One day in Assembly I witnessed a horrific accident. A man had just attached the chain for the gantry to lift a load, but he went up with it, for his middle finger was caught in the link of one of the chains. He was yelling and the men around him were yelling at the gantry driver to stop. The man had been lifted about a foot off the ground when suddenly he dropped down, quite lightly, on his feet, while the load still lifted. And there, from his finger caught in the link to the bloody mess of his upraised knuckles was a long white cord. It was his tendon stretching.
    The gantry was lowered and his finger freed, and he walked off holding the finger in his good hand, the over-extended tendon still drooping. “Did you see the way the fucker stretched?” he was laughing, babbling, to those who led him off for medical attention.
    I don’t know what happened to him after that. I was in the dunny vomiting up lunch and morning tea and breakfast and last night’s late snack and dinner and every other morsel that was there to be vomitted. And I was not alone. Soon these hard men sat around, green-faced, smelling of chunder, laughing about it all.
    “There’s a lesson for yer, kiddo,” Bert Hanley guffawed. “Never insert your finger into a chain link.”
    “Nar,” another bloke said. “Save it for the bloody sheilas.”

Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw the lodge was uninhabited.
No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gaped forlorn. Then like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me…
    So begins Rebecca, an outstanding piece by Daphne du Maurier, turned into an outstanding movie by Alfred Hitchcock, but even he was no match for the reading experience. The reason is obvious enough—the timid, dowdy second wife narrates the tale of how she was haunted by the ghost of her husband’s first wife—the lovely and tragically dead creature of the title—and the only place you can really experience such a condition is from inside the victim’s head. Her every thought and action is driven by her obsession with her glamorous predecessor such that the stunning conclusion—which I will not spoil for those who have not treated themselves to this superb novel—comes as a devastating shock.
    An inspired effort by Daf and clear proof that no matter how clever movies become, the novel will never die. Even Hitchcock seemed to acknowledge that fact, for he who never otherwise felt the need to use narrators in his films—preferring always to tell his stories and depict emotions by cinematic effects—had the sense to use those eerie lines quoted above as voice-over in the opening scenes of his movie.
    But in 1963, the favour would be returned, as Hitchcock made use of a very minor du Maurier story to create another of his most stunning and frightening films.