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Cheers Bill enjoyed this reminded me when I was a kid had a job collecting up deckchairs on a beach and we always checked for dropped coins and sometimes were lucky!!!! I am not sure if the last two verses fell a bit predictable and maybe finish 'Uh huh, a shifty schent shit!' which is gorgeous -well my tuppence!! Ps always ;oved those threepenny bits! -----Original Message----- From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bill Wootton Sent: 05 July 2016 23:35 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Not there any more The olive paint-flaked weatherboard house was wedged between St Pius Catholic Primary School and East Ivanhoe State School number 4386. Old Mr Wakeman lived there, wild-haired, grumpy state school caretaker whose son John was in my grade. Imagine now someone suggesting building attached premises to schools for live-in caretakers and their families. But it worked. We all knew Old Wakeman had eyes over the whole property. Maintained it, kept it clean. Metal bins full of lunch scraps he'd empty into the 'burner' as we termed the brick incinerator on school grounds between the wooden library/tuckshop building and Wakeman's backyard. Smoke billowed each night. Come morning recess we'd pounce. Three or four of us regularly. Down on our knees with sticks, raking ash from under the burner, slow sifting for careless treasure. Coins. Mostly pennies, halfpennies. But sometimes the odd little threepence or sixpence with its kangaroo/emu coat of arms. And once, John Bright hit the jackpot with a blackened shilling, that distinctive ram's head silvering up nicely with a bit of spit and hanky rubbing. The coins cropped up because slack kids failed to check for change in paper bags with their tuckshop lunch orders. The best you could hope for was change from a two-bob bit. Especially if they only ordered one thing. Old Wakeman knew what we were up to. And he'd come charging out to shoo us away, hating the strewn ash piles we left on the concrete apron in front of the burner. Sometimes it was lumpy stuff. Best was fine, powdery ash, so available of quick coin reveals. Some tuck-shop ladies turned up their noses at our black bounty. But most clanked our coinage and served us Chocolate Royals which we promptly smashed on our foreheads before peeling off chocolate to reveal marshmallow on top of jam biscuit. Or Sunnyboys, sweet orange cordial in a tetrahedonal tetra pak, also available frozen, the better for lasting longer. 1966 saw decimal coinage take over but no one slipped a new silver fifty in their lunch order as far as we knew. Not that it stopped us trying to suck in gullible burner newcomers: 'Uh huh, a shifty schent shit!' Both schools still exist, on Robin Hood Road, East Ivanhoe but in between, where the caretaker's house stood, gleams a massive steel stadium, a facility perhaps shared. And who cleans it is anybody's business. bw