Spring-Heel'd Jack

G. Scott

I'm walking down Vivian Street one morning and the sun is shining and the sky is as blue as plastic. It's warm and the men are wearing summer shirts and big happy ties and the girls are in bright things and sunny hair and the people are busy and laughing and hurrying. The cars in the hot car lots are warm and shining at us. The paint on the hot wooden buildings is peeling off, trying to embrace things, showing the world to the blind old planks beneath.

Mount Victoria is being dark green above us: and what is behind it? What is over the edge where the pale blue starts up there?

It's Jack.

Jack of the spring-heeled boots; Jack, tall as Shell House; Jack.

Here is his boot coming over the Byrd Memorial big as a bus, with the heels for which he is famous vibrating on their stupendous springs.

His foreleg and knee: his black trousers tucked into the tops of his kneeboots. Then the rest of his immense body as he ends his leap and straightens up with one foot at the top of Marjoribanks Street and the other in the pines of Palliser Park.

He is dressed in black, with a black cloak, oiled black hair and shining black moustaches. He surveys the city with piercing jet eyes, brushing a cloud from his shoulder and searching for wrongs to be righted. He stares with unnerving fixedness. The city waits.

In Kelburn and Brooklyn, in Thorndon and Wadestown, the students are searching for flats. In pairs and singly, in groups of four in cavalcades of six; in cars with their parents; on foot; on second-hand roller-skates; with hope and despair in their hearts they are scouring the town, knocking on doors, waiting outside land-agents, telephoning with their last cents, queuing up outside the Evening Post, searching for somewhere to live, somewhere to study, somewhere to shelter them.

In the eyes of the landlords they read the message that they are not wanted.

Jack's eyes see and his mind works inscrutably.

With a flick of his muscles of steel he is in Wai-te-ata Road, peering into every window of the Rankine Brown Building, bending towards the Students' Union, stooping to hear the chatter of the students, gazing intently into the Accommodation Office, his mind ticking over his huge hands moving delicately in the air like a tree growing at lightning speed, as he formulates the solution.

The professors look out of their windows like fish out of the tanks in an acquarium, amazed at the sight, wondering what it portends. Members of the constabulary wander perplexedly around Jack's feet, occasionally tapping the unheeding leather with their notebooks while high above them, Jack thinks.

Suddenly his attention is fixed on Upland Road. He can see two groups of footsore students converging unbeknown to each other on a house to let The landlord, fat as lard, is approaching in his Holden. Only one group can have the house. He will pick the group with the shortest hair and the neatest clothes, if they are all clean and polite. He pulls his car to a halt then he stares upward with amazement and fear.

Spring-heeled Jack is there. He holds four students in his hands, far above the houses. They look up at his gigantic face in fascination. He takes one, heavily bearded, between forefinger and thumb, and slowly brings his armour-plate fingernails together. A grimace of fear twists the student's face beneath his hirsute camouflage. Inch by inch he feels himself compressed by the incredible pressure: but his frame does not disintegrate. By some strange process his bones do not break and his vital organs do not burst asunder. Closer and closer come the super-human digits to one another, and then, suddenly, the crushing stops; the pressure is released; the bearded youth falls onto the palm of Jack's hand. From above his oiled moustaches, Jack gazes compassionately down. The student looks up at his companions, and realises that he is less than half their size.

He has been compressed. He is no bigger than a child.

His friends regard him with disbelief. Then, one by one, they too are taken, helpless, by the giant's fingers and moulded to dwarf-shape.

When all four are midgets. Jack sets them gently down on the pavement before the astonished landlord.

"Show them around the house," commands Jack, and as the incredulous party obeys him without a thought, he grasps the other four students and lifts them unresisting above the road.

Within half an hour both groups of students can live in the house. They can split the rent. They are happy, Jack smiles benignly down on them.

"When you have completed your studies," he says, "go down to the yacht-club and hurl yourselves into the water. You will be restored to your full stature and, as wage earners, will be able to work for the money needed to maintain yourselves at adult dimensions in food, clothing and shelter. Co and be diligent."

And the students went and busied themselves with their preparations for their studies, commenting on their unexpected good fortune with awed delight.

With a leap, Jack was on the Tinakori Heights, sitting against a radio-mast and contemplating the city and the placid harbour.

As he expected, a queue of students wound down the hill and along Glenmore Street right up to the viaduct All asked to be miniaturised. "It will be so much more convenient," they remarked. On the campus the president of the Students' Association exhorted those who were not short of accommodation to go likewise and see Jack.

"It will be so much easier to get permission for demonstrations", he said. "Protest will take up so much less room." The chief of Police seconded his admonition.

"Go and see Spring-Heeled Jack", said the caterer "The cafeteria will never be overcrowded, and you will be satisfied with so much less food."

"Get smaller!" exhorted the professors and lecturers. "Classes will be so much easier to control; teachers will have so much more confidence!"

"Go up to the Tinakori Hill", insisted the Chancellor and the Board of Governers. "Our Building programme can be slowed; furniture will be so much cheaper; overcrowding will cease. We will put a height-limit in the Regulations!"

Mr. Muldoon himself paid a visit to Jack, to thank him for his services to the economy. He sat on Jack's corduroyed knee, considering it undignified to be lifted in the giant's hands, and smiled his distorted smile, before he climbed down the spring-heeled boot and returned to his ministerial duties.

It was Jack's crowning triumph. Soon, the last student was compressed. The accommodation problem was solved. As the sun was setting Jack stood up, stretched, bent at the knees, and leapt into the darkening sky to yet another assignment.

Behind him, Wellington and its students lay contented beneath a yellow moon.