Silence quieter than possible

 If there is such a thing as ‘super’ hushed. Then my family, in various parts of the house, who had been whispering to each other while I waited, suddenly achieved ‘super, super’ hushed to the power of ten. An uncertain fearful stillness fell, loudly, if you catch my drift, throughout the house. It could only be they had simultaneously heard the arrival of my father onto the front path. There was a rapid scattering of persons. I distinctly heard the door to my sister’s bedrooms close. The toilet door next to my room also quietly shut. The sitting room, where my brother had been placed when awaiting the ambulance, just a few short moments before (an hour or so), had been cleaned up and suddenly sounded as if it had disappeared into a vacuum. There was even a pattering of several feet down the back steps which I know wasn’t the dog. I was definitely being abandoned to the wolves.

Well, abandoned to the decisions of my father. And when punishment was on the line… he made pretty big decisions. I often wondered if he was like that at work. Did the tellers at the post office (you remember when the post office used to have tellers and was a bank as well?), did they cringe when he walked the floors checking on the operation of his staff? Did a clerk, who had made a minor mistake want to throw themselves on their spike rather than face the potential wrath of the manager? Or was it only on the home front? I can’t imagine him making a staff member stand in the corner of the office with his hands held above their heads because of an error in calculations. Or taking the bike from the telegram delivery boy (yes, that was a job, before faxes, computer emails and text messages and, it was only boys who did it– more on that in a later blog), would he have deprived the ‘boy’ of his bike because of a bad delivery. I wonder.

However, right now I have more to wonder about than my father at work. I was wondering if my brother was going to survive the night. Since he was already confirmed as alive, logically, anything that happened to him now, was out of my control, so couldn’t be my fault, could it? Was that too simplistic? Lets face it I was certainly the oldest boy in the family, but I was still very young. I had not set out to deliberately rip his scalp apart. It was an … accident. And even then I had heard of the saying. Accidents will happen. Now my problem was to explain to my father… why they happened so often our family specifically.