ACE

It was a dirty trick, Colin reckoned. He must've seen us on the beach. Anyway, it wasn't his beach, it was our beach. Our grandfather walked along it at low-tide nearly every day, and he picked up all the funny-shaped pieces of driftwood, and he found the dead albatross with the six-foot wingspan. That stupid pilot probably never played on a beach. He wouldn't know how to make a sea-weed ball, or take a catch at mid-wicket when you're running through the breakers. He wasn't standing on top of the sand-hills during the big sea. Our grandfather was. And he saw the sloping sand-hill fall away beneath his feet, and wondered whether his little lean-to house was going to be next to go.

"Look at that plane!", someone shouted, and we all looked too high, then lower, right down against the shadow of Blackhead, and the plane looked huge, bearing down on our beach, its two frail wings rocking slightly in the wind as though not quite under control. We'd never seen a plane at such close quarters. "He's going to land on the beach! Quick, get up to the sand-hill!", shouted our big brother Wally,and we ran.

Maybe he was going to land on the beach, but I don't reckon so, claims Colin to this day. It was blowing a gusty easterly off the sea that day, and the weeks of easy weather had planed the beach down to a pleasant powdery white, warm under the bare feet, and coloured near the tide-mark by the orange grit patches and their lovely wind-swept corrugations. Wally was in charge of the four of us, and wasn't letting us go swimming without Mum or Grandad around. We'd all been down to the end of the beach already, paddled across the beck just beneath the black bridge, and dug some racing cars out of the sand. But the tide was going out, and we couldn't be bothered chasing it, so Dave ran home for the big kite, and he and Wally got it going and played out the enormous ball of string they'd brought from Dunedin. Colin and Jean mucked about with a sort of hut in the lupins for a while, then went out to see how high they'd got the kite.

                                     

It was a big white kite, a bought one, with the word "ACE" in huge red capital letters right across its face, and Wally and Dave, who were pretty good scientists, had made a long cloth tail of ripped-up sheets, tied with red ribbons. It made it pretty heavy, but it was stable, and this day it climbed and climbed proudly on the breeze, as Wally let more and more string off the stick, until he got to the end of it, and it was the highest kite we'd ever had! We all stood there on the beach, our beach, the wind pinning the shirts to our backs, so proud, with our feet apart, hands on hips, mouths open and eyes squinting in the glare of the bright sky. The highest kite we'd ever had!

Wally reckoned the sand could hold the stick, and we could have a game of cricket before it was time to go home, or if the truth be known before Mum appeared at the top of the sand-hill crying out like the seagulls to her brood. He dug the stick savagely into the sand, stamped all around it, then we all made a big pile of sand, until the stick was well and truly buried under a heavy hillock.

You had to have at least a dozen sea-weed balls for a decent game of beach cricket, as they didn't last forever, but Wally and Dave were pretty good at carving them into neat little spheres, then putting little sister Jean behind the driftwood stumps, and sending Colin, the smallest, to paddle at mid-wicket after his short first innings. Then they'd do most of the batting and bowling, as well as shouting directions and generally abusing the fielders, both of them.

Jean it was, bored with her unexciting role, and exhausted after long runs to the south as the batsman ran dozens of byes, who saw the plane first. "Look at that plane!" The four children rushed to the doubtful shelter of the lupins, and stood there, mouths open with simple astonishment, as the crazy biplane, engine now roaring as it loomed and lurched toward them just off the ground, enormous like the albatross, as it climbed again below the kite.

He snipped it off as neat as if with scissors, he did, that grinning mad pilot, and off he went above our beach, with our kite, our "ACE", the highest kite we'd ever had! The boys shouted and waved their fists, and the long, long string came drifting, drifting down, blowing sadly in the wind.

"He did it on purpose!" said Dave angrily, back in Grandad's little house. "He was laughing at us!" cried Jean. "It was dangerous low flying," was Wally's calm judgment. "He shouldn't of been on our beach!" repeated Colin for the third or fourth time. "He's a robber!" "Wash that sand off your feet before you come in this house!" said Mum.