A Larrikin
I believe it’s a very hard part in a parent’s life when he or she gets a call from a police station or is visited by the police and told that his or her son was involved in something and he had to go down or answer to the police.
Here is something that happened when I was still in primary school. I lived in Wailekutu back in the early seventies and one day while walking home from school this young boy standing up on Kalekana hill threw a stone and us. It hit one of the boys and opened up a huge gash on his forehead. Kalekana was one tough neighbourhood back then.
When the boy returned from the hospital we all went up to the boy's house with the police and confronted the boy’s parents. He was living with his single mom. When the policeman said that her son had thrown a stone that badly injured the man’s son she said with a grin, “Wooo na gone dau aim qori.”(That boy can aim).
I never forgot that day because the injured boy’s father burst into laughter. All the anger that he had with him disappeared and the policeman started laughing also. The woman wondered what she had said and stood there stony faced and defiant.
Anyway, when things were normal again and with the father still sniggering, the police spoke to the mother to look after her son properly. She said, “Isa, he got no father and he follow many bad boys.”
The mother had been informed earlier of what her son had done and was waiting for the police. When I think back to that day some forty years ago, I wonder if the mother had been thinking of what to say. Her son was notorious for causing fights and was a larrikin and she had probably exhausted all the excuses in the world that she could muster to save her son just one more time.
With all the kinds of comeback lines when there is trouble that one had to take the cake, or should that be stone.
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