Cyclones, dunnies and a belated confession

A piercing shriek rang out as poor Janette thought the house was collapsing around her!

She ran out of the room without checking under the bed, but our Dad stormed in and caught me crawling out, laughing.

He didn’t see the joke and delivered a stern tongue lashing.

“How could you do that to your sister? You know cyclones are no joking matter, John, half the town has probably suffered damage. People can get killed!”

Janette heard none of that, and in her mind, she had been a victim of my older brother, Alan. She schemed her revenge and was not in any rush to get even.

The schoolhouse had a dinkum dunny way down the back yard, with the wooden structure attached to a wrap-around corrugated iron screen for added privacy.

Janette waited until her older brother was answering a call of nature, then put her own wicked plan into action. She rapped on the iron sheeting with a big piece of wood and laughed as Alan came running out, hitching up his shorts, convinced the dunny was about to take off. Naturally he didn’t see the joke, but I thought it was hilarious. Two birds with the one stone…

Ironically, ours was about the only dunny in town to survive – some went walkabout, somersaulting into neighbouring properties, which would have been pretty scary for any occupant. It was probably the iron privacy screen that kept it in place on the low wooden stumps and really stopped the brown stuff hitting the fan!

Later that day the wind started to ease from cyclonic to gale force, and I ventured off on my bike with best mate, Rover the kelpie-cross, to survey the damage.  Trees down everywhere, and the old brickworks down the road had lost most of its roofing iron. Thankfully, its tall red brick chimney was unscathed.

I met up with a few fellow-adventurer schoolmates also making the most of another holiday, and we invented a new mode of travel. No need to pedal our bikes, just let the wind balloon our plastic raincoats from behind and it was something akin to wind surfing on wheels through the shallow water covering the road.

We also made an unusual discovery - miles away from Stewart Creek which split the village in two, there were perch and herrings swimming in the water above the bitumen road.

It hadn’t rained cats and dogs, but somehow these fish appeared seemingly from nowhere, maybe lifted by the cyclonic winds just like Dorothy and her pet dog Toto in that Kansas tornado.