I was a boy in the 1950s and often played with the kids next door. Dad made a gate through the fence, so we didn’t have to climb over it to play together. It was a wooden fence with two horizontal rails. Dad removed some pickets, fixed them together and hinged them to form a gate. We went through the gate by bending between the rails (this was back in the days of back yard toilets when human waste was removed each week by nightsoil men, commonly called dunny men).
The dunny man noticed this makeshift gate and decided to use it as a short cut. He would pick up our can, balance it on the fence, slip through the gate and pick it up on his shoulder as he made his way to the toilet next door.
One day we were having breakfast and my little brother arrived late at the table and announced: “Guess what? The dunny man was just going through the fence gate and the can fell off the rail and tipped all over him. He must be a good man though because I heard him telling Jesus all about it.”
