Knowing the Drains
Just after World War II ended and my father died, a miracle occurred in our family. We were able to get out of the deplorable housing situation we were in and get into a new house.
In my old home town of Box Hill, the building of one new house was seen as a great community step forward. How my mother ever managed to get the loan from the bank, I do not know. The business was near bankruptcy, my father had left large personal debts, and my mother just scraped through retaining the business because of the secret life assurance policy she had on her young husband’s life.
Anyhow our family was able to move out of the half house in which my mother, the four children with myself being the eldest at eight years of age, and my poor demented grandmother lived, into a new home in Box Hill South.
For the whole year of 1946, only 3,666 houses were built in the entire State of Victoria. For that year, only 14 flats were built in the whole State. House building supplies were extremely difficult to get and permission to build was rare.
Consequently, for my mother to be able to buy a new cream brick veneer house in Box Hill South was regarded as something of a miracle. It was a two bedroom house. My mother and my baby sister slept in the front bedroom, my demented grandmother and sister slept in the second bedroom and my brother and I had our beds in the dining room along with the rest of our dining and lounge furniture. There was not much room but it was our house.
There were no made roads in our area, nor gutters or drains. We were surrounded by paddocks in which cows grazed and wild gorse bushes grew. We actually had two houses, the second being an outhouse way down the backyard where the sanitary tins were collected twice a week. The man came with 120 empty cans on his truck and exchanged each for a full one.
His old truck had a bell on the back of it to warn people in the outhouse that he was coming. The local joke was “What is a hum dinger?” Answer: “The bell on the back of a dunny cart.”
One of the greatest adventures that boys could ever have was to get to know the drains. I knew most of the drains in our area from the inside, but there was one challenge that no other boy in our community had ever undertaken. That was the challenge that many of us sought to conquer, climbing the inside of the main storm water drain from Box Hill South to the highest point beneath the city on top of the hill.
One day my younger brother, Robbie and I, decided we would try to go up the drains further than any other person had ever travelled. We had talked about this for a long time. On this day, when my widowed mother was at work, we walked to Canterbury Road where the great storm water drain came out into Gardiners Creek. We had bought with us bundles of newspapers and had made a wooden sled to pull behind us.
At Canterbury Road, the drain was eight feet high and was well built in concrete. We left behind shoes and socks and most of our other clothing and spent quite a long time rolling each sheet of newspaper into a tightly wound quill until eventually the sled was full of quills. Then we started up the drain. It was quite easy as we walked up. The darkness quickly closed in upon us and we took the first quill and lit it with matches.
After a short while, we discovered a place on the concrete walls where people had used other burning quills to write their name in black soot. For more than a quarter of a mile we continued up the drain. There was very little water and what was in the bottom was green and slimy. After the first quarter of a mile the drain began to narrow down into a smaller sized barrel drain and after a little while it narrowed again. Soon we were crawling with myself leading, holding a lighted quill and then from around my hips going back through my legs, a rope attached to the sled hauling the load of paper. Behind came Robbie who was responsible for passing up the paper as we crawled. The drains became narrower and we reached sections where previous people had scratched or marked onto the roof the furthermost point that they had been able to negotiate.
By this time, the drains had started to slope upwards and the going was very slippery. The green slime on the bottom of the drains made it very hard to get a foot hold with bare hands and bare feet. Every now and then branch drains joined and we poked a burning quill up the branch drain or up an air vent. Rats scurried into their hiding places. Occasional pockets of bad air or gas smells cause us to long for fresh air.
In those years after the war, there were three thousand houses in Box Hill without sewerage. Most of them had septic tanks and the draining from the septic tanks would seep through the backyards until it collected in the unmade drains along the side of the unmade streets until it eventually ran to a point where there was a drain and so down into the network of drains underneath the city of Box Hill. Those who did not have septics had a professional pan emptying service or else emptied their own in their backyards.
At a point where the drains began to steeply rise, we conjectured that we had reached the bottom of the steep hill in Station Street that led to the top of the shopping centre. This next half mile was the section that no one had ever climbed. We pressed on, reduced now to having to crawl on hands and knees. We still dragged the sled with the quills. Robbie kept passing new quills to me. The darkness was oppressive and occasionally Robbie sounded quite frightened when I got a little ahead of him.
