Cruickshank

It’s hard to believe how Melbourne has sprawled in the short space of fifty years.  In Ringwood we lived on the outskirts of the country during the 50’s.  We grew up in Daisy Street and there were really daisies growing at the end of our unsealed road.  (even today daisies still grow on the verges of the street).  One of our neighbours, Margaret Robb would often make daisy chains and put them around her neck.  At the end of our street was Nelson’s chicken farm and on the left was Ashton’s dairy farm with probably a hundred acres of rolling hills, dams and a smattering of cows and horses.  On the corner of our street lived an old guy everyone called ‘Smithy’.  We seldom saw him or his wife but they grew lots of daffodils and had vintage cars stored in their rusty large garage.

All too quickly the tee-tree bush and green hills were bulldozed to make way for housing development and soon we had lots more kids to muck around with after school and on weekends.  One of these new kids was Jimmy Cruickshank.   He was an ungamely, daredevil kid and we had lots of fun with him.  Dad liked him particularly and he got a lot of laughs out of Jimmy.  One day we noticed a bulldozer had been left down by the creek for the weekend and so we went to investigate.  We had the usual gang of kids and we all clambered over the bulldozer which was great fun until one of us somehow got it started.  It roared into action and scared the hell out of us so we jumped off and headed for cover.  When we were at a safe distance we started to think about what had happened and decided what we should do next.   “How did it start?”, we thought, “We didn’t turn a key?”   We agreed that we couldn’t leave it running all night so we asked Jimmy to go back and see if he could turn if off.  Jimmy reluctantly consented and made his way back to the scene of the crime.  Jimmy was about ten years old at the time and looked even smaller next to the Caterpillar dozer.  We watched expectantly from a distance as he climbed up and sat in the cushioned seat.  By that stage we noticed that no one had been alerted  to the incident so we came close by and yelled some directions for Jimmy.  “Can’t you turn if off?” we tried to scream over the roaring diesel engine.  Jimmy could see the desperation in our faces so he resorted to pulling some levers but to our distress the dozer leapt into action and started rolling forward.  He pulled around on yet another lever and the monster swivelled and when he let go we could see that Jimmy was heading for the creek.  There was a good chance Cruickshank could die out of this so we all yelled – “Jump, Jimmy Jump!”  It was no good, Jimmy seemed to be frozen behind the controls.  The dozer rolled up to the creek and just when it started to tip, Jimmy let go of the levers.  We were white with fear and our hearts were racing.  Thankfully Jimmy jumped off leaving the dozer tilted above the creek.  I don’t think we ever ran away so fast in our lives as we did that day. 

I'm very embarrassed to say that the very next day the dozers' workmen asked around the neighbourhood to see if any of us kids were playing on the machine.  I'm afraid to say that we lied though our teeth and said "No, we don't know anything about it."  On a final note, Mum never knew about this incident.