5. THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS Part 5

At least we meet Winfried's Mother

THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS

5. The Mother

It all seemed so unnecessary.

There was an unhappy old woman living somewhere as far from the real world as a person might get and Enid thought the fact that she and Anthony were in her garden was considerably less important than that woman’s needs. But apparently she was wrong because the newly arrived policemen, an armed response to Pierce’s request and protected by flak jackets and armed with an arsenal of hardware seemed to want to urge the two of them as far from the cottage as they could.

“Come on, let’s go,” he said, “there’s nothing happening here. Brumpton’s that way,” and he pointed through the woods back the way they had come.

“This is a public path,” insisted Enid, “and she’s our friend,” she added as a sort of lie that lacked conviction

“There’s an armed woman in there, and bullets could fly anywhere,” urged one of the officers, Sergeant Goodbody, a younger man she might have thought attractive under different circumstances.

“Come on love, let’s let them scare the living daylights out of the poor old soul,” said Anthony sarcastically but knowing the armed officers would get their own way sooner rather than later anyway no matter what they said.

“You know it makes sense,” grunted the young policeman, and to Enid, “What are you doing tonight, love?”

“My maths homework,” she replied, which intentionally suggested she was still a schoolgirl.

“Oh,” he replied, had the race to blush as he wondered how come a kid still at school could look so fabulous, and moved away from her. “Come on, back you go,” he grunted as he did so.

“He fancied you!” exclaimed Anthony, grinning.

“So do you,” smiled Enid.

“I’m going yto have to work things out,” he replied, “now let me see…” and he pulled her to him and planted his biggest kiss yet firmly and wetly onto her waiting mouth. The important thing was she kissed him back and the whole process took a great deal longer than a moment.

Meanwhile, inside the cottage in the woods Constable Pierce was trying to battle through whatever mental shield Winifred Winterbotham had erected in order to keep a safe distance from the real world.

“You need to come to the station so that we can look after your interests for you,” he told her, gently.

“I can hear the jack boots coming this way, cruel men with death in their hearts if I so much as breathe out of place, like mother told me they would… one day, she said, mark my words, one day… she knew all about the cruel men and the way they like to rape us virgins. Mother was a virgin, so she knows all about it, the harsh tread of jack boots on the path to her door…”

“Times have changed, Winifred,” he tried to tell her, “there’s a sun in the sky now, and it shines down on our children, makes them smile, makes them run and play and… and… and eat ice cream!” He had run out of all the tokens of childhood that he could bring to mind but he had wanted to harken back to the joyous years of childhood in the hope they resonated with something in her memory banks.

“Where’s me gun! I need to shoot you! I need you to be dead, like all the other grey men who have come to torment me over the years. And they have, you know, evil creatures with only one thought in their minds, and that is to take me to the land they hail from across the seas, and their heartless master…”

“That master you refer to, you do know that he’s dead, don’t you? Took his own life rather than face recriminations for the things he’d done?” he asked her, quietly, needing to break through her mental wall that was a mixture of confusion and half understood rumour forced into her mind by an equally confused mother.

It was then that he was joined by two armed officers. Having secured the area and wrapped a tape round the cottage and gardens as if that tape would make everything safe and secure, and holding guns ready to shoot anything that they thought was immediately threatening, they tramped into the room. And Winifred saw them.

What they meant to her is anyone’s guess, but in truth they were two slightly over-the-top young figures in flak jackets and helmets, but to Winifed they were anything but that. No sooner had she seen them than her muddled mind created a threat beyond threats and she squawked in a hideous painful voice “they’ve come for me, they’ve come, the Nazi fiends from Adolf Hitler! Mother you warned me, now help me, save me, from what they intend to do to me with their foul bodies! Help me, mother! Save me!”

And she leapt as swiftly to her feet as her feeble body could manage and almost toppled over at the effort involved.

“What’s going on?” asked one of the newcomer policemen, “and who is that?”

Constable Pierce could see that everything had gone too far. The old woman, now unarmed, was no threat to anyone and in her insanity she was merely pathetic. But in a way he could understand what she thought she was seeing.

“Might be better if you went back into the garden,” he hissed at the armed response, “she’s the gunwoman, and she dropped her gun ages ago. But also she’s a poor old soul, all muddled up and goodness knows where she thinks you’ve come from!”

“Christ!” hissed one of the two whilst the other, seeing the sense in what Pierce was saying, backed out.

“C’mon, Goodbody,” he whispered, “we’re not here to terrorise an old woman.”

Goodbody nodded, and the two armed officers backed slowly backed out of the room. But their temporary presence had flipped a switch in Winifred’s mind and all she could see was a dark hollow in the air where, in her mind, they still stood, dark and menacing and ready to kill her, or even worse than that.

She turned, and had her legs been younger she would have fled with theatrical angst, but she was beyond that. She half-staggered, and almost tripped out of the room, going through a door that she needed to open with quite a nudge as she did so.

Constable Pierce followed her, hoping there was a chair in there for the old dear to sit in so that he could calm her down again.

But there was no chair.

His heart froze when he saw the bed and he almost shouted out when he took in the sight of Ada Winterbotham, Winifred’s mother, propped up in that bed against two dusty pillows.

He could tell at once, from the grey of what must have once been skin and was now almost translucent leather stretched over the skull of an a truly ancient woman, one who had silken hair still forming an intricate halo where her daughter had combed it time after time after time over more years than he could begin to fathom.

“Help me, mother, help me! They’ve come to get us!” screeched Winifred.

But her mother simply seemed to slightly nod that grotesque head, and maybe it was the light seeping between her curtains from outside, but she seemed to smile.

“For Heaven’s sake,” croaked Officer Pierce, and he staggered against the door behind him.

© Peter Rogerson 16.01.23

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