Wellington Street Notebook
Mrs Aylett next door took in the sick or wounded animals
Mrs Aylett next door took in the sick or wounded animals
the neighbourhood kids all brought her. (We just knew.)
The house I lived in had a huge back lawn and two willow trees.
The wooden swing my Dad made me hung from ropes as thick as my arm.
Our end of the street was in Sandhill; the other end was all the way
down into town. I could walk to school without leaving my street.
The women used to talk to each other over their back fences.
'Coooo-ee!' they would call, once the men had gone.
Because we were on the hilly end of the street, we could see
from our high windows all the way down into the town centre.
When Ludbrooks store burnt down one night, our neighbours woke us up,
and in houses on the hill we all stood gazing from our back windows
watching the huge orange flames and the smoke against the night sky.
I was cold in my nightie but I stayed up a long time looking.
There was a big patch of uncleared bush just around the corner from my house,
with a shabby old mansion way back through the trees. We thought it was haunted.
My little brother got stuck up a tree one Saturday afternoon.
His friends had to run and get all the fathers to come and rescue him.
The little boys used to ride their billy carts down the hill.
They were supposed to stay on the footpath.
There were always people walking past. Not so many had cars back then.
Trams went along our street, all the way from our end into town, clanking.
The kids in the street used to come and play at our house, in the big back yard,
because I wasn't allowed to play in the street unsupervised.
I lived in my street until I was 12.
Modelled on the 'Pima Road Notebook' series by Keith Ekiss, in the book of the same name – an exercise in one of my favourite resources: Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, ed. by Scott Wiggerman & David Meischen.
Photos 63 years later (2014). Little changed, but looking older: Our house; Mrs Aylett's house left of ours; Across the road, with High Street going off uphill. The patch of uncleared bush is gone, filled with houses. The big back yard is gone too. 'They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot' – really. And the tram lines have gone. Today there are buses.