A HIGHWAY OF DEMONS - CHAPTER ONE

A HIGHWAY OF DEMONS by Whispering Jack

CHAPTER ONE - MY BACK PAGES

"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

- Bob Dylan [My Back Pages]

If you live in a world that consists of just three dimensions then you may not appreciate or even understand my story. It began a long, long time ago and I'm not sure that it's over...

On a crisp morning in the spring of '64 I was a bundle of nerves, the stress made no less bearable because of the thought that today I would not be at the Melbourne Cricket Ground where my team was about to fight it out for the Victorian Football League premiership against the most dreaded of all enemies - the evil black and white army of Magpies!

You're in your teens. You don't have a ticket to the big game in town and your team is playing off in the grand final. Life can be tough for a young kid but sometimes you just luck it out. All you need is patience and a benefactor.

Every Saturday morning at seven o'clock I would load milk bottles into the refrigerator of Mr. McShane's milk bar where I worked on weekends. My mother had played a major role in convincing him to give me the job as a store assistant. She had insisted to him that she was also a native of his old home city of Manchester although her broad Polish-Yiddish accent gave the lie to that tale. To my knowledge there was no Manchester in Poland. Only in England.

By eight o'clock I had swept the floors, loaded the pie warmer, dusted the counter, cleaned the windows and prepared the ice cream canisters so that all would be in readiness for another busy morning. The customers would begin to stream in and every one of them would head, almost as if by remote control, in the direction of the stack of newspapers at the back of the store. Most of them would select the early morning edition of the Sun News Pictorial and invariably they would ignore the front page headlines and turn to the sports reports on the back page.

Of course, the boss regarded such behaviour with contempt. He was one of the others - he listened to the ABC and he avidly followed the politics of a faraway world. Mr. McShane was a teenager when he fought at Gallipoli in a war he often described as a "useless exercise." I often worried about him because whenever he referred to his war experiences he would take on an agonised look. Often he would recite poetry. Much later, I discovered that someone from the other side, a Turkish poet, had written the words he favoured -

"Stop, passer-by! The earth you have just unknowingly trodden is the spot where an era ended and where the heart of a nation beats."

Now, half a century later, he tuned into the wireless for news of another war; one that was being fought somewhere in Indo-China. He agonised over the fact that so few knew or even cared about what was happening in the faraway jungles of Asia. Sometimes, he became agitated and blared out the warning that "if they listened to me we'd get out of that godforsaken place before it tears us apart." You didn't argue with Mr. McShane but you sometimes wondered why on earth he bothered with such things as politics - especially during the football season.

Mr. McShane was disappointed this particular morning because even the ABC news was all about the VFL Grand Final between traditional rivals Melbourne and Collingwood. By exactly three minutes past eight o'clock, frustration had the better of him. He shook his head in resignation, sighed deeply, rolled his first cigarette of the day with those gnarled yellow-brown fingers and hands and went out to the back for a smoko leaving me to deal with the customers and with my own sense of heightened tension. The time for the game was slowly approaching.

The moments lingered and I spent them listening to the newsreader as he moved on to the weather report. I almost lapsed into a dream when the news ended and merged into background music. There were still three months to go to Christmas but the tune they were playing was unmistakeable. "Silent Night" sung in sweet harmony by two males but with another deep American voice reading in the background, the volume slowly rising to a crescendo:

"In Washington the atmosphere was tense today as a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Un-American activities continued its probe into anti-Viet Nam war protests.

Demonstrators were forcibly evicted from the hearings when they began chanting anti-war slogans.

Former Vice-President Richard Nixon says that unless there is a substantial increase in the present war effort in Viet Nam, the U.S. should look forward to five more years of war.

In a speech before the Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in New York, Nixon also said opposition to the war in this country is the greatest single weapon working against the U.S.

That's the 7 o'clock edition of the news,

Goodnight."

The front door buzzed and the man who would be my saviour entered the store.

Charlie was the doorman at the nearby television studio, a regular customer who came in on cue at the same time every Saturday morning to purchase his newspaper and his three packets of Turf Filter Tipped. Today he noticed the forlorn look on the face of the kid decked out for work in a red and blue guernsey. Charlie knew at once that the sad countenance could only be the result of the lack of an entry ticket to the match of the year.

