Seen it Coming

By her look I realised she didn’t need her psychic skills for this either. I looked back at her expression. “Someone phoned?” I asked. “Oh yes” She replied confidently. And remember, this was in a time before mobile telephones. Which meant that someone had to go to the actual trouble of locating a public phone, or using a local business phone, then, ringing my mother, after, having seen me being spoken to by a policeman. These busybodies didn’t waste any time. I wonder if they had been as quick to mention the clouts I had received from the large officer? “Funny how they hadn’t seen your bike when the policeman was talking to you?” My mother closed off the potential answer I was creating. That stopped my thinking dead. “And so why was he speaking with you?”

I looked up at her. I was not being left much room to maneuver. “I…”, I began to say, before delivering a dreadful admission, in a voice that faded away to a whisper, as soon as I began. ‘I stole something and got caught” I finished at a barely audible level. My mother barely heard it. She looked at me. Her head bobbed forward like a hawk locating an auditory clue as to the location of its prey. ‘You what?” She asked quietly. I bowed my head. ‘I stole something”. My head was still down. I was holding onto my bike looking at the ground, so, consequently I didn’t even see her come down the steps in a flurry of swinging hands, which slapped both sides of my head one after the other. Punishment form two had begun, before I was even ready for it. And it was my mother. Whack, Slap and I fell down, landing partially on the ground, and partially on the bike. “You did what?’ my mother screeched somewhat, as she knocked me down the path with her windmilling hands landing several solid contacts on my face, and head.  I attempted to get to my feet and escape the strikes. Howling somewhat from the surprise of the speed and the actual swiftness of the attack. For it was an attack. I was the pursued prey and my mother was the predator. Knocking me from ‘here to next week’ as she would later describe it. My mother may have been small, but when riled, she was a swift ball of spinning dynamite. Wiping out the opposition.

I staggered and scurried away down the path. My bike (a gold coloured Raleigh twenty, I believe it was?) abandoned on the grass and path, near the front steps. In trying to avoid the swiftly striking arms of my mother, I remember blundering partially into the cacti garden that ran down the side of the house (see blog April 23^rd 2012) and brushing against the ‘Teddy bear’ cactus (something that would be felt more intensely later). My mother in all her fury harried me all the way down the path to the back yard and across the lawn with me howling all the way.

(Continued tomorrow)