We just don’t hear stories like this anymore…

Once upon a time, long before the wonders of modern communication, including telephones, we spoke of and to each other as a means of relating our daily lives – and never (well, rarely) as gossip. People cared for each other, especially in smaller rural communities. It was the done thing for someone travelling through any given district to pass on messages from the area they’d just left.

They were wonderful times. We owned little – and owed even less! – taking all care and great pride in what we had. It was essential for us to be inventive, not only in the use of our tools and equipment but in the way we spoke. We were imaginative, using dry humour to tell the tales we told. Sadly, it’s a greatly lost art form which, as the years pass, ever fewer of us are able to recall.

I’ll pass on a couple of stories from back then, if I may, from that time long past. I never knew Snow, the dear old chap in the first tale; he died about the time I was born. I certainly knew Don, who features in the second tale. He was a huge man in every sense of the word and a true legend (at least in his own telling):

Snow and the Starlings

Snow was crippled in a farm accident and hadn’t been able to work for many years. He lived in a little two-roomed humpy around which he maintained a wonderful garden. Although his was an area of poor quality sandy loam, he built up the soil over time with humus, composting everything suitable he could lay his hands on. This worked wonders and Snow, although poor, never went without a decent meal. He kept some chooks, got a few bunnies – a good pelt brought in an extra threepence, too – and often swapped some of his veges for a nice cut of meat from one of the surrounding farmers, including my grandfather.

Life was pretty good. Snow was a man of good humour but one thing forever pestered him: Starlings! The darned things used to breed in their thousands and half the district population seemed to gravitate onto his land! They made a mess of garden beds, scratching out new plants that were pushing their heads above ground. Snow even begrudged the active grey birds the worms they took from the soil he’d so lovingly enriched.

One morning, he came out and saw one lot of starlings scratching away in his garden, with the next shift all lined up along the fence, patiently awaiting their turn. As he said, they were pretty well organised. They’d been a real problem for some days and he was annoyed at sight of the damned things back again for another foray into his garden. He went back into the humpy and grabbed his 20-gauge shotgun, only to find there was just one cartridge left. Loading up, he went back outside.

Grandfather chuckled. He said that the noise of a single shot would only scare the birds away for a few minutes but Snow said no, he had a plan. He took aim at the first bird on the fence and swung the gun along the fenceline as he squeezed off the shot. Afterwards, walking over to the scene of carnage, he started to count. He’d shot and killed ninety-nine starlings. Grandfather reckoned Snow was pulling his leg and said so. “Anyway, my friend, why not make it a hundred birds and be done with it?”

“What…?” came the reply. “And make a liar of meself for the sake of one lousy starling…?!”

Old Don’s Big Trout

A river ran through the small town near where we lived, a stream that wound its way out to sea through several miles of mudflats. Wharves in the town always had a couple of trading boats tied up, disgorging or reloading cargo. There were odd occasions when a third boat might need to anchor overnight before having the chance to berth on the following day.

One night, the captain of one such boat realised it had come up on a mud bank. When he checked, the anchor was still in the river but separated from the substantial anchor chain. There seemed to be several links missing. Police checked but it all remained a mystery. The boat refloated on the rising tide, a steel hawser used to reconnect it to the anchor.

Old Don, back I those days, was a great fisherman. He seemed to have caught the biggest and best fish ever, in both sea and estuary. All you had to do was ask. Don was never backward at coming forward to regale you with yarns of his fishing prowess. It came to pass, just a few days after the incident of the boat running aground, that Don caught the biggest trout in history. Pity for him Guinness had yet to establish their books of records.

Don was out in his clinker dinghy, dropping some worms over the side to feed the hungry inhabitants of the water below. Problem was, he kept pulling up bare hooks. The fish were a bit too smart for him that morning. But then, all of a sudden, the rod in his hand bent almost double. He knew there was something pretty special on the end of his line – it had to be the brown trout everyone knew of as ‘Hungry’ . It took half an hour of patient work to exhaust the fish and drag it onto one of the mudflats. It was an enormous brownie and Don was certain it had to be Hungry. “Even I never seen nothin’ like it before,” he said later.

That fish weighed in at almost sixty pounds. Don was pretty chuffed at this new record, two-and-a-half times the best ever before weighed. That was until he gutted it. The fish then became a twenty pounder, well under the record! You see, opening it up answered why the trading boat had ended up on the mudflats a few nights earlier. In its gut were four ten-pound links from the anchor chain.

We just don’t hear these great tales any more…

What is your favourite tale? Share it with us in the comments below!