The road home

He wasn’t dead. But his body was definitely lifeless. Still and floppy, and probably a fairly light, ‘dead weight’. As I lifted him, the blood from the head wound immediately staining my shirt, I pulled him towards my slight (and short) frame and I still recall his head, pouring blood and ‘lolling about’ loosely. I can safely say, I have seen ‘lolling’ and I now know what the term ‘lolling’ really means. I struggled forward through the long grass leaving a crimson trail in our wake. The stilt abandoned, the kite forgotten. The cries and screams of the other panicking children rang out loudly and blended with my own strident cries of fear as I staggered towards home.

The soccer fields in the park were reached across a short wooden bridge. To call it a bridge is simply abiding by the definition of the word. It was really just a short track of wooden slats on two cross beams, above the storm water channel, leading to the fields through the gap in the hedge to the dead end of the street that ran behind our house. Dead End. How appropriate.

The road leading to the park ran behind our house and its surface was sealed and several houses on either side held some of the original tenants of the area, now pensioners, mostly living alone, and a family of girls whose father kept a fairly impressive home garden of some strange varieties of ‘European (or maybe Greek) vegetables, using ‘foreign looking’ growing techniques and interesting bird scarers. Our father also had a vegetable garden, we remember digging it over regularly each year, but it always seemed very….. ‘English’ in comparison. Their father also appeared to have trouble not just with keeping the birds away, but also with keeping the local boys away from his girls as well. If the boys didn’t park out the front of the house, they drove around and cruised up the back street, very cool like, until having to stop and reverse back out as it was not suitable for a u turn, generally watched by the girl’s father until they had gone out of sight down the back street corner.

It was down that street I now ran, carrying my bloody brother (if you just started reading this blog today, no, I’m not being mean) my ‘bleeding’ brother, and, screaming so loudly the pensioners must have reached for their hearing aids to turn down the volume. “Dad’s going to kill meeeeeee!” I cried. Yes, It was all about me. I ran, staggered and stumbled down the road with my injured brother clasped in my arms. Running towards the back gate to our house, wailing ‘like a Banshee’ as my mother would later describe it. I knew I was dead, but, maybe, there was still a chance for my brother whom I thought was probably was dead as well, but the chance that he may be faking it. Okay, I’ll be honest, the severe head wound made that a pretty remote possibility.

(continued tomorrow)