It didn’t take long for me and others like me to start figuring out ways of avoiding the Crunch. The one good thing about bodgies is because they have so little regard for intelligence, so they aren’t very bright. Week by week, I would search the school and surrounding region for hiding places, to which I could retire when the crunch was on. Some of these sustained me for months but inevitably circumstances would change or someone would blab, and I would be discovered and herded shamefaced to join the assembled rabble. I hid in the air conditioning system, and the rubbish bins, and under the floorboards everywhere. I found holes in the perimeter fence through which I could escape into neighbouring yards. But if I learned that no one can hide forever, still I could take pride in the number of crunches each hiding-place had allowed me to avoid.
Why were they all like stone statues ! Why was the fort so utterly and horribly silent ? Why did nothing move, there in the fierce sunlight of the dawn ? Why this tomb-like, charnel-house, inhuman silence and immobility ?...
When, as in a dream, I rode right round the place, and beheld more and more of these motionless silent forms, with their fixed, unwinking eyes, I clearly saw one of them, whose kepi had fallen from his head, had a hole in the centre of his forehead and was dead—although at his post, with chest and elbows leaning on the parapet, and looking as though he was about to fire his rifle !
I am rather near-sighted, as you know, but then the truth dawn upon me—they were all dead !
Beau Geste tells of three brothers from a wealthy family, the eldest of whom takes the blame when the families’ famous diamond is stolen (in fact mum flogged it years ago and the lad is covering up for her). He runs away to join the Foreign Legion, and his two loyal brothers go with him. Great yarn dominated by the cruel Sgt Markov (Lejune), the best of several movie versions starred Gary Cooper, Ray Milland and Robert Preston as the brothers and Brian Donlevy had the time of his life as Markov. It was a wonder but I stopped short of the many sequels by P. C. Wren although I did follow up with a bunch of stories under the grabbing title Dead Men’s Boots.
Having been shot twice, and rolled upon thrice by the big mule, Xarro was quite definitely dead. Being dead, he had no further use for his excellent boots—even less for them than I had for my old ones...
Apparently, anyone who takes a dead man’s boots will suffer the same fate the original owner did. Consider that next time you find a bargain in an Opp Shop.
