Story by Geraldine
COOBER PEDY
Singular – discover- nineteenth – saffire – timorous – flibbergibbet – help
Hey mate ! I think the only way I can get Jenny’s heart back is with a big saphire !
And I need help, someone to come with me to Coober Pedy to find one.
What’r think ? Want to come ? Give me a day or two, Jo. I need to see if I’m going to loose money or not.
No, mate, you can’t loose money ! You can only get rich, very very rich…. But it is hard work… and a difficult climate though.
Ok, Ok, I’ll tell’ye tomorrow. I think I’ll go for it with you, answered Tom.
Whatafter, they pulled through a few beers to seal the arrangement and decided to get ready for the trip.
As we all know, the best way to make quick money in Australia is mining : anything… copper, gold, coal, iron, led, diamonds, uranium etc etc. . You leave for six months, travel in a yute, sleep where you can, usually in a swag, eat what you find and work, work, work all day, the way the first settlers did when they discovered the place 2 centuries ago.
Two days later, Tom and Jo were heading towards Coober Pedy, in Jo’s old yute, with a full jerrycan of petrol, another couple filled with water, their swags on the top, and all they thought they needed to drill a whole and excavate : a medium manageable derrick, picks, shovels, gloves and hope !
As everyone knows, or doesn’t, Coober Pedy is the Capital of opals. In the nineteenth century the place did not exist as the search for opals only started in the 1920’s in a very wild way. Each miner trying to discover opals would get a small concession, and from there would start prospecting, digging, excavating and when lucky, fall upon a layer of opals all colours, but mainly blue, and have them polished : the main market was Japan, which of course paid well.
In the middle of a very very harsh desert, Coober Pedy was built mainly underground : the minors who decided to stay dag big underground galleries and built singular troglodyte houses for themselves and their families when they began to remain there for a while, as the medium temperature outside is around 45 to 48°C during the summer and can lower to minus 20° in winter times. There is no sign of botanic life out there : not a tree to be seen, no insects, only a few snakes in the stones and sand to be seen for miles and miles and miles.
Jo already had a concession there, on a rocky bit of land. Under the burning sun, they started setting up the derrick, drilling with a machine they’d rented in town and down they went with their picks with which they started boring a tunnel. The rock was hard, the noise and it’s echo tearing their ears, their limbs aching and their heads spinning. How right he was : it was terribly hard work. And as the days passed without finding anything that looked like coloured, he also found out how timorous his pall Tom was : he hadn’t noticed this before, but maybe it was due to the very harsh conditions they were undergoing….
Days, weeks and a few months went by before they could see anything looking like a gemstone. They had opened a gallery in which they could rest, eat and sleep not far from their entrance, so all they needed to do was go to town once a week to find food and booze and get back to work. Occasionally, Jo would stay in the underground town for a couple more hours attending different brothels whereas Tom, would just wait for him in the Irish Pub where music was played : he was keeping clear for Jenny’s sake.
Now, if you wait long enough for something to happen, it happens. And this also applies to minors. At the end of an exhausting day, Jo and Tom were going through the stone they had dug up when suddely :
« Hey, look mate, would this be it » cried Tom. And he showed a long blueish-green vein along the wall.
« Yes ! We did it ! I knew this would come up one day ! Hurrah ! « shouted Jo.
« what next then ? »
« We have to follow it and dig very carefully around it to see how much there is » said Jo.
« OK. That’s made my day and even all the days we’ve been at it for the last 3 months » « Let’s go to bed and start the new job tomorrow morning » answered Tom.
But Jo wanted to get things done as soon as possible, which meant immediately.
They started working on the seam digging very cautiously around it and extracting big pieces of opal that filled their tired hearts with delight and joy.
« Now you, flibbergibett, don’t go tell no one we’ve found anything ! That’s the best way to get attacked and stolen ! Just keep quiet and act poor ! We’ll find a place in Melbourne or Sydney to buy it from us »
« But…. I wanted to take this saphire to my Jenny whom I love so much ! Give me my part ! »
« Don’t be stupid Tom ! With the money we’ll get from the gems, you’ll certainly get Jenny a big great saphire ! » but meanwhile, we must continue digging, pretending we’ve found nothing and letting’hem know out there, we’re going to give up soon. » That’s the only way to drive out of here safely !
They continued digging and finding more seams of opal as they went lower, and when in town, still showed long faces and talking about leaving before the winter having no luck this year.
They hid the different stones in various places in the yute : under the carpets, in the lining, sewn in the seats etc… and when they finally felt safe enough to leave the place without danger, started driving back down south towards Melbourne and back to Bega.
They sold most of their gems to a big Company in Melbourne, shared the money, and Tom finally decided that a beautiful blue opal was good enough for Jenny and with the remaining cash he could alsol offer her a small but lovely house.
He also knew by now, that whenever he was either really short of money or had a fabulous plan to develop, he could count on Coober Pedy and his friend Jo.
------------------------------------------
A story by Annemarie
A singular date requiring help with a not so timorous flibbertigibbet to discover missing a sapphire moon on the nineteenth.
