Competition

Billy in a China Shop
by Ruth Tuxworth
Roadvale, Qld

"Look at that!" I'd said to her, and so look at it we did,
a battered rusty billy with a wonky, crumpled lid.
It lay against a chamber-pot - a "rustic -chic" display,
a clutch of plastic lavender and a tired bale of hay.

"So authentic!" sighed the creature who maintained the city store,
selling china and antiques and, ..." A Little Something More.”
She had scented hands, a painted face and artificial lashes.
Amid her lacquered orange curls were diamante flashes.
With a languid purple fingernail she scratched a powdered nose.
When I asked about the billy can, she actually rose.

She clattered over to us and in language quite obtuse,
Said the "antique chefs receptacle for open fire use"
was an item with a "history", a "Darling little piece."
an Australiana mystery of wire, rust and grease.
And since all antiques were "delicate", to handle it with care,
And her no-refund policy applied on items old and rare

I picked it up a moment and I held it to my face,
-breathed in the smell of Bushells and some distant, open place.
It was the smell that yanked me back there, to when I was eight or nine,
when holidays meant barefoot ways and the whole wide world was mine!
We had camped a lot with Dad - he often called us "billy-lids"
-and he had near a dozen scruffy, tumble-headed kids.

With a car brimful of arms and legs and sleeping bags and tickles,
and cricket bats and books and snags and squabbles, jokes and freckles,
We would flee the built-up areas, -the rodents in their races,
and live awhile in regal style in wide and grey-green spaces.

With hats and thongs and billabongs, life was far less hasty.
Morning smells seemed sharper, camping tucker far more tasty .
Fried bread, eggs and bacon in a bent cast iron pan,
And a never-ending cuppa brewed in ash-black billy cans.
Perhaps it was creek-water. or the gum leaf in the pot.
But billy tea seemed to be strong and sweet and hot.

And I cut my toes on oyster shells when we camped at cotton tree.
Our legs got burned just catching worms by a crimson sunset sea.
And we fossicked up at Agate Creek in unrelenting heat,
filled our pockets up with treasures, grubby hands and blistered feet.
We got flooded in Banana when we tried to pitch the tent
The canvas bellied, full of rain and the tent-poles all got bent.

We went south to see Swan Hill through granite country, hard and old,
Saw Winter Bathurst poplars, weird and pale, bare-limbed and cold.
By the end we were exhausted, we all longed for home and soon,
drove endless night-time hours beneath a Goondiwindi moon.

And in all my memory snapshots, and in every camping fire,
There hangs a blackened billy on a crooked hook of wire.
And in misty dawns remembered, and in chilly evenings' lee,
There is always warmth and comfort, there is honest billy tea.
As I stood there in the shop, I set the billy on the shelf,
and I wondered where the child was who had since become myself.

I saw it with the shudder of an urgent sympathy,
and something in the billy reminded me of me.
It seemed to me the billy didn't feel at all at home,
Didn't live there with the china, with the shelves of steel and chrome,
And I felt within my office wear, within my shoes and hose,
a wiggling wild, bare-shouldered child, with freckles on her nose.

And I have gotten busy lately with efficiency and pace,
With "best -practices" and "policies"  with gravity and grace;
With acquiring and with having; with remorseless renovating;
with upgrading and downsizing with a haste I end up hating.

And I have been so busy lately and I think it's time to stop,
lest I loose something I need, something maybe I forgot;
lest pursuing all the having I forget the joy of being;
lest in hurrying to get there I miss all that I am seeing;
lest I end up feeling "wrong”, like I somehow don't belong;
lest I find a sudden grieving when I don't remember leaving;
lest the happiness in small things and the miracle of all things
be a child I once was being and I currently am not;
...lest I end up like a billy in an antique china shop.