59
Torquay Avenue was the only numbered address on Torquay Avenue.
It
was a side road. None of the other side roads in the vicinity had any
buildings at all. It seemed as if some Government Civic authority had
named the sideroads some time ago by a plan that included building
homes. That plan never materialized; the named roads remained, some
of which were, Donegal road, Lighthouse road, Island View road. Like
Torquay Avenue, all were overgrown with high wild out-of-control
vegetation, some with thorns, most attracting stinging insects.
The
only reason the young woman, Emilia, decided to live on Torquay
Avenue after she was required to leave the family home in the
Settlement of Island View, was because of the mysterious massive
three-room concrete structure located there. Nobody ever came to know
how Emelia found that building.
It
was hidden deep in the jungle. Markings scrawled on the walls
indicated it had been there since, at least, the First World War. A
practical guess was that it had been used as a secret storage
facility for the Nation's Armed Forces during that war. There were no
indications that it had been used as a dwelling before Emelia
occupied it.
There
was little, if any, unpleasantness in Emilia's having to leave Island
View. It had been a long-standing custom in that small Community of a
few hundred persons, that a woman who was unmarried by the age of
twenty, was obliged to leave the Community and never return,
unmarried. The woman would be sent off with a lot of money donated at
a final farewell party.
It
was seldom that a young woman was so exiled. Never had an exiled
woman returned, married or unmarried.
The
Island View Community was situated on a mainland peninsular across a
narrow ocean-deep strait from Salisbury Island. The swift current
made recreation boating and swimming impossible.
Salisbury
Island was one of the Nation's naval bases where sailors were
trained. Candidates came from all over the country to train on
Salisbury Island. No civilians were allowed on the island. All the
personnel on the Island base spent recreation time in Island View.
Over
ninety percent of Island View's thriving economy depended on
Salisbury personnel.
The
Community benefitted especially from the railway line the Government
built that ran through Island View for the sole purpose of servicing
the Salisbury Island naval base. That concrete causeway with its
strategic mini tunnels, ran through and across the strait.
Island
View was at the tip of a mainland peninsular; ocean on three sides.
Rowboat fishing was popular and lucrative on two sides. Fish sales to
Salisbury Island equaled those on Island View.
Over
ninety percent of the young women of Island View married Salisbury
Island personnel, on completion of their three years of training.
There was talk at official levels of building a harbour somewhere
along the Island View coast to promote civilian visits onboard naval
ships.
Torquay
Avenue was miles away to the north from the centre of Island View,
and virtually lost in thick jungle. And so, it was a mystery why,
after Emilia took up primitive-style residence at 59, other Island
View single young women were abandoning Island View to voluntarily
join her. Those young women were abandoning the option of marriage,
some of them long before marriage became an option.
It
was bound to happen that sooner or later the men in male-dominated
Island View, would take adversarial action against the Torquay
59ers.
Because
it was merely young women they were planning to attack, the men were
sure of a quick victory. No need for firearms. Horsewhips and canes
would be sufficient to discipline unruly girl children.
The
59ers, fully expecting the Island Viewers to attack by night, watched
by night with their faces and hands smeared with black berry juice.
The
men were careless about secrecy. Young women in Island View secretly
notified the 59ers of everything said and every move planned about
the coming assault. As well, it showed how easy the men thought a
victory would be against an all-women army, that they attacked with
much military music and fanfare on a sunny day, at mid-morning.
When
the men arrived with their horsewhips and canes, to struggle-inch
through the Torquay Avenue wilderness, the 59ers ambushed them.
From
the beginning, Emilia had planned to never use Torquay to access her
concrete dwelling. At that earlier, much earlier, time it was a
decision made out of pure mindlessly instinctual self-defence.
Over
the years, special attention had been regularly given by the 59ers to
cultivating the wild Torquay vegetation into becoming ever
increasingly impenetrable wilderness. Emilia's instincts proved to be
on the mark when the Island View men foolishly attacked along the
Avenue.
It
was a one-sided debacle. Not a man returned to Island View. No
Torquay 59er woman suffered so much as a scratch from the Island View
men.
Accounts,
possibly apocryphal, are that the only weapons the 59ers used were
poisonous snakes caged for the occasion, and freed on the occasion.
That part of the country was tropical Africa; naturally, wall-to-wall
wild poisonous snakes all year round. If not with snakes, with what,
then, could the women have been so absolutely victorious? Except for
shovels and hoes and rakes, the 59ers were not known to own lethal
weapons.
The
win against the Island View men was nothing short of phenomenal.
Nonetheless, there was another and most long-lasting win.
Most
of the men were old enough to be the 59ers' older relatives. Hence,
defeat was a real probability in the expectation of every 59er.
Therefor, as an extra precaution against likely defeat, Emilia had
led them in digging a secret underground tunnel somewhere in the 59
backyard. The tunnel extended into the neighboring home virgin site
which, if numbered, would have been 61 Torquay Avenue.
In
the 61 yard where the tunnel surfaced and opened, they found a sturdy
very old-looking wood box on the ground, obscured under wild
vegetation. On every side of the box were tangled clumps of countless
sloughed-off snakeskins of different ages.
The
lid had a metal lock, completely covered in rust. The box was locked.
Emilia used a shovel to break open the lid. They saw piles of World
War One memorabilia: solid gold swastika badges, medals displaying
the Kaisar's face, jewellery, money coins, and other metal objects.
Neither
Emilia nor any of the others was curious about the swastikas among
pre-Nazi Germany memorabilia. Was it because the 59ers on Island View
were so isolated from the rest of the Nation that they knew nothing
about the infamous Nazi swastika?
A
few steps farther along on the ground was a human skull and some
bones among shred remnants of some sort of uniform. A very
old-looking handgun was among the bones.
Careful
to not disturb the bones of the skeleton and to not touch the gun,
the women, led by Emilia, shoveled earth to cover all.
In
walking about clearing the spot of the wild vegetation, and shoring
up and hiding the tunnel's entrance, the women came upon a graveyard
of sorts.
Three
old graves, each with a name painted-scrawled on a piece of dried
wood: Arnold, Charlotte, Theo. The women stopped clearing in that
direction, fearing to discover more graves.
Emilia,
acknowledging the likelihood of defeat by the imminent Island View
army, selected four women to take the treasures and immediately go
west through the jungle towards the Drakensberg Mountains which were
hundreds of miles away. If the 59ers were defeated, the treasures
would not fall into the hands of the Island Viewers. The women were
to not leave a trail.
That
debacle and the Government's closing down of the Salisbury Island
naval base were dire coincidences. The Island View Community never
fully recovered.
Nobody
knows what happened to Emilia's Torquay 59ers. Fearing Government
consequences for destroying the Island View army, the 59ers vacated
Torquay Avenue; that much is well known. That graveyard, undoubtedly,
must have made it that much easier for the women to abandon the area.
Before
they vacated 59 Torquay Avenue, the women filled in the tunnel.
It
was not only because she thought that uniformed corpse with a gun
could very well have been of a woman, that Emilia erected a wood
marker on that gravesite on the premises of 61 Torquay Avenue.
Contact
Ezra (Unless
you
type
the
author's name in
the subject
line
of the message we
won't know where to send it.)
