Back roads and Buddhists

[Maha]

Hitcher, you need to become an author or something.

He could be the next Tim Shadbolt...thread title is similar to Bullshit and Jellybeans.

[ellipsis]

...at 14 years old and not having been the model pupil at school, my wish to be an apprentice mechanic were dashed one sunday afternoon after I got home from rugby practice to find a stranger in our kitchen, drinking tea and eating mum's scones. Without any fore knowledge I was introduced to this bloke and learned within a few moments, that I was his apprentice and I was to be a carpenter. If that wasn't a big enough kick in the arse the next bit was....I was to be shipped off to the West Coast to start my new life, next week. I wasn't legally old enough to get a leaving certificate from school, but that seemed to be disregarded as irrelevant.

...next week came and I was in a Mk 2 Zephyr with some grumpy bloke on my way to my new life, building houses for Odlins Timber Company at Bell Hill near Lake Brunner. This was not to my liking at all but that was about as irrelevant as me being 14 and supposedly still meant to be at school, but it seemed I had burnt my bridges there by being the not so model pupil...

...upon arrival in a little ghost town called Te Kinga, on the edge of Lake Brunner which at that time was inhabited by a farmer and the old woman who ran the dolls house size post office, we were the only other inhabitants, it seemed...lots of falling down houses still existed and one of them was ours...
I was told I could have one of the front rooms...I chose the one that had the most wall left and nailed a mattress in the hole where the window frame had once been...it was so cold that I slept on a damp old mattress under another damp old mattress...we started work the next day...up at six, bacon and eggs cooked on the coal range, put the tin of bully beef an onion and the butter in the nail box with a loaf of bread and headed off to Bell Hill, about a twenty minute drive away...the boss was a cunt and I was young and not as hard as I thought...after a ten hour day with bully beef and onion sandwiches for lunch we drove back to the Moana pub where the boss would drink piss for an hour or so while I sat in the car or kicked stones on the road outside...when he came out with a glow on and got in the car it seemed like he was almost about to smile, the only time he ever looked that way...we got back to Te Kinga where I had to rekindle the coal range and wait forever for a fatty bit of mutton to cook...as soon as we had eaten it was time to crawl under the mattress and I was usually unconscious within seconds...the only variation to this regimen was muddy old lake flounders that someone in the pub would give him...
...at the time I thought I was in some kind of living hell...we were there for over a year...I got home about three times in that year and one of those times was only because the boss wanted to get to see some of the Commonwealth Games that were being held in Chch that year...10 hour days 7 days a week...week in and week out..

...I didnt realise then what a favour that arsehole had done for me...I became a hard, tough, young lad who by the time he was sixteen had done enough hours of the apprenticeship that I was a 'tradesmen' by 17 ...learned enough about myself to know I didn't need other people around me to keep me safe or fed or coddled...but best of all, with no time off I had accumulated more money than I new existed...

...with my money I bought a 1962 Mk2 Zephyr and a 1971 Suzuki 250 Hustler, up-swept pipe model...the Zephyr got wrecked in a tussle with a tree and was relegated to a forgotten place, the Suzuki fucking near killed me constantly and kept me broke repairing the dinged bits...I'll always have a soft spot for those hard times when I was a new apprentice on the coast...if not for my mum squashing the forlorn hope of me being a mechanic and getting a size 11 boot in my arse from a surly builder the Suzuki may never have happened and what would have become of me then?...