Martyn Green
Coordinator,
Baywater Anglers
“We’ll be back in a minute, Lenny.” Once again there was a brief exchange of good-natured blows as both brothers fought to be the first to get through the door, leaving a bemused Lenny staring after their retreating forms.
‘Oh well,’ he thought to himself. ‘I’ll wait for a while and, if they are not back soon, I’ll go back to bed,’ which is exactly what he did, carefully propping open the door with an obliging little winkle that had crept up to the cave.
He did not go straight back to sleep, but, after an hour or two with no sign of the brothers returning, he did, eventually, drop off. He awoke with a start.
“I’ll come a-waltzing...G’day Lenny!”
Words failed him at first, but then he managed to catch his breath. “Bruce? Wayne? Do you know what time it is?”
Two pairs of eyes regarded him curiously, then turned to each other. “Do you know what time it is, Bruce?”
“Can’t say I do, Wayne, but then I never learnt to tell the time anyway!”
Both brothers howled with laughter, then leapt on Lenny, dragging him over to what they had been making. “What do you think, cousin?”
Lenny looked at their drums, then chuckled. A large crab – probably Cruncher he decided – had peeled, leaving his old shell behind. The brothers had fixed it onto a pedestal of razorfish shells, then surrounded it with cockles, which they had also mounted on razorfish. One of them waved his shell as if to protest but then, catching the scent of the three huge crustaceans, shut it with a snap. Lenny’s mouth began to water.
“What about this one, Lenny.”
“You sing it, and I’ll hum it.”
‘Now why,’ he wondered to himself, ‘did that make the pair of them laugh till they collapsed into a tangled heap of waving legs and claws. Oh well!’
And so began the visit of the terrible twosome, as the residents came to call the two crayfish. It was a period in the history of the pond that would not be soon forgotten.
