THE BOMB SITE

The old man and the small boy, and time...

“I used to play down here,” whispered Danny to himself, “I used to love this path, these trees, even the site where a bomb fell seventy-odd years ago, scrambling over the debris, daring the foe to come with his guns and helmet…”

But the Danny of now was a different Danny to the Danny of then, and although he knew it he didn’t like it. The Danny of now struggled to even walk down that bridleway, even with his stick to help him. And the bomb site wasn’t a bomb site any more, it was a small estate of houses that nestled like 1960s tat against a field of golden barley, and nearly stealing his pathway.

The one he used to run down as a boy.

He could see himself, small boy, scuffed knees (weren’t those knees of his always scuffed?), school shorts, grey and unpressed,(they were all he had, school clothes because times were hard back then), tousled hair like it had always been tousled, and a smear of fresh grime on his face from this or that altercation with something that was dirty.

It was like that, tough as old boots, that he had raced around when he had met the old man. Only the once, but that once had been one time too many because the old man, harmless, had told him the one truth he didn’t want to know.

That old man had taken him by one hand and led him to the very top of a pile of rubble, like a mountaineer helping a novice, and had waved one hand and indicated the chaos where a German bomb had been jettisoned a few years earlier. It must have been jettisoned, he said, because all the rubble had been nothing really, just an old house where Spikey had lived before the explosion had done for him.

Then he told him about Spikey.

Spikey had been one character it would have been best to avoid, he said. He’d been told that Spikey hated children, especially boy children who could be cheeky and ill-mannered. Spikey had been an ogre. Not a story book ogre, but a real one, and tales of his wickedness were still told in the town where Danny lived.

The old man had made young Danny shiver. He had liked scary stories and Spikey was fresh out of a scary story. Or so it seemed.

Then the old man had told him the one thing he didn’t want to know.

“One day soon they’ll build some houses here,” he had said, “and you’ll wish they hadn’t,” and he had bent down and picked up half an ochre brick and tossed it idly into the chaos that was the remnant’s of Spikey’s home.

Straight away Danny had hated the idea of his scrubland and his bomb-site becoming houses. Where would the spirit of old Spikey go if there were houses everywhere?

“One day soon they’ll build some houses here,” he had repeated, “and you’ll wish they hadn’t,”

And those words had followed Danny down just a few years with the threat that part of his playground was going to be taken from him until his mum and dad proudly led him to their new home. And that new home, that house that had offered them space to grow as a family, was slap bang on the spot where Spikey had been killed by the bomb that had devastated a bit rural England in the forties. His playground had become his home.

It hadn’t been the best of homes. They said it was the revenge of Spikey causing all the bad stuff, the arguments between his erstwhile loving parents that seemed to be almost continuous once they moved in, the way physical things were wrong too, like the way the roof leaked in heavy rain even though the builders who came to fix it couldn’t find any reason why it might leak, and worst of all, the way Danny had an endless series of nightmares that wrecked night after night when he should have slept peacefully and that turned him from a happy tousled schoolboy into a nervous wreck.

In the end they said it must be Spikey, angry at them for moving into his space, and before the little family completely disintegrated they made a decision before it was too late.

They moved out of that house, and the bad stuff came to an end with an unnatural promptness even though the house still stood, of course. Spikey’s house. For some reason, nobody could explain exactly why, but nobody wanted to live in it even though there was a housing shortage. The windows were boarded up and nobody ever lived in it again until some homeless hippies took up residence in the seventies. He didn’t know what had happened to them. Maybe they were still there, old now and feeble, or maybe Spikey had chased them away too.

Danny stood and looked over the small estate, at the house where he had lived - it was still just about standing - and the half a dozen others.

Yes, it was still there, but gradually crumbling to the Earth in decaying pieces. No bomb had blasted it since the war, but it had started returning to the rubble it once had been. Spikey’s bomb-site. Spikey’s rubble.

Then he turned and shrugged his elderly shoulders and wandered on, down the bridle-way and into verdant countryside and fresh aromas of summer all around.

“Hey mister,” said a voice before he had gone far.

He turned and saw himself, grey school shorts and scuffed knees, standing on a mound of debris that hadn’t been there moments ago.

“Yes, sonny?” he asked, confused.

“Are you really called Spikey?” asked the boy. “Is that your proper name?”

“No,” he said, moodily, “they called me Danny.”

The boy perked up at that. “That’s my name too!” he shouted.

“Do you know about Spikey?” he asked the boy who also claimed to be Danny.

“He’s a spirit,” said the boy, “an elf, a gnome, something like that. He used to live round here.”

“So I heard,” he said, nodding.

“But it’s no good,” said the boy, and, grinning, “he hated children.”

“I thought that once,” he sighed, and leaned on his stick.

“Goodbye!” laughed the young boy, and he turned away.

“You know what,” said Danny, leaning heavily on his stick, “they’ll build some houses here, one day soon, and you’ll wish they hadn’t...”

“I know that much,” came an almost cheeky reply, “you told me that a long time ago!” and he disappeared. Not by running or jumping or skipping, but by vanishing like mist might on a fine spring morning.

© Peter Rogerson 10.05.18