Peter was a belligerent Dutchman.  He was the size and weighed about the same as a year 6 school kid.  He was wiry, tough, tanned and constantly smoking.  He spoke  an interesting variation on English.  I used to ask him questions that required answers with lots of words starting with the letter “J”.  When Peter said the word “just”, it came out like “shoosht”.

I figure he was about forty, but his lifestyle rendered him as about 65.

He was the meanest and most miserable alcoholic bastard I’ve had the displeasure to have worked with in the shed and on the line, but despite this he was a machine that put a lot of the younger fitter and bigger blokes in the shade.  Tubby said that he was such a total bastard because he’d been raised below sea level and he never got a decent night’s sleep living in constant fear that his socks were about to float away into the Zuider Zee.

Peter was so tight with a quid that fish had more problems keeping the water out and the poop in than Peter had exposing his dosh to sunlight.  He used to show up at 7.00am – kick off time with a half-finished can of DA (his second for the day).

Peter invariably bit me for a couple of bucks for morning tea.  I was the only one to not tell him to go and get stuffed.  It wasn’t that I LIKED him.  Everyone hated Peter, but he was part of the actual foundations of the shed, and since I was the new kid, it was my job to do the putting up with.  And I soon learnt to get the two bucks back after we were paid and before Peter had stopped at the TAB or made it back to the Pig’s.

Nobody knew where Peter lived.  Nobody had ever seen him not at either the co-op or the Pig’s Arms, except for brief excursions to the TAB – before Merv had one installed in the pub, but by then Peter had gone – if not exactly to God, it was more likely that he had taken the big subterranean trip.  Most of the blokes were just happy that wherever Peter lived, it wasn’t at their boarding house.