. The roof poles, and the roof material was hauled onto that compound and skywards later. A man shimmied from the ground to the top of both poles in turn and ropes were run and the roof of the tent was commenced to be raised. A winch was used for this raising, an engine powered device and a tent shaped building was erected by 11.00pm that night. Just three men still.

 

A very big wooden ‘plug’ was sunk into the earth using sledge hammers. A hole, about 5 feet deep was dug first, then the big wooden ‘plug’,was put in, pointed end down, and this was bashed into the ground by the three men standing on drums in a circle around it, using those hammers, one after another, clockwise, and they counted, one, two three as they swung at it. Slowly, about a quarter inch each minute it went in, then was pulled and it started again to re-direct it off the vertical line a little. This process of bashing the ‘plug’ into the ground, then withdrawing it, re-positioning it, then bashing away at it was repeated, it seems. So it went from | to / kind of. I had a go, well I picked up the biggest sledge, it was heavy, and Munro, (a clown dressed as a man but) said have a go ‘Muscles’, that’s me, and I did. It just bounced off the indented top of the plug. They laughed, I laughed and I left. It took most of the day it seemed but that plug was in the ground, at an angle, about 3 quarters of its length. It wasn’t used for anything. Munro said that if it got really windy and they needed a ‘tie-down’ quickly that plug was used. Otherwise there were alternative tie downs, mostly the caravans and the generator and engine. I suggested they use ‘Gladden’. They laughed.

 

Out of goodwill Dad had invited the men to use our spare room, attached to the garage away from the house that had a toilet and a kitchen. They did that. They still camped at the airport and had lunch at our place. It was now a month on from their first arrival.

 

When the yards and enclosed areas were completed, the tent up and two flags flying in the breeze from the top, this was the time when  ‘Gladden’ arrived.

 

But back to now, in the moment, in my yard, the circus star (my thought) was looking at me looking at her and I thought that was pretty good. In my yard!

 

‘Gladden’ swayed and groaned, a little of each. She felt soft and warm to touch, and appreciated that. She was hairy, quite, and you don’t see that in photos. You were told to stand beside her but not in front and not further along than her front legs. I got to cuddle and carry her trunk, she plonked a coil, almost, of trunk onto me and I automatically gave that a cuddle. She stayed put so that must have been the right thing to do. I lent against her, she lent against me, Pals.

 

Big ‘Gladden’ had a chain from her front left leg, up to be suspended from a circingle under her belly, then down to her rear right foot. The chain moved through a hoop where it was suspended and she never extended her step to test its effectiveness. It was for show. I crumpled against her and she was warm on a cold day, and alive, you felt tiny movements, spasms, in her leg. She stood still and I didn’t want her to move.

 

‘Gladden’ was ushered out onto the road and across it to her home at the Circus town now in operation opposite our house. She was there 19 days and I went there every day, after school, and in the morning at weekends. Mum did too with her laundry basket and garden shovel to get the offered effluent, courtesy of ‘Gladden’ over active alimentary canal. Mum had pruned the roses at the Court House for several seasons and now they received a serving of fresh dung and a good watering to cool it down.

 

We had nice roses and enormous water melons later. Rock melons and grape vines boomed as well. Everything smelt until the next rain.

 

There was a parade of circus animals before the first matinee. ‘Gladden’ walked at the end, behind some donkeys, zebra, small horses, clowns pushing a clown car, a pretty girl wearing high heels (and not a lot otherwise) and a man with a gun.

 

The circus did not enthuse and in the end was playing at night for 8 to 10 people. We didn’t go. It was expensive but that wasn’t the reason.

 

‘Gladden’ was ridden into the ring by a man who cracked a whip and he stopped. Sometimes the rider was a clown, sometimes the girl. The big elephant carried a cornet, a trumpet, and waved this up and down, left and right, no sound though, no playing. That is what she did, then she stood off in the background while the circus went on. I didn’t go, I don’t know what they did in there.

 

‘Gladden’ and some horses left town first, going west to be homed at a property over the Darling until the next circus site at Broken Hill was built to accommodate everything. Other animals left progressively and at the end of the week the site was devoid of life, human and otherwise. It stayed that way for weeks, the big tent slackening and slumping over time, some walls flapping in a gentle breeze, and flogging themselves almost to destruction in the bigger puffs of it.

 

The DC 2 had left days before and the Tiger Moth was long gone also. The gypsy style vans left two at a time, but the other way to the animals. The fencing went and the tent walls came down next so that you had a canvas topped amphitheatre that you could peer through, front to back, left to right.

 

In the night, after a breeze and some rain there was a discernible thump, a seismic thing and a noise, and an investigation showed the tent top had collapsed inwards, and nearly down.

 

The place looked a wreck and important people came and pondered, photos were taken, and in a week or more those three men returned and in a couple of days had everything down, rolled up, folded over and stacked and respectable. It stayed like that for months, stacked, dusty, and later surrounded by council erected temporary fencing.

 

The tent went first, the big collapsible poles that formed the centre heights, and some ropes. The railway crane, a Council tractor using its hydraulic arms at the back, at least 20 men, no boys, all surrounded the tent roof top, folded into miniscularity and hoicked the thing up and onto a tip truck which buckled, dipped, with the load. Funny. Better than a circus, some have bigger tents, we had better clowns. There were still stacked items there that had grass growing through them at the end. The ‘plug’ hole remained, deep into the stony red ground.

 

That circus site became a service station, the items left moved around the site as site works occurred, trenches dug, holes for petrol tanks, foundations. By the time of concreting everything foreign had been moved out and away, to somewhere, it took a year.

 

That concrete rock was enticing. My initials are in it, twice, ‘AGM’ at the entrance and exit.  I pushed a half penny into the blanc mange mess of concrete until just an upper curve was visible. What a Sharpie (or vandal, at least)

 

I did that, coin planting and ‘initialising’, on the way to being an altar boy at benediction in the evening after tea, so, sweet?

 

Still I had an elephant as a pet for a bit, that was good, unique, and yet sad, like clowns are.

 

‘Gladden’ was sold to New Zealand (and re-named?). I hope she was warm and happy. I hope she remembered me, they are good at that it’s said. She was from Borneo.

 

She didn’t look Asian.

 

Mum said don’t talk like that, ‘smarty pants’.

 

It’s still there, that half penny (2024) and my initials. 70 years after. Like a monument almost , not really me on a stone plinth gazing a thousand miles away to the north (or south or west) but something of mine, and not the service station that once was, now burnt.

 

 

More from Pestwac can be read Here.

 

 

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