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question Spit about his grandfather.
    ‘What does he do it for, Spit?’ Crispie asked him one summer’s day when they were lying on the hard cracked mud of the big river, out of sight and sound of town and people, fishing and making the best of a hot day on the big river. ‘I mean why does he go around shouting at everybody?’
    ‘He’s got something wrong with his head,’ Spit replied.
    ‘Everybody in town thinks he’s crazy.’
    ‘That’s what they think,’ Spit said. ‘They don’t know anything about it.’
    ‘My old man says he ought to be locked up.’
    ‘Well …’ And, with his usual habit of defending his grandfather, Spit turned his head and spat at a passing bee. ‘If they lock him up I’ll go and burn the place down. They don’t know anything about it, Crisp, that’s all I’m saying.’
    ‘Well, I always say, “Hello Mr MacPhee,” and you know what he says back to me?’
    ‘No,’ Spit said. ‘But I’ll bet he lets you have it.’
    ‘He always says, “You’ve got big ears, Willy Wastle.”’
    ‘He likes you,’ Spit said.
    ‘Why does he call me Willy Wastle?’
    ‘That’ll be his name for you, Crisp. He does that all the time. Sometimes he calls me Tam Glen or Davie Bluster,’ Spit said, and they both laughed at the old man’s wild sport with their proper names.
    They were good friends – planned to be for life, but one day Crispie didn’t come to school. He didn’t come the next day, and on the fourth day Miss Masters told the class that Crispie had been bitten by a tiger snake in one of the canals near his house, and he had never recovered. He was being buried that day, and Spit decided on the spot that he would never forget Crispie and would never have another friend as long as he lived.
    It was early summer. Spit was still ‘not quite eleven’, and now that his real trouble was about to begin he had no Crispie to support him. In the end it would be Sadie Tree who would become the other part of him – like Crisp, only being a girl Sadie was different.

5
    Sadie Tree lived in a house downstream, where the little Murray and the big Murray joined. Her father, Jack, owned a Dodge tourer and he was the Pastoral and Livestock Inspector for the district: a strict, soldierly man who, as an Anzac at Gallipoli, had discovered something good in the best moments of soldiering. In the attack on Suvla Bay he had taken charge of a machine-gun position when all the officers and sergeants had been killed, and he had done it well enough and bravely enough for a General to raise him from Private to Officer in the field. Since then he had kept his faith in soldiering and in old soldiers as the best thing in his life. He was the Secretary of the St Helen’s branch of the Returned Soldiers League, and his first loyalty in the town (apart from his family) was to any man who had been a soldier. Old Anzacs always knew that he would help them if he could, they could count on him, but this belief in the comradeship and pride of arms made something of a disciplinarian of him at home, although for his luck he had married a silent and obedient and gentle wife, Grace, and now had a silent and obedient and gentle daughter, Sadie, both of whom accepted his discipline, and respected and loved him nonetheless. In the end, Spit’s predicament would make a change in this mix of modesty and discipline, but that was to be the end, not the beginning.
    Sadie was a quiet girl and a clever girl who watched everything, saw everything, and said so little that she was hardly noticed even by girls her own age. Nobody resented her and nobody bothered her, and those who did notice her said that she got her silence from her father, the strong silent Jack. But if Sadie had inherited his silence (it was really her mother’s) she did not have his strength, because Jack was used to having his own way so that Sadie and her mother always gave into him, as if it was the normal and the right thing to do. There was never any