The headlight effect?

There I was in the bedroom waiting for my father to come in. Currently I believed him to be talking with my mother in the lounge. I say believed, as I had been waiting in the room for a few hours by now and since his arrival home I had been straining to hear his movements through the closed bedroom door. My brothers, with whom I usually shared the room with, probably went outside to the yard to hide somewhere out of sight. The other family members appear to have ‘gone to ground’. Little doubt where would that phrase have originated? Presumably evolved from a hunting phrase. And I presume (I won’t assume – we all know what that means), it was to do with the prey disappearing into their various burrows and caves, hopefully out of reach of their pursuer. That would make it a very appropriate phrase to use at this point in time in relation to the other family members. I meanwhile was sitting like a trapped rabbit. In a place, with the exception of the high rear window, that had only one way in or out.

As I sat like a terrified rabbit, straining to hear the approach of the ‘killer’ hound (Yes, the role about to be played out by my father). I can only imagine how such a creature must feel. I have since seen many animals ‘caught in the headlights’. Their eyes appearing enormously wide, as the increased adrenaline suddenly races through their system. Dilating the pupils of their eyes, causing palpitations of arrhythmia to produce a fight or flight response essential to survival. But most just simply stay rooted to the spot. Until the beast descends or the vehicle collides with, or, in some fortunate cases passes right over, the petrified animal. In my case however I was stuck. There was no opportunity for flight. It was simply a matter of waiting for the axe to fall. Although I didn’t really think he would use an axe. He probably had one in the small shed, but since we weren’t allowed to use the tools, at that point in time I didn’t think I could verify the existence of one. I learned later there was one.

Although as we lived in town and did have a couple of real fireplaces, one in the lounge and there was another in my older sisters room. While we were not required to cut our own timber for the fire, we must have needed an axe to cut timber for kindling from the split log pieces delivered with the coal. I remember the Hessian bags of cut logs, which were purchased from the back of the flatbed truck as winter arrived. The bags of coal and timber carried by a genuine coal man down the side of the house to the shed. The coal man, a very big man I recall, wore one of the traditional leather head and back covers to ease the pressure of the lumpy coal in the sacks he carted around all day on his deliveries.

(Continued tomorrow)