Mrs Dodd-Smith looked at son pityingly. “You do realise she'll never fit in with our family. Just look at her - auburn hair today, tomorrow it might be purple...or pink. And Peter, for heaven's sake, she works in the market. I've only met her once and she chats a lot; she says she lives in a council house. Are you sure she's not after your money? If you ask me she seems a bit of a flibbertigibbert.”
“ Mother, I’m not asking you. Karen has her own business making bespoke clothes. She lives with her mother, who's not that well. She has no idea what I do or who father is. We go out to the country, take long walks. She's different from all the other women I meet,” retorted Peter.[1]
“And how do think she’ll fit in with your friends. That dreadful Cockney accent. What will our friends think?”
“ You’re such a snob, mother. She's funny and kind …and interesting. And despite you not wanting her there, I shall bring Karen to the charity auction you’re hosting at home. I really feel she’s the one for me.” he added defiantly.
We'll see to that, my son, Mrs Dodd-Smith thought to herself.
Peter arranged with Karen that someone would fetch her on the evening of August 19 for the charity auction extravaganza as he would be helping his mother. The cream of society would be there in all their finery, with open cheque books and clipped voices,
Adorned in a gorgeous sapphire dress - one she’d made herself of course - Karen was somewhat startled to see a Bentley crawl to stop outside their council house home in Rainbow Close. A be-capped chauffeur exited and rang her doorbell. “Mr. Peter sent the Bentley round for you, Miss Karen.”
She really hoped all the neighbours were watching agog, as the chauffeur held open the rear door of the spotless, shining black Bentley while she climbed in.
She was quite unprepared for the sedate drive past the private “Porters Park Golf Club”, down the long tree-lined drive leading to the Elizabethan style mansion, a mansion of singular beauty in one of the most expensive streets outside of London.
On their arrival the chauffeur asked her to wait while he telephoned Mr. Peter, who soon hurried out to meet her.
“You look radiant,” he said admiringly. “Now come and see the parents.”
“ Gosh, Peter,” gasped Karen ,”I had no idea you lived somewhere so posh.”
They walked hand in hand to the front door where Peter introduced her to his father, whom she’d not yet met. Not quite as tall as Karen Mrs Dodd-Smith nonetheless managed to look down her nose at her. Sending her son off on a mission she took Karen aside and passed her a piece of paper.
“Well it’s nice to meet again, Karen. Perhaps as there is a large number of people here you could avoid speaking to some of them. This list of names should help, “ she added briskly, leaving Karen surprised and affronted.
Karen was no timorous female; glass of champagne in one hand and her list of forbidden names in the other and a big smile on her face she circulated the room trying to meet as many guests as possible. Each time she was introduced she blatantly consulted the list and if the guest's name was on it she announced in an exaggerated 'cockney' accent:
“Oi'm so sorry, but Mrs Dodd-Smiv 'as asked me not to talk wiv you.”
The list was long. The surprised, bewildered faces of those guests were many. Mrs Dodd-Smith was embarrassed. Mrs Dodd-Smith was angry. Karen was satisfied. Karen was happy to be driven home.
The following day to Karen's surprise and to the astonishment of the curtain-twitchers of Rainbow Close, the Bentley arrived for a second time in two days.This time the chauffeur came to the door with an enormous bouquet of exotic flowers, accompanied with a note from Peter's father apologising for his wife’s behaviour. Would that be enough to stay with her son? Had Mrs Dodd-Smith won?
She was just sorry she’d missed seeing the biggest blue moon that had occurred that same evening.
Sarah's story
Sapphire 1 – Blue
(12.08.2024)
It was the nineteenth day of the tenth month after Gwendolyn had been locked in the tower. This was after she had made the singular discovery that the Count was not her father. This fact she had found out by accident while rifling through the papers in the desk in the top room of the tower, a place where she was not supposed to be. The Count's valet, a sneaking sycophant, had discovered her there and had run to tell his master, who had lost no time in cornering her there and locking her up. Since then she had had much time to ponder.
If the Count were not her father, who was he? Or, more to the point, who was she?
The door to the top room was of thick, solid oak; she could bang on it all she wanted, her most vigorous blows sounded like timorous patterings to the people in the castle below. And who cared anyway? Her mother was dead, if she had ever had one. She began to doubt the fact. The Count had never spoken to her of her mother, nor had anyone else. Whenever she had broached the question, the conversation had petered out or skithered to a new, only sightly related topic. Even the servants avoided the matter. Had she been carried here in a napkin, flown in by a stork, as they told her? The eventuality was unlikely: although she was slim and light, she was very tall, and even as a baby would certainly have been too heavy for a stork to carry. So, then, what was her origin? She had heard of the virgin birth, where the child had had no father. No earthly father. Was it possible to have no earthly mother? She pondered further, and came to no answer. The only remaining fact was that there was no mother to worry about why her daughter had not come down to dinner.
