A HIGHWAY OF DEMONS - CHAPTER SEVEN

At last, the Doctor's back but will WJ get to see the '64 grand final?

A HIGHWAY OF DEMONS by Whispering Jack

CHAPTER SEVEN - PRETTY MARY

It was such a simple plan.

The Tardis was supposed to drop us off outside the ABC's Ripponlea studios on Saturday, 19 September, 1964 at as near as possible to 2.30pm. I was to be returned to the precise place where it had collected me long ago in the faraway past. The Doctor had given his assurance that, when this happened, my appearance would again be of a fifteen year old; the beard would be gone and the scars healed. I could return home to my parents and my sister and nobody would be any the wiser about our long sojourn in time and space ... but of course, only after I finally availed myself of the opportunity to attend the Grand Final. I wanted so much to discover how my beloved Demons had fared against the dreaded Magpies and whether they did indeed win their twelfth VFL premiership flag on that famous day in history.

I should have realised that, as with the great majority of the simple schemes hatched in the brilliant but erratic mind of The Doctor in the time I had known him, nothing ever went as planned. For all I knew, we might well have landed in 1964 this time but we were certainly not in Melbourne, Australia.

My guess was that we were in foggy London because somewhere behind us was the shadow of Big Ben. The three of us, the Doctor, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and I, stood there in a state of confusion as the big clock struck the hour of four o'clock. Darkness was already beginning to set in and we were shivering; clothed only in the attire of eternally sub tropical Gallifrey.

The Doctor muttered somewhat sheepishly and in unconvincing terms of a defective sonic screwdriver being thrown out of kilter by the proximity of the coming equinox but he stopped with the gibberish as he drew my attention to the building across the road. It was a music hall and I instantly recognised the main act whose performance was advertised for that very night.

I closed my eyes and listened to the music. The acoustic guitars, the perfect harmony and the inspiration of the words lifted my spirits. Back home, their music had long ago worn out the needle of my record player but now I was in their actual presence. No longer would I have to content myself with the remembrance of a grainy black and white image of the first time I saw her face. I was floating in space.

"I'm the kid who ran away with the circus,

Now I'm watering elephants,

But I sometimes lie awake in the sawdust,

Dreaming I'm in a suit of light."

Just a minute!

I suddenly realised that they weren't singing this repertoire back in 1964 when I left. Wasn't it all about marvellous little toys that go zip when they move, about Stewball the racehorse and about magic dragons named Puff that sadly disappeared from Jackie Paper's life?

Before I had an opportunity to reflect on this conundrum, the gray haired gentleman sitting behind us tapped The Doctor on the shoulder. In a clipped accent that could have been anything between American Yankee and East End cockney, he greeted my mentor.

"Who, it's you!"

"Charles. My lord, what a co-incidence. I haven't seen you since I left you in Hong Kong with the countess. You look positively distraught. What's the matter with you man?"

It transpired that we were in the presence of one of the greatest comic actors the universe had ever known – an elderly Charlie Chaplin, whose classic role as The Tramp from moviedom's silent age was legendary.

He could speak!

Far too loudly it would seem because, we were very quickly ushered out of the music hall by some burly attendants and we found ourselves sitting in a nearby tavern. My dream of meeting Pretty Mary was over and I had this feeling that I wasn't going to witness the 1964 Grand Final at any time soon.

"Time was talking,

Guess I just wasn't listening,

No surprise if you know me well."

Chaplin needed The Doctor's help. He was in the latter years of his life, ailing in health and he had a problem in the shape of a family heirloom, an emerald brooch, bequeathed to him in his mother's Last Will and Testament. He had recently discovered that the one that he had in his possession was a fake.

"The only time it could have possibly been substituted was while we were filming 'The Circus' back in 1927. I had befriended one of the bit actors who showed a liking for the brooch so I entrusted it to him for a while. It was during the time we were filming the scene with the zebra. Now that I think of it, he must have stuffed the real emerald inside the animal, made the exchange and removed it later. That's why I need to get back in time to recover my jewel – so that I can pass it on to my daughter Geraldine before I die. "

"Too risky for you, Charles. Time travellers aren't allowed to come face to face with their former selves, but we'll go back and get that emerald back to you in time for us to catch this evening's performance. It's a promise!"

