The Lawn-mower from Hell
The time has come for me to relate yet another tale of anguish from my tragic youth. Suppressed by my own psyche to protect me from trauma, this ghastly memory has finally re-surfaced. Steel yourself for this dread narrative: The Lawnmower from Hell.
At first glance it appeared to be an innocent machine, sincerely dedicated to its single task of mowing the lawn. But I was soon to learn that within that inorganic frame lurked a spirit so malevolent that it made Saruman look like Santa Claus; a wily mind that fed on the pain of a young boy, driving a wedge between him and his own father, cunningly refusing to co-operate in order to make this noble youth look like a lazy shirker.
The machines phase one cunning ploy was simple but effective. It would refuse to start. When I couldn’t start the mower, dad would tell me to remove and clean the evil spark plug. Dad was always the last person to screw it in, so it had been tightened by a fully grown man who had fought in a war. The chances of a late-blooming eleven year old, whose primary skills were re-reading Lord of the Rings and avoiding being eaten by imaginary tigers, successfully unscrewing this spark plug were vanishingly remote.
In our family there were two sub-species:
1. The Competent, which included Ben, my eldest brother, who could easily manhandle a submarine, Toby, the next eldest, who once built a boat in our living room, Mum, who was afraid of nothing except wetas, and of course Dad who could build or fix pretty much anything.
2. The Dreamers, including Christian, who, at the age of twelve, taught himself French and touch typing, wrote three books, and tried in vain to teach me philosophy, and lastly, me, who could not start the lawnmower.
THAT Lawnmower
Now we are about to enter into childhood trauma territory. It involves a device, a mechanical beast, so difficult and dangerous that I lay awake at night, sweating with dread as though some nameless horror had just emerged from the swamp of doom to stalk my very soul.
Why did my my mom and dad continue to pretend that placing me at the mercy of the ghastly machine was somehow normal? Why not be honest and simply sell me as a gladiator, or a laboring slave to toil under the lash assembling the tomb of the Pharaoh? But my parents didn’t want a Tomb of the Pharaoh. They wanted me to mow the lawn.
Perhaps you imagine that I exaggerate. Let me assure you, if you had endured what I endured you would be first in line volunteering for an Egyptian incarnation. And I’m not talking about a lifetime as Cleopatra. That spot is long gone.
No one had a lawn-mower like ours. In those days most people had push mowers with gears that drove the blades, making them whirl fast enough to sever innocent grass blades. You had to lean in and push with all your weight to make this thing work. Mowing a large property like ours would have exhausted me. But at least the mechanism was simple. There was little that could go wrong with a push mower. It was an unsophisticated device, lacking the native intelligence required to deliberately torment a young boy.
But my forward thinking father was not one to be satisfied with such a low tech solution. He proudly purchased a modern lawnmower with an engine. Which might have been a wonderful thing if starting that engine had required less effort than embarking upon the first moon landing.
50 years later I gaze in awe at a robot lawn-mower that drives itself. It’s like one of those robot vacuum cleaners, except that it mows the lawn instead of vacuuming your carpet.
Author’s note: Please ensure you don’t get these two devices mixed up — the result might not be pretty.
What would I not have given to possess such a device during those terrifying days of my ongoing battle with the devil machine?
Whenever my father approached our Behemoth lawnmower, it instantly snapped to attention and functioned perfectly. But as soon as the intimidating figure of its six foot boss turned his back, it slouched into its regular inert, non-lawn-mowing state.
Which, as intended, created the impression that I was deliberately trying to avoid my duty. At one point my father was kind enough to call me a ‘lazy little bastard’ because I hadn’t mowed the lawn with with the ‘aid’ of his favorite demonic device. I was surprised when he called me that. He almost never swore and evidently he wasn’t very good at it. I mean, insulting his own son by calling his paternity into question seemed like something of an own goal.
Clearly my Dad didn’t understand what was really going on with this machine. How would he? The mower never dared to give him any problems. He was its boss.
But I was the youngest child and was boss of no-one except my dog. The lawnmower, which had no official authority over anyone except grass, clearly resented this attempt by such a lowly being as I to command its obedience. So it used what little leverage it had like a petty tyrant and endeavored to extract from me as much pain as possible.
New Zealand Green
Another challenge was the weather. I’m not saying that the weather considered me a personal enemy. I was too insignificant to attract such notice. Like a Greek God of old, it merely behaved as it willed with no thought of the consequences for a mere mortal such as I.
You may have heard that New Zealand is very green. Guess why? Here’s a clue: it has something to do with rain. Particularly in my home town of Wellington with a rainfall akin to the Amazon basin. The only differences are that Wellington rain is cold and we rarely get to hang out with multi-colored tropical birds and cute monkeys.
Grass really loves rain, as do all kinds of plants and trees and forests, which generate more rain, and it goes around and around like one of those vicious bicycles. Result? Lots of grass, and wet boys.
Another problem was that I only had time to mow the lawn on weekends. Monday to Friday I was at school, busy becoming a better educated lazy little bastard. Sadly, due to an oversight on the part of the Education Department, the curriculum for eleven year olds did not include recalcitrant lawnmower wrangling.
