Harvie Krumpet

Some are born great
Some achieve greatness
Some have greatness thrust upon them…
…and then …there are others…

Harvie was born into the world upside down, back to front
And was christened Harvek Milos Krumpetzki

His father’s name was Maciek
A lumberjack with hands as big as shovels
And hair that smelt of pine needles

His mother’s name was Liliana
A weary woman with lead in her veins from working in a mine

She was obsessed with counting her fingers
and had conversations with people… that just weren’t there!
The other villagers stay well clear.
But she didn’t need friends
Now that she had her miracle

Harvie grew strong and healthy
He had his father’s ears and his mother’s open heart
But soon his parents began to notice… peculiarities

He began to have odd twitches and like to touch things with his index finger
For no reason at all
When he met someone, he had to touch them on the nose

The doctor said he had Tourette Syndrome
A brain disorder that meant he couldn’t control his impulses
It was like trying to control the sneeze
There was no cure or explanation

At school
Harvie was called a thick
His friend was Bogush
Bogush stuttered, and had problems with his … mucus
The other kids threw stones
And together they were tricked, teased and tortured
Until Liliana pulled Harvie from school and decided to educate him herself.

Although she was illiterate
She knew about facts
and filled his brain with all sorts of stuff
An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain
Butterfly smell with their feet
And elephants can’t jump no matter how hard they try
Every day he wrote more and more facts in the notebook he carried … everywhere!

Fakt 48
Facts still exist even if they are ignored.

As Harvie grew taller and stronger
His mother grew shorter and madder
Slowly fizzling into insanity
Often she mistake him for an intruder

Harvie followed in his father’s footsteps
He liked working with him
But at times felt he needed to be alone with his problems

He pondered the world beyond
Wishing for things to change
And suddenly they did

He returned to find his home burnt to the ground
His mother had left the stove burning in the night
And Harvie found his parents nearby
Frozen and nude

Fakt 116
Certain frogs can come back to life when thawed.
Humans do not.

But there was more to come:
The Germans invaded!
Harvie escaped and found himself on a ship bound for a place called “Australia”
His world was turned upside down and back to front, again!
Harvie ended up in a small suburb called Spottswood.
He rented a small house with eleven other migrants
And try to assimilate as best he could
Changing his name from Harvek Krumpetzki to Harvie Krumpet

He got a job
And many years went by as he saved his money and tried not to indulge
Life didn’t change much
But his body did
His hair fell out and re-grew on his shoulders

In the evenings, he learned English off an old television he found amongst the rubbish
He put little curtains on it
And fond of memorizing sorts of facts
(Revised: and found it a mesmerizing source of facts)

The first thing he’d ever watched was a Busby Berkeley film
He fell in love with all the bosoms and smiles
It was so different to the Spottswood dump!

At work, he tried to make friends
But for Harvie, it wasn’t easy

Harvie’s skull had spilt in half
The doctors inserted a steel plate between his scalp and skull and laced it up with 19 stitches
He was left with a scar that looked like he had a lobotomy
Harvie wished he had more hair

He left the dump and tried new jobs
He seemed to get sacked a lot
He didn’t know why

But he was always discovering more facts
Rubber bands last longer if refrigerated
The Bible was written by the same people who thought the earth was flat
And time does not heal all wounds


One time
Harvie got a job collecting golf balls
This is where he got struck by lightning
But he survived
And even made it into the local newspaper
“Retarded migrant survives lightning strike!”

Harvie began to wonder how he’d survived so much bad luck
Maybe he was like a cat that had nine lives
He thought he had about four left

Actually, the biggest threat to his daily life was the 28 cigarettes he smoked
He developed asthma, so went and saw his doctor
In those days, the dangers of smoking were not known
Doctor Graystane recommended Harvie smoke even more
Smoke is soothing for the lung, she said,
Just like steam in the sauna.

His asthma worsened
And for every ten cigarettes he had to have a puff from his asthma pump

Years later, his doctor died from emphysema
Just as the dangers of smoking were finally revealed

Fakt 142
A cigarette is a substitute for your mother’s nipple.

Harvie kept collecting facts
And one morning discovered one about himself

His steel plate had become magnetized from the lightning strike
Harvie made the papers, again!
“Retarded migrant becomes human magnet!”

Harvie’s optimism began to crumble
He thought about fate’s horrible dealings
How he felt powerless
A victim to the world

He wondered if he should just throw it all in

“Seize the day, Harvie! Seize the day! Carpe Diem.”
The simple profound word struck a chord
Harvie decided to turn his world upside down and back to front, again!
He stopped believing in fate and did exactly what the statue said

He felt free and alive and joined a nudist group!
He became a vegetarian and joined an animal liberationist society
Liberating chickens and their eggs
Harvie didn’t just seize the day, he was strangling it!

Fakt 268
There are three times more chickens in the world than humans.

Despite his enlightenment, physical problems still plagued him
One of his testicles developed cancer and had to be removed
But this was when he met nurse Valerie Bustall!

She had everything he didn’t and was everything he wasn’t
Yet Instantly, their pheromones fizzled together like ice cream and lemonade
They decided to get married and had the ceremony in Cancer Ward 9
Harvie wanted a nude wedding, but Valery and the hospital forbade it

Fakt 372
The trouble with nude dancing is that not everything stops when the music does.

