A question I have often been asked after the publication of Albert Magoolie Remembers is what happened to my older brother Norbert?
Those who read the story will know Norbert and I parted company when he was thrown in jail for incitement after trying to sell car batteries he’d named Soltan, with the slogan: Get Charged with a SOLTAN Battery!
As my life became swallowed up working and touring with Pink Floyd I lost all contact with Norbert.
I wasn’t unhappy with this, as we hadn’t always gotten along anyway. In fact I could never understand why I’d made the decision to accompany him to the UK in the first place. Looking back, it may have been destiny.
Either that or the fact that he was bigger than me and had very powerful fists!
He was a bricklayer by trade and enjoyed portraying a tough guy image. And he was tough; there was no question about that.
He came home from work one day and proudly told us how he’d been laying bricks on the second storey of a new build and fell off the scaffold onto the concrete pavement below.
He got to his feet, dusted himself off and shooed away those who had rushed to his aid. He climbed back onto the scaffold, grabbed his trowel and fell straight back down again.
He again hit the concrete with a sickening thud, but nobody bothered to rush to him this time. There was even some mock applause. If I’d been there I’d have scrawled a score out of ten on a mud board and held it aloft.
After a few minutes of convalescence to rid himself of the “jelly legs” he got back to work.
But one of his favourite pastimes was inflicting pain upon me.
He loved this torture called “the typewriter”. He’d get me on my back on the floor and sit on top of me with his knees across my arms, and then use my chest as a typewriter, pounding the invisible keys with both index fingers.
His other favourite was giving me a “dead arm” by repeatedly punching me in the arm just below the shoulder joint.
So in a way leaving him languishing in a prison cell somewhere seemed like his just deserts.
But I did find out later through my other brothers Herbert and Gilbert that Norbert had pretty much spent the next three decades trying to track me down, all the while plotting my downfall.
On several occasions he contacted my parents Bertram and Gertrude to find out if they knew where I was.
My dear mum had always had trouble with her hearing, and once misheard me when I told her I worked with Pink Floyd.
Celebrity chef Keith Floyd
Norbert rang mum a short time after this and she told him,
“He’s working with Keith Floyd.”
She thought I was working with Britain’s popular celebrity chef!
The sad thing is Norbert tracked down Keith Floyd and beat him up when he said he’d never heard of Albert Magoolie.
This led to another, longer stint in the slammer for Norbert.
But far worse was to come for poor Norbert.
I was back in Australia and dropped in on my mum. My dad had passed away, and Herbert had moved in to look after mum, who was now suffering with the early stages of dementia.
Herbert had this hideous green Holden Kingswood which he spent most of his time working on. There was ALWAYS something wrong with it.
Herbert called it “the sedan”, but to the rest of us it was “the lime lemon!”
Despite my knowledge of cars being dwarfed by a three month old baby’s comprehension of quantum physics, Herbert had
somehow managed to talk me into giving him a hand replacing the radiator… or the spark plugs… or realigning the sump oil or something?
I remember lying underneath the lime lemon in mum’s back yard when the telephone rang.
Mum answered the phone, then came to the back door and yelled out, “It’s Norbert on the phone. He wants to know where Albert is.”
Herbert yelled out, “He’s working on the sedan, mum.”
“What did you say Norbert… er, Albert…er, Gilbert… Herbert?” came mum’s typical response. (She always rattled off the names of all four sons. No matter who it was to whom she was referring, his name always had to be preceded by the other three.)
“HE’S… WORKING… ON… THE… SEDAAAAN!” yelled Herbert.
“Oh. Ok,” mum replied, then disappeared back inside.
I suddenly flew into a panic, worried that Norbert could turn up at the house at any moment.Immediately my chest began to ache at the thought of Norbert’s index fingers pounding out a type–written message on it, and my upper arm became uncomfortably numb.
I crawled out from under the lime lemon and raced inside.
I said, “Mum, was that Norbert? Where was he calling from?”
“Oh, somewhere in England,” she said. “It was an overseas call….”
Suddenly the expression on her face turned to shock and confusion.
“What’s up, mum?” I asked.
“You’re… You’re Albert. You’re not supposed to be here. Herbert just told me you’re working in the Sudan!”
“No, mum,” I replied, “Herbert said I’m working on the sedan!”
“Oh dear. I just told Norbert….”
A massive sense of relief flooded over me. I hugged my distressed mother and said, “Don’t worry about it, mum. It’s ok. You said absolutely the RIGHT thing.”
The threat of being hunted down by my marauding big brother had been allayed by a serendipitous combination of my mother’s deafness and dementia. But the story was to take a cruel twist for the bedevilled Norbert.
Around a year later Norbert ended up being flown back to Australia on a mercy flight after spending several months in a Sudanese hospital. And he was now a good deal shorter than he was before.
He confided to our youngest brother Gilbert that after calling my mum he had made his way to the Sudan, expecting to find Pink Floyd performing there somewhere.
With no sign of Pink Floyd or me, and his money all but gone he signed up with a division of the French Foreign Legion.
In time he was assigned a deployment on a mine sweeping mission, and was working with a handful of Legionnaires looking for unexploded mines in what had been a particularly volatile war zone.
He had been taught how to use the mine detector, and had got the technique pretty well sorted. You hold the detector out in front of you and pan it from side to side, listening for the beeps.
Yep, simple. But for one thing. You don’t walk BACKWARDS!
Norbert did, and blew both his legs off from just above the knees.
I look on the bright side. He could have been killed, but survived. Not only that, but now he had an endless amount of time to finally learn to play the guitar. And he’d always complained about not being able to park in disabled car parking spaces. Now he could! Except that now he could no longer drive a car.
The main thing for me was Norbert was no longer in any fit state to exact his revenge.
I could now walk the streets without fear.
Although… I guess… there’s still Roger Waters.