by Martin Anton Smith martinantonsmith@gmail.com

“Me & Chippie Hopkins – who was my best friend, spent hours in the blazing sun. He being red haired & fair skinned would get horribly lobster-like sunburnt, while I was merely lightly toasted. We roared around on bicycles, climbed trees & hunted eels. Yes me & Chippies young lives were all typical small-town stuff. We were afters-school part time rebels & would get up to a fair amount of various mischief, such as throwing rocks on our Neighbour’s roof, aka Principal Teasdale.

Principal Teasdale was a typical old fashioned type man – a firm disciplinarian, sometimes cruel & looked haggard but commanded certain amount of respect amongst the schoolkids – this of course was mostly out of fear.

One incident stands out in my memory & it involved our good old nemesis & coincidentally Chippies next door neighbour ‘Principal Teasdale’. Our fear of him had made the prospect of playing a trick on him too divine to continue to resist.

One day Chippie Hopkins who was definitely the more rebellious of us, decided to really upset Principal Teasdale – this time instead of throwing tiny insignificantly small rocks – he’d climb on the roof & pour a bag of manure down the chimney. This would be the trick to satiate our long held rebellious schoolboy desires. Chippie scaled the roof expertly with the bag tied to his wrist via a cord.

He was a great climber, we had practised a lot climbing trees, Chippie always beating me in height. I would look up at him & curse his ability to climb the spindly branches as if they were sturdy ladders.

He edged closer & closer to the Chimney walking along the horizontal roof line. I had to desperately cover my mouth as to not laugh & give the game away to Mr Teasdale, who I could see via his window. He was within earshot reading the paper by the fire.

I watched Chippie edge closer & closer to the chimney, each creak of the tin was a minor heart attack for us both. After what seemed like an eternity Chippie lifted the white manure bag emptied it almost perfectly – apart from one bit of horse crap that rolled off & down into the gutter.

There was a whoosh sound as the manure went down the chimney, followed swiftly by an aggressive yell from Mr Teasdale, who then rushed outside to figure it all out. Chippie tried to scale down the roof to the tree but in the excitement of the getaway he lost footing & rolled down the roof, off the roof & landed on the hedge, right in front of the furious Principal Teasdale.

Chippie was half embedded in the hedge, his face with small scratches over it, his overly long red hair tussled with sweat & looking like a wild campfire. Chippies little freckled red face became twice as red as his eyes locked with Teasdale’s. Teasdale grabbed him by the ear & Chippie squealed like a little piggy. Mt Teasdale simply took him by the ear and into his house, not saying anything – the door slammed like a gunshot.

Chippie spent the next 7 hrs cleaning manure out of his fireplace, among other chores such as mowing & raking leaves. I, like a coward watched from the sidelines, feeling sorry for Chippie but also in true schadenfreude fashion, happy it was him & not me in there facing the wrath of Principal Teasdale – it so easily could have been.

To this day, 30 years later I can still hear Chippie Hopkins’s loud wailing, as he cried & cleaned up that manure in Teasdale’s fireplace. I still hear Teasdale’s screaming at Chippie…….”You’re a stupid boy Chippie Hopkins!..& you’ll never amount to nuthin’ ……now clean harder dopey!”

After that, me & Chippie would still roar around on bikes, catch eels & climb trees – but it wasn’t quite the same as before the Teasdale incident – it didn’t help when the kids at school found out about it either – they called him “Manure Boy”.

Chippie wasn’t the same boy as before & soon we drifted apart as friends. As we both became teenagers & young adults life’s changes took us to different schools, suburbs and eventually different towns altogether.

The last I had heard anything of Chippie Hopkins was when I was home on summer break from my freshman year, when I ran into a mutual friend of ours – Billy Sanders – Billy told me Chippie had gone overseas to ‘follow his dreams’.

I’m writing you this story of my old friend Chippie Hopkins, because today my old memories of him were jogged. This morning I opened up the newspaper & saw a headline in the ‘World News’ section that made me practically spit out my morning coffee, it read:

“Chippie Hopkins Becomes Prime Minister Of Small Nation Of New Zealand“

I wondered if the ‘manure incident’ at Principal Teasdale’s House was the root cause of Chippie becoming the Prime Minister in a little-known foreign land. Was that traumatic childhood event thirty years before in our home town the seed that created Chippie Hopkins as a ‘Great Leader Of Men’?; or was it because he – like most who enter Politics – had turned to the ‘dark side’ & wanted ‘Payback’ on Society?

Was Chippie aiming delusionally to get back the power he had had lost as one of the ‘bullied children of the playground’?

Maybe one day if I ever run into Chippie again, I’ll ask him that very question. If he was still the old Chippie I knew as a ten-year-old he would say “Well you know what they say Marty – shit happens! & that’s why I’m here”. Somehow, I don’t think he will put it like that, but you never know – I might be happily surprised.

I hope you enjoyed my story of my old schoolboy best friend – ‘Chippie Hopkins’ – & if you are a citizen of that small foreign land he now runs, I hope that Chippie’s personality eventually reverted back to what it was before I dared him to drop manure down Mr Teasdale’s Chimney.

If not, you could be in some very deep horse manure yourselves.

And to Chippie – If you’re reading this – I’m really sorry I dared you to do that – I hope after all these years you found it in your heart to forgive me. Good luck on running New Zealand & I hope you’re still the good guy I knew all those years ago.

Your old childhood pal – Marty Myers.