Harvie had lost a testicle but gained a wife
He moved into Val’s small apartment with her two cats and parrot, Brian
Brian had a parasitic disease which made his feathers drop out
Valerie was constantly knitting little jumpers to keep him warm
For some reason, pets resented Harvie

Fakt 586
Love does not conquer all.

Harvie and Val went to bed early every night and tried to get pregnant
But there was not enough sperm in Harvie’s lonely testicle
And he was declared sterile

They decided to adopt
And came across a little … (thalidomide) girl
They related to her immediately
Took her home and named her Ruby after Val‘s mother

So little limbless Ruby
Big bold Val
And magnetic Harvie
Became a family

Harvie gave up working
And dedicated his time to teaching Ruby what he knew about the world

He told her that animals had rights too
And to always respect the environment
As well as herself
He told her about the beauty of being nude
And to be never ashamed of your body
Everybody was … unique
Some people had less bits
Some had more bits

For every new fact she remembered
He would stick a gold star to her wall

She adored her father
He was full of tricks and was like having her own private clown

Fakt 698
The average person uses nineteen miles of dental floss in their lifetime.

In school, Ruby excelled
She went into university and came out a lawyer
Then moved to America and started her own practice
Championing the rights of the disabled
Harvie and Val were extremely proud

On Harvie’s sixty-fifth birthday
Valery’s brain clotted
And she died
It was such a shock
She had never been sick

Harvie was all alone again

He had his daughter but she was so far away
He became a hermit and stopped washing
His mind wondered slowly into senility

It wasn’t long before they took him away
When a neighbor found him trying to withdraw money from the microwave

Fakt 804
42% of the population can’t remember their pin number.


So began the last phase of Harvie’s life at Pleasant Paddocks
He shared a room with a man called Hamish McGrumbel
Hamish looked like something of a tin of short-bread
And had nostril hair that looked like he was housing a family of spiders
He was 94 years old and had given up the will to die
He also had Alzheimers
And recently burned his ear trying to answer the iron

Harvie and Hamish pretended to dislike each other
Harvie often stole Hamish’s teeth, returned them and then showed him where they’d been
But Hamish always had his revenge
Sometimes they sneaked alcohol into the room
and put on drunken shows with knitted finger puppets the ladies were making for charity

everyone was thoroughly entertained
but were less than impressed
when they found Harvie the next morning in the corridor
From then on, Harvie was to remained clothed at all times
“Nudity is strickly Forbidden. By order of the management”

Fakt 914
Alcohol can cause drunkenness and nudity.

Often Harvie escaped at night and took Hamish on animal liberation jaunts
They sprayed slogans on shop windows
“Chops have feelings too!”
And on their way home paint over teenagers’ gufity(graffiti?) with their own sayings
“Slow and steady wins the race”
Escaping Alzheimer’s patients were a particular problem at Pleasant Paddocks
The staff would find them at bus stops waiting to go and see relatives … long dead.
To solve this, they put an old bus stop in the home’s garden
Where the Alzheimers could sit for hours waiting for a bus that would never come.

Time drizzled on while everyone sat around and waited to die

Harvie’s Alzheimer began to worsen as he slipped in and out of dream worlds
Especially when the local church group visited
“God is better than football
God is better than beer
God is better than cricket
‘Cause God is there all the year
He isn’t shut on Sundays, he isn’t stopped by rain
He is better than the captain coach
You can talk to him again and again and again and again ……”

“God is better than football
God is better than beer
God is better than cricket
‘Cause God is there all the year”

After these magical episodes, Harvie would get extremely depressed
And was put on an amazing new drug
But the only thing that really cheered him up were letters from Ruby across the world
He wished she’d visited more

Harvie’s mind grew darker
And the fire in his belly began to fizzle

One night he decided to end things
But life had one more challenge for Harvie

On the way back to his room
He came across a woman he’d never met
Her name was Wilma, She had cancerous goiter
And was embarrassed to leave her room during the day
She was waiting for death to hurry up
They sat and spoke long into the night
In the night, Harvie realized he had some more living to do
Wilma had decided she needed no more
“Thank you.”

Harvie was going to enjoy what time he had left
He took off his clothes and went and sat in the morning sun

It shone on his face and he smiled for the first time in a long while
As he waited for the invisible bus

He knew it would never come
But… he didn’t mind

Fakt 1034
Life is like a cigarette. Smoke it to the butt.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Questions about Harvie Krumpet:

What did Harvie's father do for a living?
farmworker
lumberjack
lawbreaker

What did Lilliana have in her veins?
vest
poison
lead

How did Harvie grow?
weak and problematic
strong and healthy
happy and smiling

Why did Harvie touch things?
He liked it
He needed to touch them
there was no reason

What did the other guys do to Harvie and his friend?
they tricked, teased and tortured them
they were kind and honest with them
they punched and kicked them

One of the facts that Harvie's mother taught him was that...
butterflies can jump so high
butterflies can smell with their feet
elephants can smell with their feet

Why did his house burnt?
His father started a fire accidentally
Someone left a cigar near the house
His mother had left the stove burning

When he arrived at Australia, where did he live?
In a small suburb called Spottswood
In a big city called Spottswood
In a house called Spottswood

How did he learn English?
He studied hard
He bought a television and learnt from the programmes
He found a television and learnt from the programmes

Why did he change his job?
He needed more money
Someone offered him a better job
He could not make friends in the other job