And that my friends, is how I managed to witness the 1926 Grand Final, also played between Melbourne and Collingwood. In his haste to travel back in time, The Doctor neglected to repair that faulty sonic screwdriver and, after leaving an ecstatic and very grateful Charlie Chaplin behind us in the bar of London's Fiddlers Arms, we managed to overshoot our target again - this time by almost a year and three continents.

We landed in Melbourne in September, 1926, during grand final week. I pleaded with The Doctor to allow me to remain there so I could go to the big game and he acquiesced. It took him no time to find some lodgings in Swan Street and a ticket in the member's stand (in another incarnation, The Doctor had been a teammate of the great W.G. Grace) and then he took off to the States with Lethbridge-Stewart in their quest to solve the mystery of Chaplin's missing emerald, leaving me in what had been my home town four decades before all this started.

The Fuschias (as they were then known) played a very stop, start game from my point of view but, as they drew away from the Magpies in the second half of the game, the feeling in my heart was one of sheer exhilaration. Bob Johnson, a tall centre half forward whose son I remembered as a player in the fifties, kicked six goals, Herbie White was a brilliant rover and captain coach Bert Chadwick simply controlled the proceedings. We were treated to an exhibition of delightful skills from Ivor Warne Smith, the Brownlow Medallist of the year and, much to the chagrin of the Collingwood rabble, Melbourne went on to win by 57 points and to record its second premiership after 26 years of waiting. The long drought was over.

I sat in the stands beside an elderly man who introduced himself as Henry Harrison. It was only later, as I meandered down Yarra Park in the direction of Punt Road that it dawned on me that I had been sitting in the presence of one of the game's co-founders. Henry Colden Antill Harrison had written down the rules of the game with his cousin Thomas Wentworth Wills back in 1858. What's more, sitting next to him had been a man named Dick Wardill. Surely, he must have been the captain of the 1900 side that captured the club's first premiership? I really had been in the presence of legends.

My reverie was interrupted when I bumped into the familiar blue police box shape of the Tardis. The Brigadier grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and we were off into the ether. On the way back to London, I learned that The Doctor and the Brig had apprehended the thief on the set of The Circus as it was being filmed. The jewel had been stuffed into the eye of the zebra and the Brig, disguised as an elderly woman extra had communicated the news to The Doctor through one of those mobile phones they had mentioned were the sensations of the early Twenty-first Century. The thief had been caught and the real jewel was on its way back to its rightful owner.

Back in the London music hall, Chaplin was reunited with his long lost emerald and we enjoyed the second half of the evening's performance. At one point, a bearded Peter Yarrow appeared to glance in my direction and, with his buddy Paul Stookey, they started strumming their duelling guitars to a tune that sounded very much like, "It's a grand old flag". I was sure that when they stopped playing Mary Travers winked straight at me. By the time the evening was over, the spring of 1964 was the last thing on my mind.

"I'm the kid who has this habit of dreaming,

It sometimes gets me in trouble too,

But the truth is I can no more stop dreaming,

Than I could make them all come true."

[From "The Kid" written by Buddy Mondlock]

The opportunity to live your dreams might not come very often, so when it comes, grasp it with all your might.

Epilogue

This part of the story would never have been told but for an interesting discovery made by an Irish film buff whose persistence uncovered some unintended vision of Lethbridge-Stewart in the course of apprehending the villainous thief. Here it is on You Tube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6a4T2tJaSU. Now that the story has been well and truly exposed, I suppose The Doctor will come back to get me so that together we can find a way to erase the Brigadier's bungling efforts. With a bit of luck, I might also have the opportunity to describe to you the euphoria of 2014 when we … no, that's a bit too close to home.

Charlie Chaplin died on Christmas Day, 1977. The legend is that his daughter refused to accept his bequest of the green emerald and that it was buried with him. Not long after his body was interred in Corsier-Sur-Vevey Cemetery, Vaud, Switzerland, his corpse was stolen. The body was recovered but the jewel was never accounted for and I suppose that's another reason why we will have to go back one day.

Mary Travers passed away on September 16th, 2009. After successful recovery from leukaemia through a bone marrow/stem cell transplant, Mary succumbed to the side effects of one of the chemotherapy treatments.

We all loved her deeply and miss her beyond words.

TO BE CONTINUED