Charlie
Charlie – not his real name, but acquired from an early Australian TV sitcom about a country garage mechanic by the nickname of Barley Charlie. This name was bestowed upon him by another character at the quarry where we all worked, Plozza. He and Ploz were always arguing about something, quite often started by a string of barbed comments about Charlie's ability as an engine mechanic. His specialty was GMs (General Motors diesels), Jimmies in slang, and Charlie was wont to call any person Jimmy on the spur of the moment.
From the moment I met Charlie, I was struck by his seemingly inexhaustible string of anecdotes, many appearing to be terminological inexactitudes (Winston Churchill, an untruth!) plus his claimed friendships with people of influence including many police officers! I never knew the full extent of these friendships, but they stemmed in no small part from the fact that at least one of his sons enjoyed certain notoriety with the local minions of the law!
Charlie has now departed this life, but one thing I remember is his lined face, but as he said, they were all laughter lines. The corners of his eyes and mouth were always on the verge of a smile, and this was a miracle as his life was a series of disasters both financial and otherwise. He never had any spare money, was always in debt and having things repossessed, never had a real car or home, but he always had that smile in the face of massive odds.
I remember one occasion when his daughter was kidnapped, no one really believed this as she lived a mature life style in her relationships with the local lads! However Charlie called in some favours with the local police, and the hunt suddenly assumed full-scale official proportions, but not for long! His daughter suddenly phoned home – it turned out that on the spur of the moment she had joined up with a car load of locals and decided to decamp to Sydney. But after a couple of nights on the road, the reality of life in the rough caused her to go into hiding when the car pulled into a service station somewhere along the route, and her erstwhile companions moved on without her, so she rang her home long distance, and of course Charlie had to borrow a car from the firm and go and bring her home!
This sort of adventure was a regular part of Charlie's life. He was always becoming involved with other people's problems as well as his own, and it was common for him to take off on strange trips for vague reasons, almost always after borrowing one of the firm's vehicles, and being back at work next morning with detailed adventures to recall. It must be admitted that a lot of these trips were in the boss's interests – he was the number one gofer, and he was often the Boss's co-driver or companion to the Boss's wife on an interstate jaunt! He was also available for clandestine operations such as pinching back a company car from an erstwhile company employee, who certainly on one occasion was under the impression that the vehicle was actually his, and I know from bitter experience that it actually was, and the recovery operation failed miserably!
There were always two sides to these questionable arrangements, the boss was a notorious Indian Giver!
One of Charlie's scrapes was such that he barely escaped seeing the inside of prison for an extended period. It was all innocent enough – one of his sons, or was it a son's mate, turned up with a submachine gun, and eventually someone blabbed to the police who swooped and caught Charlie virtually with the machine gun in his hands! His defence, apart from claiming that he was going to use it to shoot rabbits, was that he had decided the weapon was too dangerous to be in the hands of these young blokes, and as a former scoutmaster (bullshit!) he saw it as his duty to take it off their hands with the eventual intention to return it quietly to one of his police mates who hopefully would conceal the true nature of it's acquisition of what proved to be part of the proceeds of a notorious robbery of an Army munitions and arms store!
Of course the wheels of justice were in unstoppable motion, and to be honest I don't know how much it must have cost certain people to keep him on the outside of prison walls! I remember him recounting his version of the entire incident to me, still with that infectious grin on his face.
Towards the end of his life he was driving in Queensland where he still functioned as the old boss's gofer, he had stopped and bought a bottle of Coca Cola to quench his thirst, and back on the road he continued to take swigs from the bottle in the glove compartment at his side. What he had forgotten was a half full Coke bottle of brake fluid in the same compartment! The inevitable happened and he took a couple of good gulps from the wrong bottle! He made it to hospital somehow, where according to his account it was touch and go for a while, but I can't help feeling that this incident, if it was true in it's entirety, somehow typified his whole life in the years that I knew him. He wasn't exactly a loose cannon, but a ship without a rudder wasn't far off! He was a very heavy smoker, and everyone about him for years had pointed out that they were killing him! Eventually his hacking cough turned to emphysema, and despite doctor's ultimatums to quit smoking he eventually paid the price. But this guy touched a lot of people's lives one way or another and there wouldn't be many who had a bad word for him.
He was a forgivable larrikin in the true sense of the word though there were times when I cursed him! One such time was when I was laying under the family car in the early hours of the morning between Melbourne and Adelaide, trying to replace a water jacket Welsh plug under the exhaust manifold of my reconditioned (by him!) Holden V8! I had bought new Welsh plugs and given them to him to replace when the engine was on the work bench, but in his wisdom he decided not to fit them and placed them in the car's glove box! Lucky for me a couple of weeks later! It wasn't so much the terrible job of replacing them under the circumstances, but have you any idea how hard it is to get the old ones out!
VALE Charlie.