Thanks to the Weather Gods, dry weekends when lawn mowing is possible were rare. The grass grew very tall during the intervening periods and the long grass never really dried out. Long, wet grass is like Ninja grass. It has no fear of the terrible spinning blades of the mower. It just lies down, all flat and slippery, and the blades slide right over the top of it, kind of like what Nemo does in The Matrix (why is he named after a lost fish?) whenever the baddies try to kick him.
Even the most diligent LLB (to protect the ears of the young I will henceforward use this acronym in place of ‘lazy little bastard’) finds it pretty much impossible to mow long, wet grass. Looking back, I can’t help wondering if this was the reason my father assigned this task to me in the first place — because he didn’t want to do it himself. My dad was no dummy. That war he was in, notice how he was on the winning side? Hmm. You know I never thought of that until just now? Man, I’m naive.
I felt like I was living in a stacked deck. There was I, poorly prepared by the New Zealand Education Department, facing Weather Gods, the machine from Hell, plus my Dad. I was doomed to remain an LLB for the rest of my life.
My father was very proud of his Behemoth lawnmower. He seemed to imagine that in allowing me to use it he was bestowing upon me a high honor. I, on the other hand, was visualizing it being sliced into tiny metal cubes with an oxy-acetylene torch, then melted down and forged into spoons.
It squatted like a great red and silver beast of solid iron, rooted to the earth by gravity. Years later I realize that its color scheme mimicked that of Iron Man. Perhaps it imagined that it was actually a playboy billionaire Superhero, pretending to be a lawnmower. I suppose we will never know. But one thing I am sure of is that it was made of the same substance as a neutron star, a teaspoonful of which weighs more than our entire planet. Want to guess how I know this? It entered the public record when Behemoth lawnmowers were banned under the Geneva Convention.
Sometimes in desperation I was forced to try and mow the wet grass anyway. The blades would slide over the grass leaving big circular marks, as though rather than cutting the lawn, the mower was styling its hair. I now realize that this must be how they make those crop circles. My heart goes out to those poor alien kids whose parents force them to stay up all night mowing mysterious circular patterns across the farm lands of England.
The Twelve Labors of Hercules
But I’m getting ahead of myself. None of this was possible without getting the machine to start in the first place, a task that will surely be listed alongside the Twelve Labors of Hercules in the annals of history.
It began with a rope, which could be handily repurposed in case you decide it will be easier to hang yourself. You had to wrap a rope around the top of the machine, and pull with all your strength to get the engine to turn over. After doing this about 20 times it still wouldn’t start. Clearly the mower never had any intention of starting. It was simply allowing me to turn the engine over in order to weaken and taunt me, but I saw no other option so I continued the futile ritual.
Having struggled to the point of collapse with this hopeless rope pulling exercise, I tried the next impossible tactic: cleaning the single spark plug. This diminutive but wicked object became caked in soot whenever it was not kept in one of those dust free environments where they make computer chips.
Yet once in a while, and I cannot believe that this was possible except through divine intervention, a mechanical miracle occurred and the murderous ‘Behemoth’ started and began growling impatiently, eager to assassinate a bunch of grass blades, and, then, wonder of wonders, due to a rare meteorological miracle the grass was actually dry enough to cut. Which led me directly into the path of the most deadly danger of all: brain mutilation!
Allow me to explain. We had this big property and some of the paths were lined with gravel. Since we also had two dogs, it was inevitable that some of those stones would end up on the grass. If a lawnmower blade struck a stone, it would tend to shoot out the back of the mower towards me at roughly the speed of light. Our dogs were very active in scattering stones on the lawn, so I figured that the odds of a stone flying up one of my nostrils into my brain were pretty high. This might account for a certain reluctance on my part to have anything to do with this whole project. Yet my so-called ‘parents’ appeared to be indifferent to the fact that they were placing their cherished LLB at such deadly risk.
I remember seeing lawns that looked neat and manicured, and wondering how in the world it was done. Even on the rare occasions when I did manage to pass these augmented Trials of Hercules, when my prayers and sacrifices to the aforesaid Gods bore fruit and I was able to wrestle the accursed Behemoth into submission, and despite overwhelming odds did not end up with a stone lodged in my frontal cortex, our lawns (did I mention that there were four of them!) never looked remotely like those sculpted wonders. How was this possible? The tidy green edged paths, the evenness of the surfaces all served to humiliate, fascinate and mystify me. I viewed golf green keepers with awe. Inspired by their shining example I did my best, but the results resembled a sad and ragged medieval battle ground.
And then, no sooner would I finish the last verdant lawn than the entire population of grass blades would bounce back up and start growing again with their usual tremendous enthusiasm, undaunted and virulent, utterly confident that they would wear down my resolve and in the long run, they would win.
This grass infestation of New Zealand is a huge deal. The Government have employed an army of more than 20 million animated lawnmowers, popularly known as ‘sheep’, to keep the dread rising tide at bay. This has inspired a plethora of tasteless and childish jokes at our expense, but the sheep chew on contently, oblivious to the slings and arrows of the evil Anti-New Zealand lobby. The sheep don’t care — they understand that it is mere jealousy.
My memoir, which I hope to publish pre-posthumously, includes an entire chapter relating this tale of my long defeat in the battle of boy against machine. Perhaps the story of my suffering will serve some purpose for this world, igniting in the hearts of fathers a spark of insight causing them to hesitate before they impose such onerous chores on their innocent younglings.