A LIFE IN THE PARK

Memories are made of this....

Malcolm Drury sat on the bench seat in the park and watched the water trickling by in a stream that had been there all his life even though the bench seat hadn’t. He sighed, contentedly. He’d always liked it here.

But now he was feeling tired.

As far as he was concerned there was no good reason for him feeling like he did. He’d had a good night’s sleep, hadn’t he, with only one trip to the toilet for a wee? But tired he was feeling, and he sighed.

The stream, like life, trickled along.

He didn’t see where the boys came from but suddenly, as if he’d blinked (though he couldn’t remember blinking) they were there at the edge of his vision, two lads that were so familiar it shocked him.

“They remind me...” he sighed to himself. And they did, but not of his own two sons, men nearing middle age now, but never quite as familiar as these two.

“Pardon?” That was a woman who’d come to sit next to him when he’d been busy looking at the stream and almost basking at the way it giggled and gurgled on its way along.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, staring at the ground in front of his feet, “it was the boys...”

“Boys?” she asked.

“Over there, in the grey school shorts, exactly like I used to wear when I was knee-high to a grasshopper myself. They remind me...”

“Of days gone by? Of the good old days? Of when you knew what was what and everything was in order?” she asked.

He nodded. “That’s it in a nutshell,” he murmured.

“Well, I’ll leave you to your pondering,” she said quietly, “I’m going to look at the stream and maybe even dip my toes in if nobody’s looking...”

He was going to reply that he remembered his mum doing that, way back, in the forties, the nineteen-forties, but didn’t. It might sound daft, as if he was likening the woman who had been sitting next to him with a woman who’d been long dead, bless her. But mum had been. Long, long dead, and it still broke his heart.

He glanced at the woman’s back as she walked off, towards the stream. That skirt, brown, severe, familiar … surely… no!

“Wanna play footie, mister?” asked the boy. The one with the grey school shorts and the socks that never stayed up properly.

Like his had never stayed up.

He smiled at him. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, “I’m a bit old for that.”

“You’re never too old, mister, for fun,” the boy told him. And he was right! Of course he was right. But you could be too old for kicking a football around, even a modern plastic one, though the one the boy had look heavy and leathery and wet.

“What’s your name?” he asked, “what do you want me to call you?”

“I’m Malcolm, though you can call me Malc,” grinned the boy.

I know you, he thought, a boy called Malcolm…

“I’m Malcolm too,” he confided in the boy, “fancy that, you and me having the same name, only you’re very young and I’m very old...”

“It’s not so strange really,” murmured the boy, still grinning, “there are millions of boys and a lot less than millions of names. Here’s my friend Ricky. He’s playing footie with me, and then we might catch tiddlers in the stream and save them in a jam jar before we put them back”

“I used to do that,” sighed Malcolm senior, “I used to catch loads of tiddlers in the stream and feed with with stuff they never wanted to eat and then, before I went home, put them back in the stream. And, you know, I did it with a good friend too, a friend also called Ricky.”

“That’s spooky!” exclaimed the boy.

“The war hadn’t been over long, and there weren’t many things for us to play with back then,” sighed the old man. “I suppose you might call it a boring time, but we didn’t mind. There were tiddlers to catch. Sticklebacks.

“There are lots of things to do these days,” explained the boy, “nothing’s ever boring! And, you know, I even play hopscotch with the girls down the street if I can’t think of anything else to do. But whittling’s what I love. Whittling wood with my penknife, making things.”

“Hopscotch? Whittling? I remember...” sighed the man.

“Then there’s the library,” enthused the boy, and he laughed quietly for a moment. “The woman who works there and stamps our books, she likes me all right! She says I’m a right little book worm!”

“Audrey...” whispered the older Malcolm, “I remember Audrey… she stamped my hand once, when I asked her, and told me not to let on it was her! I loved the Famous Five and the Secret Seven… though the girls’ books by Enid Blyton were a bit soppy.”

“Hey! They’re what I read!” shouted Ricky, who’d joined them. “But not the girls’ ones,” he added in case he was misunderstood.

“So, you see, these days there’s plenty to do,” explained the boy Malc. “Loads and loads of really good things, all the time. There’s conkers and f*g cards and marbles, glassies and them made of pottery that break. You know what I do, mister? When mum sends me to bed I snuggle under the blankets and take my torch with me, and read my library books until my eyes don’t want to read any more or the torch batteries are dim, and then I go to sleep. Next day, secretly, I shove my torch batteries in the oven along with mum’s baking, and that puts them right for another day or two.”

“I did that,” sighed the old man. “Batteries in the oven...”

“I feel sorry for the kids who lived before the war,” went on the boy.

“The war? What war?” asked the man.

“The war against the Germans, against Hitler. Don’t you know anything, mister?” grinned Ricky.

“I remember that, but I was only a boy, younger than you two,” sighed Malcolm the Elder. “Days were dark back then, and the nights were darker! There wasn’t much on the television but once a week, on Saturday mornings, we went to the pictures if we had enough pennies. That was good, that was!”

“We do that too!” laughed Malcolm the Younger, “but it’s mostly cowboys and Indians and bang-bang, they’re dead!”

“It was in my time too,” murmured the elder Malcolm, frowning. “Well, boys, it’s been really grand talking to you but is that lady over there, the one with her feet in the stream and the brown skirt calling you?”

The boys looked.

“Coming, mummy,” shouted Malcolm, and “coming mummy,” shouted Malcolm.

Old Malcolm struggled to rise to his feet, but suddenly they seemed to have turned to lead. Suddenly nothing would move and slowly, like evening fading to night, the light of the sun shining on the world and illuminating the park dimmed and went out, and a sudden, eerie silence replaced the giggling trickling of the stream

And at the same time the two boys were gone, and the paddling woman, and every shadow from yesterday.

And that was that.

© Peter Rogerson 26.11.17