Furry The Builder

Ok, guys. I was away with my kids last week, so you only got one chronicle. So invoke the SOP, which you should all be familiar with by now and we'll get started. Like in the previous story, this takes place when I was a young Furry, living in a new housing estate. Well, as with any property development, houses started to be built. It was in the days when there were no fences around these sites. No one broke windows, no one pinched stuff.

The builders didn’t care if they turned up to work & there was a dozen kids running around the house with guns built from off cuts of wood & dropped nails, playing war. Shit, you could even have lunch with them, or at least, I used to.

You see, I was getting paid a shilling (one bob, 10 cents) for collecting all the off cut wood & rubbish & piling it up out the front. It was also in the days when builders used handsaws, hammers & nails. So there were always the dropped nails on the ground where these guys worked.

Well I started keeping an empty nail box or two. I’d pick up the dropped nails, clean them on my T-shirt if required, and then started filling up the empty nail boxes. When my builder mates returned, I presented them with a full box of “recovered” nails. The older builder (obviously the boss) asked me where I got them.

“Off the ground all around here & inside the house”, I informed him. Then I told him how they were cleaned, (by wiping them on your shirt of course) and repacked exactly like they were when he got them from the shop, (ie all the nails standing up, one point up, one point down).

“When’d you do this?” he asked,

“After you went home” I replied.

He was so wrapped and I got 3 bob a box for recovered nails.

Mum came over early in the piece & said to the builders “If he’s any trouble or getting in your way, just send him home”. The boss Builder replied, “Naw he’s alright missus, no problem at all”.

It then got so bad that my Mum hated the weekends, because I couldn’t “go to work” and spent the day walking around the house in a shitty mood. So, instead of having me carry on & being miserable, she’d send me off to the sites & clean up and recover nails anyway.

That suited me because my working days were getting busier because I was helping “hold stuff” while they got nailed to the wall. Or moved planks of wood (floor boards) around the rooms for my builder mates to nail down. I even went out to the Ute to get hammers, saws, levels, and all sorts of cool stuff.

It got to the point that Mum used to pack me sandwiches, frozen cordial in a bottle & off to work I’d go at 6.55am in the morning, with my little TAA (now defunct Aussie airline) bag my Poppy gave me.

The drive to work was never a problem for me; you’d just walk across the paddocks. Even better, the guys would sometimes also have to buy lunch, (because morning tea was eaten for breakfast, lunch was eaten for morning tea, so something had to replace the now relocated original lunch).

On these days they’d “shout” lunch for me as well. And that something else that replaced the original lunch was a meat pie & tomato sauce (or in Aussie slang, “Dog’s eye & dead horse”).

Man, these were the BEST, big chunks of meat (beef), gravy & quite often, home made tomato sauce. As opposed to the over processed crap we eat today. Imagine, two or three big burly blokes, (were talking mid 1960’s here), overalls, flannel shirt, boots, sitting on boxes & the like, eating meat pies & drinking soft drink, with a little “Mini-me”, dressed almost exactly the same, copying them letter perfect.

The guys were so taken to have a Mascot that Mrs Boss made me a pair of overalls, one of the other blokes brought me a flannel shirt & mum brought me a pair of black gum boots, (there wasn’t steel cap boots available in size “Mini-me” in those days).

So yeah, if you ever wondered when a Furry starts to become a Furry, it’s probably at birth. I mean this story was when I was about 4 ½ to 5 years old. It was before playstations, Xboxes & personal computers.

It was before I knew what Wars really were & had no idea what a Terrorist was. It was when I was young & innocent.

It was well before I knew how to “blow shit up”. It was well before I was trained to live off the land & make things that go bang out of kitchen products, and things you’d find in a farm shed.

It was before I was trained to be a “homeland” terrorist should we be invaded, come under attack & become separated behind the lines. It was well before the attacks in London and Bali & those on September 11,would make me feel dirty.

I’ll apologise here & now for forcing the readers to sit & wade through what was probably a mountain of boring shit. I know it’s not the usual “tongue in cheek, blow shit up, injuring & crippling of little brothers” stories of my past, but today, that just seems a little to disrespectful. I just wanted to remember when I was innocent, once, a long time ago.