No one in the bush would swipe a child’s bike from a country bus stop.

Everyone recognised it, even the bloke with 10 kids who was known as the district pilferer, his caper almost tolerated because his family circumstances were so reduced.

We knew without asking that another bike was beyond our family’s means that year.

Our father wasn’t about to let down one of his boys, however.

Quietly, he retrieved my little old bike from the back of the shed, took a look at its dilapidated state and got his tool box out.

I’d been wildly proud of the machine when my dad bought it from a neighbour a few years before.

Why, I was so proud that when the boy who was getting rid of it kicked it over and called it junk that he didn’t want any more, I hauled off and gave him a bloody nose.

Loading

He went hollering and blubbering to his parents. My father looked stern and apologised to the family, but later told me a left hook was handy when required and the little bugger obviously deserved it. Praise like that was pretty special to a five-year-old country boy.

But when I outgrew the tiny bike, it was consigned to the depths of the shed where bits of worn-out machinery were tossed in the unlikely event they might serve a new purpose in some undefined future.

Without telling anyone, our father set to work.

He dismantled the little old bicycle and rebuilt it. Rust was removed and paintwork touched up, the chain was oiled and tightened, inner tubes were patched and the tyres blown up.

There remained a problem.

My brother’s legs, measured surreptitiously, were too short for the machine, even with its seat screwed down as far as it would go.

A couple of stout blocks of timber were fashioned.

Our Dad, for whom necessity had always been the father of invention, wired the wooden blocks to the pedals.

And on Christmas morning, under a tree chopped from the back paddock and decorated by our mother with bits and pieces from her sewing box and a hand-painted star cut from cardboard, a brand-new recycled pushbike with built-up pedals awaited my little brother.

His grin was wide enough to split the sky.

Our father tried not to appear much more than content, but soon we could hear him whistling a Christmas carol out the back. Our mother, humming along to the sound, busied herself preparing breakfast.

Christmas morning was a triumph.

So was the rest of the day.

We drove to our grandparents’ place for Christmas lunch and dinner, as we did every year, a grand affair whose traditions had been imported by our English-raised grandmother.

A roasted turkey, which had lived a carefree life in a grove of pines before being captured and executed by my grandfather, sat in the middle of the table in what was called the long room.

Beers cooled in buckets for the men, the wood stove in the kitchen radiated fierce heat into the summer day and a flurry of aunts set out roasted vegetables and hams and cold cuts and salads. Down the hallway in the front room an uncle set the piano’s keys dancing. We knew the music would continue way into the night.

My brother and I had a tribe of cousins. We cavorted in the vast garden and climbed trees and played hide and seek and told tall tales.

All of us, except my brother.

Loading

He spent the day out on the grandparents’ gravelled driveway, assiduously practising the confounding art of riding his Christmas pushbike, which he’d refused to leave behind.

He fell again and again, skinning his knees and merrily getting up to have another go before our parents finally insisted he come inside, get some Mercurochrome applied to his scrapes and have something to eat.

It took only a few weeks before my brother was wheeling happily around our own driveway, his short legs pumping away at the augmented pedals.

By the time school resumed, he and I set off happily for the long ride to the bus stop, not a wobble to be seen.

Years later, when my brother had graduated to motorcycles and I was in an early phase of sports-car appreciation, we reminisced about the Christmas of the magical custom-made bicycle.

Had we understood how important it was to our parents that we were to be kept unaware that they had no money to treat us to shiny new Christmas gifts that year?

Of course not.

All we knew was that it was a perfect Christmas.

But what eventually became of that magical little bicycle?

We couldn’t remember. It lived on in its own special place in the forever, and that was enough.