Nor would the servants fret about her absence. There was not one of them that had ever shown the least interest in her person. They busied themselves only with sweeping the stairs, polishing the brass banisters, basting the roasts over the fire, scouring the pans and so on. She had read stories about girls and women who had governesses and lady's maids, who supervised their education and looked after their personal needs, but no such employee had ever crossed the threshold of this castle, so far as she had heard. It occurred to her at last that she was in fact less lonely up here in the solitary tower than she had been for all of her eighteen years in the bustling palace down below.
She could look out at the sky where the billowing, snow-white clouds floated through the blue on to unimaginable countries, having come from even less imaginable places, giving her a feeling of belonging nowhere herself. She could look down on the countryside that stretched out to where the earth met the sky, a green and yellow patchwork counterpane rimmed at the edge with a soft purple fringe, and dream that a prince would come over the mountains on a coal-black charger and carry her away. In short, she passed her days more pleasantly than she ever had before.
Still, she ruminated on the question of her beginnings. Was she even human, or was she the offspring of a fairy? And for the first time, she came to the conclusion that she needed assistance. She could not solve this problem by herself. As she sat there, musing and staring into the distance, a bird flew up and perched on the windowsill. A bird of the same deep bright cerulean as the sky, and it began to chirp and flutter its wings as if its mission were to deliver her a message of the utmost importance. At first she thought she did not know bird language, but she began gradually to make sense of the creature's twittering. This flibbertigibbet was offering her the help she needed!
Blue, it was saying, blue is the answer. Blue as the eyes of your mother. Blue as the jewels she wore when she came to the castle. Blue as the cold eye of the Count when he saw her. Blue as the steel of the dagger with which he killed her and tore out the child she was carrying, the child of his worst enemy. Blue as the azure field of your father’s coat of arms. The bird fell silent and cocked its head. And Gwendolyn realized that she had never seen anything blue in the castle: green, red, yellow, orange, purple, all the other colours had been there, but the blue she had seen was only ever in the sky.
But what did all this mean? She was hardly advanced in solving the question that obsessed her. The bird hopped past her and landed on the desk. Its beak went tap-tap-tap tap-tap-tap on the wood polished smooth with age. It cocked its head again and fixed her with its beady eye. How useless, she thought; the Count had shut up the desk with a great key before he left, a key that made the whole internal mechanism click and slide until all the drawers were locked tight. But the bird still tapped, and she realized he was pecking at one drawer, one drawer in particular. She approached and touched the drawer, and at that very second it flew open. There, sparkling in the sunlight, lay a sapphire necklace, blue as the sky, blue as her own eyes when she picked it up and held it against her as she looked in the mirror that hung on the wall opposite her. The bird seemed now to go mad with impatience. It tapped not only its beak but its tiny feet against the desktop.
“What do you want? Shall I put it on?” For all the world it looked as if the bird were nodding yes. So she fastened it round her neck, and suddenly, everything seemed to explode at once. The oaken door flew open, the Count who was rushing up the stairs behind it, was felled by a beam which detached itself from the door frame as the very walls of the castle seemed to fall apart of their own accord, and the bird jumped gracefully off the desk to stand on the floor, now fully clad in shining armour with a blue plume waving at the crest of its, or shall we now say, his helmet.
“You have broken the spell,” he said. “For you and for me. My charger is waiting outside. But hurry, before the castle disintegrates entirely!”
And so they rode off into the blue distance, leaving rubble behind them, heading for the land called là-bas, where there is only order and beauty, luxe, calme and velupté.
-----------------------------------
Jackies contribution
Singular, discover, nineteenth, saffire, timorous, flibertygibert, help
This morning I saved a life.
A little being shouting help from my kitchen sink – A spider . as I was filling the kettle It did occur to me to drown him by pouring boiling hot water over him
I imagined him spiralling down the drain trying desperately to hold on to the slippery slimy tube that was my drainpipe and finally being swept off to no-mans land and then I had a thought …
Perhaps he had a family and his spider wife was waiting for him with four spider children to feed I imagined spider wife crying as her spider husband who was providing the food didn’t appear as he was about to be flushed down the drain in someones house …and they would all die of famine
Since a small child my very religious mother had drilled into me that all God’s creatures deserve a life and never to kill any living creature – except flies and possibly coakroaches which spread disease so this lives on when you hear things in your childhood you obey forever
I picked him up In a jam jar and and once captured he proved to be a real flibertygibert rushing round and round the jar trying desperately to get under the gap between the paper rim and escape. He had the singular good fortune though to be saved at all.
After a closer look I discovered that this spider was quite attractive. He had saffire coloured legs, eighteen whiskars with an extraordinary nineteenth whiskar entirely covered in red fur that the most qualified arachnologist admitted to being unusually unusual
I took him into the garden and he scampered timorously into the unknown territory of my flower bed.
The next morning I had the pleasant surprise to find a whole family of spiders in my sink – spider wife, with four spider children, auntie spider, uncle spider and loads of cousin spiders all come back to thank me for having saved their daddy spider.
What did I do then?
Well, I turned on the tap.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
