Open Writing

It was the bedtime story that had always caused an uproar.

"Once upon a time there were two small boys,'' it began. The children waited, wide-eyed, for the next bit. "One day they asked their mummy if they could go for a walk and when she said yes, off they went.''

There was no remembering exactly how many times the story-teller had managed to deliver the final breath-stopping sentence. There was a gasp of disbelief the first time; a bigger gasp the second time, and after that, as soon as the children’s father opened his mouth to say ..."Once upon a time there were two'' ... there were shrieks of ‘no, no, NO, not that one’. The whole episode became, in time, a family joke, etched for ever on to the building bricks of childhood memory.

At odd unexpected times, as the years passed, someone in the family would recall the nightly bed-time stories, but only The Two Small Boys would evoke a shout of ‘do you remember?’ Then someone outside the family would ask, with puckered eyebrows, what the giggling was all about, and when all was revealed he or she would look completely blank and at a loss to understand what was funny.

So it is that the recipe for one family’s special dish of humour can rarely be matched by another.

Many years on, Tom, the son of the family, was far from home. He was in a broken, lonely place; it had been a war zone for months, if not years, and all the roads and pathways hid landmines. Every day he and his team went out to defuse them and clear the roads; if they were unlucky, they helped the injured back to base. Sometimes it was worse than that. There had been two deaths, and three were detained in hospital. That left a group of only three. The days went by, and one by one the mines were rendered harmless. Tom would stare at the craters left in the road after an explosion, and remember his father’s bed-time story.

"Once upon a time there were two small boys. One day they asked their mummy if they could go for a walk, and when she said yes, off they went. They set off down the garden path, through the gate and into the road. It was a quiet road and nobody else was about...''

One morning there came an order for a new area to be cleared. It was a mile of unmade road between two villages, with high banks and tall trees on either side. The three men moved as one, slow, silent, listening, and using a sixth sense born of experience. The day went well, and then they came to a bend in the road with the houses of the second village already in sight. They could see the surface had been disturbed by someone, or something, and a crow was busily pecking at some small dead animal. It flew into a tree squawking, complaining.

Without a word two of the men crept forward, signalling Tom to wait. The crow landed again a few feet away, anxious to reclaim its lunch, and the delicate fingers in the dials of the mine detectors began to move.

Suddenly the ground ruptured. Sand and stones flew upwards and the explosion echoed up the slopes beyond the trees. Silence returned in a matter of seconds and with the settling dust came black feathers, drifting gently down, disappearing into the huge crater. Of his two friends Tom could see no sign at all. He seemed to have escaped any great damage and yet there was no strength in his body, and he crumpled slowly down to his knees.

From somewhere, not far, he heard a voice calling: “Tom, Tom, it’s me.“ For a moment he thought it was his friend, down in the crater. Then he realised it was his father’s voice, the voice of his childhood memory, and he was there beside him, sitting on his bed and beginning the old familiar story. Only this time, it wasn’t quite the same.

"Once upon a time there were three small boys, and one day they asked ...''

“Tell me the end, Dad, tell me now, before it’s too late“

Tom slid down and lay quite still, and his voice was barely a whisper.

“Tell me again, Dad. Tell me the ending.“

And so it was that later in the day the bodies of the three friends were retrieved and taken away to be buried. For that was the end of the story.

They set off down the garden path, through the gate and into the road. It was a quiet road and nobody else was about. They walked along, talking of this and that, until suddenly they came to a great big hole in the middle of the road.

The three little boys fell in and were never seen again.