On some days, the footpath between Womma railway station and Elizabeth West was littered with woolly bear caterpillars, which presumably felt reassuringly safe and secure in the realisation that there were few predators that found them palatable. They had reckoned without me and the Fowler brothers, however. The object of Squash the Caterpillar was self-explanatory. With each step you took, you were required to convey at least one woolly bear caterpillar into oblivion. As soon as you failed to do this, you were ‘out’. Gary Fowler was impressively proficient at this game, often making it almost as far as his front gate without a single ill-directed step, leaving a two kilometre long trail of mutilated corpses of the arctiidae family in his wake. The game appealed to me on many levels. I found the ‘splat’ as you brought your foot down hard on each unsuspecting victim immensely satisfying. I was also intrigued by the thought of the split second transformation of something living into something dead. Many transformations were reversible – when you doused the candles on the altar after Mass on Sunday you knew that, come the next Sunday, they would be lit again – but when you squashed a caterpillar you were creating its ultimate, incontrovertible fate. After a while, however, the appeal of stamping repeatedly on helpless invertebrates began to pall, and I started to hanker after something more audacious and challenging.
One afternoon, as we were waiting at the Womma station level crossing for a train to pass, it came to me. “Why don’t we see if we can derail a train?” I suggested. Graham, the older of the Fowler brothers, looked a bit perplexed at that, but then turned scornful. “You’d end up in Borstal.” Gary, though, appeared intrigued “How’d we do it?” I said I knew a place, not far from the line, where some old railway sleepers had been discarded. “There must be about twenty of them,” I said. “We could pile them up across the rails and see what happens.” “OK,” said Gary, “when?” “Why not now?” I said, and so it was agreed – almost. “I don’t want anything to so with this,” said Graham, but he followed us just the same, and I could see that he was having a little trouble quelling his fascination, if not his outright admiration. “Let’s just try a couple at first,” I suggested, when we reached the ditch in which the sleepers were lying. “We can always try more if that doesn’t work.” Graham’s sense of horror suddenly resurfaced. “Work!” he almost shrieked. “What do you mean, work?” His normally flushed face had paled. He looked from Gary to me as if trying to discern a flicker of common sense in either of us. Then, exasperatedly, “You’re really planning to do this, aren’t you?” Gary and I ignored him. “You’re both crackers!” wailed Graham, but still he tagged along. Gary said, “Go home and suck your dummy if you’re scared,” and we both laughed.
Getting the sleepers up onto the track was hard work, and we ended up with mud all over our hands and the fronts of our school uniforms. However, we finally managed it, and, after dusting ourselves off as best we could, crouched down behind some nearby shrubbery to await developments. The first train to pass was travelling the wrong way, but a short while later we heard the distant wail of a horn emanating from down the line in the Adelaide direction, heralding the imminent arrival of our prey. It proved to be even better than we could have wished. The approaching train was a Bluebird, an express en route to Port Augusta. This meant that it would not stop at Womma, but would hurtle through at somewhere in the region of seventy miles per hour. Seconds before impact, the potential seriousness of what we had done finally hit me, and I was suddenly beset with qualms. What if the train actually was derailed, and people got injured, or even died? Gary and I would be murderers, condemned to a lifetime diet of bread and water, forced to do hard labour for the rest of our lives, or maybe even hanged.
For some unknowable reason, I imagined confessing my sin to Father Abfalter, who said, disinterestedly, “And are you truly sorry, my son?” “Yes, father.” “Very well. Now say a good act of contrition, and for your penance say two Our Fathers – one for each of the deceased – and a Hail Mary for every broken bone. How many did you say it was?”
“Ninety-seven, father.”
“Ninety-seven Hail Marys, then.”
There was a sudden, almost deafening bang and the sleeper on the far side went scudding along the rails for about ten yards before bouncing into the ditch which ran immediately adjacent to the tracks. Meanwhile, the sleeper nearer to us shot up into the air in our direction and, after contriving a lazy but quite spectacular somersault, came to rest, almost vertically, against one of the track-side fence posts. The Bluebird hurtled on without a pause, completely unscathed. As Gary’s eyes met mine, there was a brief glimmer of mutual alarm, and then, with exaggerated fervour, we both burst out laughing. Graham briefly glared at us with exaggerated disdain before striding purposefully off, as if frightened of being contaminated by proximity. “You’re both nuts!” he yelled back and, on reflection, perhaps he was right. We were also very relieved.
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