Being Dead Part Eleven

A look at the early nineteenth century...

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Being Dead Part Twelve

I was almost at a loss.

This boy’s mother had a son called Peter, which is my own name, and her name was Megan, shared with the love of my past life. I’m not stupid: I know that nobody has the unique permission to use the name of Megan. There must be thousands of them about. But the coincidence sparked curiosity within me.

“I tell you what,” I said to the urchin, “take me to your mother and I’ll give you another shiny silver coin.”

The temptation was clearly too much for him and he grabbed me by one hand and tugged me away, saying “hurry and I’ll still get back in time for Mr Bones to open!”

So I allowed him to tug me along. It must have been an odd sight, a man in pyjamas being pushed and pulled by a scruffy urchin in rags. I was only grateful that we didn’t have far to jostle along as a grotesque pair.

His home, when we got there, was a tumbledown shack on the edge of a field and and next to a woodland. Although it was still dark I could quite clearly hear sounds of deep heart-wrenching sadness as a voice that sounded spookily almost familiar wept “Peter, oh darllng Peter, please don’t die…”

The door was pushed open by my guide, who was clearly anxious to get back to the butcher’s shop.

“Ma, there’s a man,” he called out and turned to go, but first holding out his hand for another shining shilling.

“Good boy,” I said to him, and I was about to enter the shack when the woman he had called ma, frowning, appeared in the doorway.

And it was Megan. Maybe not my Megan, but her clone. I could see that despite the weary lines on her face and the troubled look in her eyes.

“Whatya want?” she asked.

“To see your boy, I replied, “to help him…”

“Ya mean our Peter?” she queried.

“I was told he was ill.”

“We can’t afford no doctor,” she said, “nor any quack with water in bottles he calls medicine,” she added.

“I’m neither of those,” I said firmly, “take me to him if you want to save him.”

The boy Peter looked quite clearly as if he might be dying. There could be no doubt about that. When the other boy had told me about a brother called Peter being ill, I had thought of nipping to a willow tree I’d spotted in the woodland close to the shack, and begging him to chew on its bark, because something in my mind remembered that it might contain salicylic acid from which aspirin is derived, and aspirin is a decent enough medicine. But this Peter looked to be almost too far gone for that, though maybe his unclean appearance didn’t help him look anything but on his way out.

Still, I knew I had to do something, and that was the only thing I knew, because I was pretty sure that even if I could find a pharmacy somewhere near, there wouldn’t be anything useful in it. This was the 1830s, and that was a long time before I was born and the field of medicines that actually worked blossomed..

But this Peter had been born before Queen Victoria mounted her throne. Surely there was something I could do despite my less than adequate knowledge.

“Wait for me!” I said firmly to the mother called Megan, and I raced out of the shack and up to the willow tree. I scuffed my knuckles tearing at its bark and ended up with a narrow strip of the stuff loose in my hand.

I raced back into the shack. The door was still open, so I ran in because that’s what I knew I should do. The boy Peter was still deathly pale and shivering, so I folded my prize of bark until it would easily slide between his teeth, and begged the lad to suck it.

“I know it’s not nice, but try,” I urged him, “pretend it’s sweet and wonderful and suck as if you need to live!”

The Megan woman thought I was crackers! I could see her hesitantly wondering if she should stop this mad man from forcing dead wood into her precious boy’s mouth.

But somehow it started working, and I certainly hadn’t expected that straight away. Slowly at first but then more rapidly he started to shake off the worst of whatever it was he might have died of had I left him in peace.

“Good boy,” I whispered in his ear, “I do believe you’ll get better now.”

He almost smiled at me and reached out to touch my hand. And it was then that I felt something that I’d never felt before. There was a tingling, an almost magical sense that something I‘d never understood or thought might exist, was happening. And when I looked at the boy Peter, when I conentrated all of my vision on him in his dirty bed, I saw, as if through his eyes, me standing there in my pyjamas.

His mother was standing anxiously watching, and she saw something happening as well. Then she reahed out and tugged the willow bark from his mouth… or was it his mouth? Because the figure that I knew was me, the one standing and staring, closed his eyes as if struck by a sudden pain and the boy, the one in the bed and through whose eyes I could see the world, looked more and more alive as the minutes passed.

“”Oh Peter…” wept Megan, his mother, wringing her hands, “My darling son..”

Then, suddenly aware that everything was wrong, “where are you going? Stay there, don’t leave me, my daring boy…”

But he, or rather I, was already somewhere else and much as I would have loved it, I never knew what happened to that Megan and that me.

Because now I was outside a school and not wearing pyjamas but gratefully back in shorts. And this was not any ordinary modern school but one in which stern masters marched along the corridors with black gowns swirling about them, scowling at everything, and outside, on the field that was better manicured than any grass has the right to be, two teams of boys were charging in what must have been a game of rugby.

And I was there, suddenly again inexplicably morphing into the referee and running around in the middle of them and clearly in charge, shouting words that were both encouragement and threats.

“Pass the damned ball, Smith!” I bellowed, not knowing who Smith might be or why he ought to pass the ball.

And then I blew a whistle because I knew, somehow, that the game was over, and the boys, lining up behind me, walked back to the school and to a room with showers and lockers and piles of clothes waiting to be worn, and the strange aroma of deodorant and testosterone filling the air.

“Get changed!” I bellowed, “and a prize for the first boy ready!”

© Peter Rogerson 07.09.24

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