The drain began to reduce in size even more and it turned from smooth concrete into a brick drain laid decades before by workmen who never realized that two children would one day crawl up on the inside with their fingers and toes grasping for handholds and footholds along the cement courses of the brick. We paused at a junction of several drains to straighten our backs and to stand up in a vent that went up to the road. In this vent there were iron rings cemented into the side of the wall which enabled us to climb to the top and to look through a slit that formed part of a made gutter facing a made road. The wheels of cars as they went up the hill travelled close by us where we peered through the three inch slot of the concrete gutter. Straining our necks around we tried to see if there was anything that we could recognise. To our delight we saw, on the other side of Oxford Street, the Methodist Church. We were more than half way up the hill!
Robbie and I felt as if we had achieved something tremendous. None of the other boys who had been drain exploring had ever been as far as the Methodist Church.
After some time of celebrating and leaving our names and date in soot on the underside of the lid to the drain, we descended once more to the main junction. The big question was whether we would turn back or press on the last quarter of a mile to the top of the hill.
The real problem was that the drain was now getting narrower and the hill steeper. We were now reduced to hauling ourselves along. The sled was riding higher on the rounded bottom of the drain and was jamming along the sides. We decided to leave the sled behind and to stuff as many quills of paper as we could down the back of our shirts for the underside was wet with green slime, and to continue our journey.
We had only travelled about twenty yards when we became aware of the most awesome noise. The noise was getting louder and louder as if a steam train was rushing down the drain towards us. The noise became absolutely frightening. Robbie and I did not have to discuss what we should do. We quickly backed down the twenty yards we had just travelled, reached the junction of the drains, and then climbed in fear of our lives up the steel rings in the side of the vertical shaft.
We clung to the vertical shaft while the noise grew louder and louder. Then with a sudden explosion of noise, a wall of water, perhaps six inches deep, swept along the drain below. It was such a little wall of water in comparison to the noise it generated.
Box Hill in those days after the war still had many horses delivering bread and milk and sacks of flour to the baker and sawdust for the floor of the butchers shop. Those horses always left behind them a good quantity of manure, far more than keen gardeners could ever use. So the city council employed some sweepers who swept the manure into the gutter and then turned on the fire hydrants along the street to wash out the gutters.
Some diligent council worker up in the shopping centre had turned on the hydrant for five minutes or so, washing out the street, and in the process almost washing out two boys in the drain a quarter of a mile away and twenty feet below.
After a while the noise had abated and we continued our journey. The sudden flush had left the drains clear of slime and easier to climb with a fresh sweet smell of hay. We had climbed for perhaps another twenty minutes or so when we heard another awesome noise. By this time we were marking the vertical vents where we could retreat in safety. We quickly retreated to another vent. This time no water came and it took a little while before we worked out the source of the sound there was an electric train crossing the railway lines a hundred yards ahead. Never were there two happier boys. We suddenly realized we could make it to the base of the railway lines. We had reached the top of the network of drains. The crawling became more enthusiastic. Soon we passed under the railway lines and then met a network of crisscrossing drains. We realized we were under the main shopping centre. We found a vertical shaft and climbed it to make our way out. We had accomplished what no one else had done.
We reached up into the box drain beside a gutter in Main Street and tried to force the lid up with our shoulders underneath it. But the lid would not budge.
The next two lids likewise would not move. We suddenly realized that the only way out of the drain was to go back or to go forward. Go forward seemed to be the easier alternative because the drains now started to slope downhill and widened out a little. In the pitch black, broken only by occasional glimpses of light that came down from vertical shafts from the roadside we continued on. We were crawling on hands and knees as the drains slowly widened. All of our quills of newspaper had been used up. The drain turned from brick back to concrete pipe and the concrete pipe dipped steeply as it followed the terrain down the hill in White Horse Road. We crawled and slid until the pipes widened and the level flattened and we reached another large junction. Climbing up the vertical drain to the roadside we peered through the wider crack onto the road and saw the Box Hill Gas Works. We had travelled from the shops down to Elgar Road and were now opposite the park. The gap in the drain in the made gutter was wide enough to allow us to squeeze through. Passers by looked as they saw two grimy and slimy young boys emerge from the vertical shaft of the drains.
How I remember us laughing and shouting to each other as we travelled back home that afternoon. No explorer at the North Pole felt a greater sense of accomplishment than Robbie and I that afternoon we travelled the whole journey through the drains of Box Hill.
Years later our city was celebrating an important anniversary. Certain distinguished men in the Australian community who had once lived in Box Hill were invited back for various formal occasions. In my turn I was invited to address a dinner attended by the Mayor, Town Clerk, City Engineer, Councillors and all the dignitaries from our community. I told them on that occasion that if ever the City Engineer had any problems with city drains he had only to ring me because I could give him advice on his drains from the inside!
GORDON MOYES
