Man’s world

In which our amiable Southern man relies on a cantankerous neighbour to do his dirty work.

Joe Bennett presents a tale to make you grateful for your cranky neighbour.

Some months ago, it was brought to one’s attention – how’s that for pompous? – that the beautiful people had taken to reading this column in order to discover what the fashionable gardener was growing this season. Well, you can imagine one’s reaction. Indeed, you read one’s reaction. Remember those columns praising improbable plants? Red herrings the lot. And by all accounts, they worked. The gardens of Ponsonby this last season were apparently thick with nasturtiums and forget-me-nots.

Eventually, of course, the social climbers woke to the deception and have been frantically hauling the herrings from their soil. But what to grow in their stead? Unable to trust what I write, they now want to see what I plant, and are apparently planning a trip south with a view to sneaking onto my neighbour’s property in order to peer over the fence at my little piece of paradise and take notes.

And all I can say (you will notice that I have abandoned the one stuff, for I wish to speak man to man here with no pronouns standing between us) is good luck to them. For the neighbour is a retired Abyssinian steelworker, short of stature, temper and cash. But not, and this is rather the point, of combativeness. His hobby, in retirement, has been an intimate study of the law of trespass with particular reference to the various household items that victims of criminal trespass have got away with using in self-defence.

So on a beautiful Sunday morning last spring, it came as no surprise that, when an itinerant evangelist knocked on the neighbour’s door in a bid to entice him into the welcoming arms of the lord, I heard the screams from my place.

Three months later, the case came to court, the Abyssinian being charged with assault with a dangerous weapon, to wit a beesmoker. Defending himself through an interpreter, my neighbour pointed to the case of Crown v Turnpike in which the said Reginald Turnpike, a Gallipoli veteran and part-time bee-keeper, had seen off a burglar in New Plymouth in 1937 by blinding him with smoke from his smoker, rendering him semi-conscious with a blow to the skull, removing his trousers and threatening to, and I quote, “smoke you like a kipper.”

According to a witness, the burglar fled for his life down the main street of New Plymouth, naked from the waist down, to the delight of the many small children playing there. Not only was Mr Turnpike acquitted on all charges, he was cheered to the echo by the crowd in the courtroom, judge included, and then carried out shoulder high by the jury that had acquitted him.

My Abyssinian neighbour did not meet with quite such acclaim. Indeed, after the prosecution pointed out that his bee-smoker was twice the size of a conventional beesmoker, that it had been sharpened at one end, that it had been hung on a hook just inside the front door and that, significantly, the Abyssinian had never been known to keep bees, it came as a shock that he was acquitted at all. But acquitted he was, which led to one of the more memorable evenings up this way for a while.

Quite where all the other Abyssinians came from I can’t tell you, but the singing went on late into the night, the recycling truck had to make a double visit the following Thursday to collect the bottles, and the bonfire, topped with a life-sized evangelist fashioned from straw and soaked in kerosene, was apparently visible from Diamond Harbour. One just thought one should mention it.