My old Aunt Mildred is as tough as a red gum stump and as prickly as a cranky echidna on an ants nest, but even she would have to admit she’s starting to fall apart at the seams.
The municipal councillors called an extraordinary general meeting and tried to get her to move into an old people’s home, but the stubborn old fool wouldn’t hear of it. She glared at the mayor as if he’d just crawled out of the sewage farm, without his clothes on, and then insulted the other good officers who were only trying to help.
Mildred stood belligerently; hand on hip, a steely eye spelling trouble for anyone daring to cross her. ‘I’ve been in that house since I was born, ninety-two years ago,’ she said testily, ‘and I'm starting to like the place.’
“Should let it fall on her stupid head,” I thought to myself bitterly. “Hot in summer under the rusty tin roof and freezing cold in winter. Not to mention the broken windows, doors hanging off their hinges and the cold wind, straight off The Mullockgoolie Mountains, whistling up through the rotting floorboards.”
What upsets me she tells anyone, who cares to listen, what a useless no-hoper I am because I won’t repair it but to be honest it’s too far gone.
In a moment of stupidity I even offered her a room in my shack, but she reckons all I want her for is to cook and clean. ‘I’m not going to be a servant to the likes of you.’ she told me scornfully, ‘I might be getting old but I ain’t getting stupid.’
In a way it would solve me a few problems but that’s not the reason I asked, I’m genuinely fond of her, sometimes. ‘I know you’re not stupid Mildred but we can’t repair your house any more it’s full of white ants.’
She glared. ‘Rubbish, you’re as hopeless as your father. He couldn’t nail two pieces of wood together to save his life, and the stupid idiot was full of excuses, just the same as you are.’
Each year Aunt Mildred takes off, for two weeks, to see her older sister, Gerty, up in the hills. They chop firewood for the coming winter and spend plenty of time drinking rum and planning another year’s mischief for some poor unsuspecting fool, namely me.
But this year I decided to solve the problem, once and for all, and saw a golden opportunity on the very night she left. I went around and set the hovel on fire, simple as that then waited until it was fiercely burning and wandered up to the local fire station, to alert our enthusiastic band of volunteers, strolling the long way around because it’s quite nice by the river in late autumn.
An hour or so later, after a couple of quick beers, I rounding up the volunteers from the pub, and the well oiled fire brigade went tearing down the road in a mad rush, but the fire was almost out when they arrived. They were fully prepared though, Charlie Winthrop had a bag of potatoes to throw on the hot coals and Fatso McGinty came over from the ‘Drover’s Dog’ with a few dozen coldies, for there’s nothing quite like a good fire to bring country people together. Sergeant Jenkins, after completing his arson check, said it was one of the best house warmings he’d been to in years.
Realising it would take some explaining, over the telephone, to Aunt Mildred, I decided to wait until she came back home before breaking the bad news. Why worry the old lady unnecessarily, while she was still enjoying herself and no doubt getting the birch broom ready to fly back home on?
When she arrived back in town I explained about the accidental fire and, according to Sergeant Jenkins’s report, faulty wiring was the problem. Then I drove her around to see if there was anything we could salvage: Photographs, letters, personnel things. She walked through the devastation sadly shaking her head, then turned to me and said. ‘It’s a good thing I sent all the valuables over to my sister, when everyone started to nag me about moving into the old people’s home, but if I’d known it was going to take my stupid nephew this long to solve the problem I would have set fire to the dump twenty years ago.’
David I enjoyed that thanks
