Back o’ The Shed Jim introduces us to a flying friend who had no fear when it comes to flying under mainland bridges
There are some young geezers, still wet behind the ears, who simply refuse to believe it when you tell them that there was a time when delinquent lads were flayed with pliant bamboo rods as punishment for their transgressions.
These same callow whippersnappers, cosseted in cotton wool, roll incredulous eyes when you insist that entire cities used to warm themselves with coal, pumping a volcano’s worth of sulphur into a starless sky for weeks on end. Or that long-distance travel once involved being hauled by great, black, steaming K-class locos that used to stop for extended periods at remote sidings to refuel with … water!
Reared on tablets and twaddle and schooled by mollycoddling post-Freudians convinced one rebuke will cause lifelong trauma, our millennial YouBook and Facetube yooves cannot comprehend such unfathomable things.
Yet I, like you, know them to be true. For I, like you, was one of those delinquent lads bamboozled for badness. And I biked about on freezing nights when 30,000 smoking chimneys fouled the air. And, for four fab years in the fab four ’60s, on long weekends and school holidays I’d cross the alps to hang out with a pal, riding the rails to Greymouth, then taking the bus to Blackball, where much of the coal that went up those chimneys actually came from.
Not that pollution — or any other kindred scourges — particularly bothered us. We were too busy having fun, roaming bush tracks, startling fat wood pigeons, climbing tailing mounds, tossing red-lichened rocks into dredging ponds. There was an abandoned mine in the hills behind Blackball where a fire had started and coal was still burning underground 90 years later. The scree slope above was treeless, just bare stones with little wisps of smoke seeping through cracks in the earth.
Best of all, the favourite summer spot, was a place that always offered some different dare — the big weathered timber Blackball Bridge, spanning the wide Grey River. It was an imposing thing, a rough-hewn pioneer structure built with purpose for a purpose — to get trains in and take coal out. You could climb under it and over it and up its angled wooden flanks. And we did, for we had no fear.
But one thing we didn’t do, indeed a thing so rare and risky that it’s hard to believe anyone’s done it, is something I only heard about, along with other wondrous tales, a few short days ago.
The man telling the stories was Allan Ferrari; 76 years old and not a relative of Enzo’s — “The name’s as common as Smith over there.” Born in London in 1942, Allan came to New Zealand in 1953. Builder, linesman, hunter, pilot, he’s as tough as goat’s knees and has been in and out of sheds all his life. In 1964 he moved to Reefton and started playing darts. Well, one thing led to another and soon he was the West Coast champion, then a national rep and selector.
Which meant going to tournaments hither and yon. Unhappy driving for hours on end, Allan and a mate did the sensible thing and bought a plane. They flew their little Cessna 150 to working men’s clubs all over the country. One day, Allan thinks it was in 1978, the match was in Greymouth. So he took the plane. As you do.
Match over, it was back to Reefton. And since some of the team had travelled by car, that meant there had to be a race. And Allan had to win. So he banked the 150, dropped it down to take a shortcut just above the Grey River, and flew that little aeroplane straight as an arrow, right under the Blackball Bridge.
Straight under? You bet! First and only time it’s ever been done, Allan thinks. When he told that story, the older me remembered the younger me, standing on the bridge. And I imagined me watching a little plane zooming under the deck.
Or, better still, being in it. Because, now I know that it happened, I’ve never wished to be anywhere as much as I wish I’d been in the cockpit of that wee Cessna on that great day.