"It's not the same as being there but if you come to the back door of the studio before the start, I'll let you in," he told me.

"You can watch the live feed coming in from the outside broadcast van at the ground.

"We show it every year for all the local old age pensioners and there'll be room for one more if you come along".

The studio was near the picture theatre where I used to hang out with my mates on holidays. If you walked there from the shopping strip you passed the local police station and courthouse. We were once picked up and questioned by a young copper who claimed we were "jaywalkers". He never pressed charges against us; a fortunate circumstance that might have been a result of the fact that we gave him false names and addresses. I was Brian Dixon and my friend Frank Mills, who supported Essendon, called himself Johnny Birt.

I always felt a trifle uncomfortable whenever I passed the local cop shop and on this day, as I marched towards the ABC studios, I had a particularly uneasy feeling even though the young constable was nowhere to be seen.

Suddenly, the street fell silent and I sensed a strange vibration accompanied by a high-pitched whine that lasted only seconds before everything was back to normal. In an instant, the birds twittered, a dog barked mournfully in the distance and even the old blue London bobby's police box outside the station glistened in the sunshine.

A police box!

I was wondering why I had never noticed it before and was about to dismiss it from my mind (after all, there were more important things happening today) when a grey haired old man jumped out of the doorway and nearly bowled me over in the process. He was clearly distressed.

"Pardon me son but I'm here about the demons. You must take me to see them at once," he said. I noticed him brandishing a copy of the Sun newspaper with a preview on its back page of the day's grand final written by football writer Lou Richards.

"Yeah. Sure," I replied. "Follow me".

It was clear that this old man was not fully in control of his faculties. He claimed he was a doctor but he seemed nervous and was muttering about the urgency of his visit; repeating that it was all about the demons. He went on and on about losing his supersonic screwdriver and how he had been put off course on account of the high power transmission lines of the television studio. I did what had to be done. I delivered the old doctor into the safe arms of Charlie at Channel 2 and then sat down to relax and watch the footy in peace.

The arrival of the visitor took Charlie by surprise but I was relieved to discover that the old man appeared to be known to our doorman.

"Welcome Mr. Hartnell. I wasn't aware that you were visiting our city. I love the series. Look, why don't you sit yourself down here?"

I noticed that Charlie hadn't called him "doctor".

Inside the auditorium where the game was being screened there was very little sitting room available. Charlie gave my companion a seat next to mine, a decision that was to prove disastrous for a young football supporter who simply wanted to see his team playing off in the most important game of the year.

The television monitors flickered in monocolour as they treated us to the first sight of our champions running onto the field before the start of the game. Streamers swayed gaily in the light breezes that circled the Melbourne Cricket Ground and, for those who supported one of the competing teams, the moment was one of high tension.

Still, there was not a single person in the room who looked more nervous and agitated than the doctor. Without warning, he rose and shook me violently by the shoulders complaining that I was letting him down. I wasn't helping him to find the demons. He insisted we should be there in person searching for "them" instead of wasting our time in a room "full of old fogies" and, grabbing me by the arm with great strength, he led me outside. The captains were tossing the coin under puff-white clouds interspersed with sunshine.

We stood by the sidewalk squinting in the sunlight as the doctor grappled about in his pockets in a desperate search for the key to the blue police box. I should have been worried. I was missing the opening moments of the grand final and I was with a delirious old man who had a mad fixation about finding the demons. But I wasn't nervous at all because, after all is said and done, a man with a key to a police box couldn't be a bad person. Could he?

My disposition changed entirely when we entered what should have been a cramped little police box but the inside of this contraption was like ... well, some sort of space ship. Over time, I would come to understand that this was the TARDIS. Time and relative something in space smells sweet by any name but this was a quite weird spaceship. It could travel anywhere. In space. In time. In your imagination.

Of course, I was unaware of all of this when I walked through its doors for what was the first time to see a large control room with screens, bright flashing lights, levers and pulleys. I was too stunned to think and I didn't really believe this could possibly be a vehicle capable of taking us half way across town to the football ground even as the doctor continued to insist it would.

You can imagine my chagrin therefore when he took to the controls and announced that the search for the demons was not going to take us to the M.C.G after all. At least not yet. The autumnal equinox was a matter of a day or two away and we were off to Stonehenge!

It was at this point in time, that I think I blacked out.

[TO BE CONTINUED...]