Eventually, I’d inherit that autographed bat and realise the error of my ways.
I’ve never been good at telling bric-a-brac from outright heirlooms. Houses aren’t like museums, where they plaster every item with a history and thereby a value. For a kid, the only way to find out if some gewgaw idling in the living room is precious is to break it. This will bring about a valuation of the item from your parents pronto, usually, in my experience, delivered in tears by her and by being frogmarched into lengthy exile by him.
Parenthood is a masquerade of bonhomie during which mums and dads secretly grieve their lost freedom, and every banal keepsake is revealed as The Holy Grail the moment it is smashed by a child. Breaking a shoddy electroplate candelabra gives it an Aladdinish lustre. Drop a vase and you murder a beloved aunt.
Lowie and I, just boys, one stupid, one not, were playing backyard cricket at my grandparents’ place, under the shade and in the perfume of a massive peppercorn. Scorning the boy-bats we were gifted by Santa, I had taken a full-sized adult cricket bat from my grandparents’ mantelpiece. It smelt of linseed oil and the type of fantastical glory that exists nowhere but in a boy’s head.
We were using a real cricket ball, risky for lads whose skulls hadn’t yet hardened. Lowie, who wasn’t as contemplative as Curly, Mo or Larry but as violent as that trio combined, bowled a beamer right at my temple. And, in a moment of biomechanical excellence built entirely on fear, I tonked the ball over the locally famous pilot’s backyard into the wilds of a Furphy compound where it woke one of their short-lived gun dogs into an apologetic yodel.
(My computer tells me “tonk” is not a word. But it is. And it’s a word filled with such explosive delight, such a reminiscent burst of manly, moustachioed derring-do, and such onomatopoeic accuracy, that as I repeat it loudly into my empty study I feel the brazen pulse of victory, many years dormant, rise in my veins.)
The bat model with which I tonked the ball was an “Improved Conqueror”, a risky branding these days but nevertheless a cannon of aged willow, and in its centre was the virgin blemish, the cherry-red bruise left by the ball I’d tonked.
I leant on it like a boulevardier on his cane and told Lowie to “fetch”, happily aware this operation involved two rusty corrugated-iron fences, a territorial pilot and an impatient pointer who knew that a meteor of the sort that had just clobbered him was often a harbinger of a bite-size, slow-witted monkey.
I was happily contemplating Lowie’s Odyssey when, from nowhere, Dad pounced on me like a rogue wave on a yacht full of fabulists and began to tumble and shake me back into a here-and-now that had suddenly grown nasty. He was bawling famous names up into the peppercorn canopy and these climaxed with the pitiful cry, “The Don … The Don himself.”
How was I to know this bat was the Cameron family heirloom in excelsis? In fact, our only heirloom. On its right rear panel were the 1928-29 handwritten signatures of Jack Ryder’s Australian team. Bradman is there (The Don … The Don himself), Grimmett, Woodfull, Ponsford, Kippax … On the left rear panel, the England team: Hobbs, Jardine, Sutcliffe, Hammond, Larwood … All of these great men had held and signed this treasure. I might as well have used a Stradivarius as a flyswat. My grandmother, either befuddled or in arrears in her punishments of my crimes, washed my mouth out with soap and water.
Mine was a tonk heard to the very outer reaches of our family tree, where it was agreed, root and branch, even (preposterously, I still think) by an incarcerated third cousin, that I was an oik who ought be launched into space on a one-way ticket like that Russian pooch who had recently gazed forlornly from her porthole at a diminishing world.
Of my grandparents’ three sons, the bat was left to my father. Of his five children, it somehow came to me. It hangs on my wall in a glass case now.
I took it to have it valued a year or so ago. “Ah, yes, now,” the valuer grimaced. “Lovely names. Rich in history. If only it was an unused bat … in showcase condition.”
“That ball mark,” I said. “So perfectly centred … it might have been The Don. The Don himself. Tonking Larwood for six.”
“Bradman,” this specialist told me, “did not tonk.”
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Anson Cameron is a columnist for Spectrum in The Age and the author of several books, including Boyhoodlum and Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.
