IAN C SMITH’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, North of Oxford, Rundelania, The Spadina Literary Review, Stand, & Westerly.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island 

Arriving back in England after so many years I first visit my birthplace near London where even the smells have me reminiscing.  From here the plan is to travel south along the Thames Estuary, then north along the coast.

 As we were freed from Sunday school we all heard the short screech of brakes.  A boy who lived near me was known for scaring drivers by sauntering saucily in front of them.  I think I disliked him because he was bolder than me.  I feared being run over after seeing a stricken dog’s blank eye bulging from its stilled face in the gutter.  The jam factory closed until Monday, its usual burnt sugar smell diminished, my parents chose to potter in our miniature garden while our roast dinner bubbled in the oven, contributing to the neighbourhood olfactory menu change, rather than cleansing their sins.  Our junior scripture, wasted on us, was their chance for a break.  My mother had no idea of my commitment to her.

Riding his luck, that silly boy had also ridden a car’s grille.  We both had sensible older sisters.  I had already crashed my sister’s bike, breaking my arm.  His travelled to the hospital in the ambulance, comforting him.  He wasn’t badly hurt.  The rest of us rocketed home with our dramatic news.  My mad dash was impeded by a stitch from clutching my collar.  My sister, perhaps not always so sensible, had instilled in me the belief that when you see an ambulance you must hold your collar until you see a dog, lest your mother died.  Like some of us, the American T-shirt had yet to emigrate.  Due to regular unwanted sightings of ambulances, often from buses, and dogs, although numerous, hiding when I needed them most, I only disproved my sister’s morbid dictum much later, a tardy laxness ending with guilty relief.

My family emigrated to Australia where that boy’s family also headed, where he became a policeman.  An early school leaver, like him, I also found employment in an asteroid belt of hazards, a welding shop, where I fantasised about travelling.  Sparks arced from steel melted by heat in that flashy crackling ghetto, shadows pulsing where men toiled to make ends meet.  Tension simmered beneath crude camaraderie like a live nerve, with me Rilke’s panther trapped in a cage.  I kept quiet there about my burgeoning reading solace.  In that acrid netherworld of freckled light immigrants padded their vocabularies.  That masquerade of spectral figures with shields and wands wearing identical overalls, who could have been space warriors, or prisoners, did little for the immigrants’ language education.  Morale was weary, likewise, morality.

A newly-wed German listened to, asked, and copied us, occasionally with odd results.  He managed to explain about an impending weekend visit to his English aunt, another immigrant, but, unlike us, well-to-do.  Grasping a finger-printed mug of sweet black tea I tried to help with advice he sought regarding manners, etiquette, while others competed to hector us with vulgar suggestions.  On the Monday after his social call the German raged in pent-up, back-to-front mispronounced oaths that doubled up the blue-flashed denizens of our Tartarus, the molten metal mob, in guffaws.  The posh aunt had cut him like an oxy-acetylene torch in front of his bride, felling him with outraged scorn when, uncomfortable in his pressed suit, the German lad had suggested: ‘Would you please shift your slack arse to pass the fucking jam, Auntie?’  Or words to that effect.

Overcoming my velleities, bridges burned, finally educated but love still elusive, I feel so alive back where I started with my boyhood imagination.  Driving through England looking hard at everything, I wonder about all I have missed while away, their shadows and echoes, now, in this cliché, my supposed mid-life crisis, albeit early.  Anxious, I, now we, move on, never stopping long in my ancestral land of ancient sorrow.  In Norfolk, an argument east of The Wash, ours no larksong at break of day arising, we approach an old man wearing a cloth cap with a horse, both their noses whiskery in grey light.  A man, a horse, a cart, a sign.  Should be a palindrome.  Yes, my argumentative partner, her Australian accent rapid, twangier than mine, wants to take the ride, but with the reins in her experienced hands.  English caution irritates her.  The old man hears us out before agreeing to a test drive.  He watches, worried.  But I understand the need for money.  Scavenging gulls also scrutinise her merry-go-rounding Wells-next-the-sea’s otherwise empty carpark.  Sticking close to the old man, deferential, I talk her up as if sharing secret knowledge.  You’d think she was Clancy of the Overflow’s direct descendant.

Our high seat a magic carpet, carriage erect, pert bottom sticking out like Chaucer’s Alisoun’s, her impatience with the Brits is ever-present.  The morning air, still, with few cars, brings to mind Eliot’s certain half-deserted streets, and regular glimpses of the North Sea captivate me, horseshoes echoing on tarmac.  That horse taking over, I ask my abrasive Queen Boudicca – East Anglia’s own – how she knows where to navigate her chariot.  ‘The horse does,’ she says.  ‘We’re just along for the ride,’ a fair description of our relationship.  Early shoppers like figures in a Lowry painting stop, stare at the strangers with the familiar horse, its pace increasing.  I wave to them languidly.  ‘We must be heading back,’ my woman says.  Wanting to believe her compelling logic, concerned, I ask if she is in control.  ‘Hardly,’ she says. ‘Stop waving like the queen, you show-off.’  She does seem happier.  In her element, I suppose.  Beyond the horizon I picture Europe, geography as reality, mind fizzing only with travel’s romance, not the errancy of our ways.  Then the old man looking lonely.  Flushed with success, she is kind to him.  Relief in his tone, he says he knew we would be all right, his demeanour a wavering lighthouse beam of warning we might well heed.