Open Writing

The strangers on the other side of the river shouted to me but I couldn’t hear what they were saying, although the river was narrow at that point.

I went as near to the edge of the water as I dared, down among the reeds. Still the strangers shouted but the strong wind scattered their words.

After a while they waved and turned away and walked towards the trees in the distance. Darkness was falling. I felt my feet sinking in the mud.

*

Once, at the age of nine, I went to the Fracker house hoping to show off in front of Beth and Else with my new mouth organ. I played Greensleeves.

Beth and Else just giggled but their mother danced.

‘It’s lovely,’ she said, ‘play it again.’

Then Dr Grooley came in and said to Mrs Fracker, ‘Beth and Else always greet me with a complicitous smile.’

‘With a what?’ yelled Mrs Fracker, still dancing.

*

Somehow I dragged myself free from that mud at the river’s edge.

‘You’re late,’ said Beth, my wife.

She stared at me. ‘Goodness,’ she said, ‘what a mess you’re in.’

The children gazed and giggled.

‘Aunty Else said that you’d run away and left us,’ one of them said.

‘I said no such thing,’ said Else, who lived with us.

After I’d washed and changed we ate our meal.

Then Beth said, ‘Give us that tune on your mouth organ - Mum always danced to it when she was alive.’

‘Well,’ I joked, ‘she could hardly dance to it when she was dead, could she?’

‘Oh yes she could,’ they yelled at me.

‘By the way,’ said Beth later, ‘Dr Grooley died this morning…he was just like a father to us, wasn’t he Else?’