Today has been almost the perfect Sunday for me, only Pa feeling a little unwell has darkened the day at all. After all the pressure of the past week of so I feel the need for a little relaxation ans so I decided to give myself an afternoon off.
Since the buggy is out of action and the day very cold I decided to stay indoors and play with my paints and my computer, and having made Pa comfortable wrapped in a fur rug on the sofa I indulged myself in a very lazy afternoon.
I am not the sort of person who finds doing absolutely nothing relaxing, a fact which cause much amusement among my friends, my hands at least must be busy and then my mind can wonder,and wander it did.
Thoughts drifted in and out of my mind until at last one of them stuck fast and demanded to be recognised. Funnily enough it was the sight of the bare tree branches through the window that reminded me of some thing in my childhood.
The small hamlet I grew up in had quite a population of children who's ages ranged from three to seventeen. I was, to my Mothers dismay a dreadful tom-boy and tended to prefer boys games, I was never,ever to be seen with anything so girlish as a doll! Next door lived a boy who had spent some time at a boarding school until his father, tiring of expulsions and bad reports decided to send him to the village school for a few terms to...rub the corners off.....as he put it. You may judge for yourselves the success of this ploy as his doings will feature in this and ,other stories.
The boy,s name was Todd and he had a reckless fearlessness which exactly matched my own, we were a dangerous combination indeed. It there was any thing going on we would be in the thick of it.
One balmy August day a gang of seven of us were hanging about sitting in a row on the stone wall above my house. Gangs were all the rage and we were in a state of continuous warfare with a gang from a village less that a mile away. Our “den” had recently been targeted by these ruffians and had been found and destroyed a few days previously. Our meeting was called to discuss the building of a new hide out. No one came up with any ideas at first and then I remembered that Jenny;s Mother used to keep ducks and that the duck ark had not been used for well over a year. This was hailed as a good idea and off we went to have a look. The ark was about eight feet long and had a triangular shape, the floor was slatted and there were two poles through it from front to back for moving it about We spent hours getting it down to the woods, the general idea was to somehow lodge it high in a tree. Next came the question of how to get it up there and Todd had the answer, he produced from a Hessian sack a very long rope and a block and tackle.
It took hours and wore us all out, but as darkness fell the ark was wedged firmly across two thick branches and help in place by being tied in to a branch above.
We made our ways home delighted and of course sworn to secrecy. The next day we met in the woods full of plans for our brilliant new hideout. Todd had brought with him a hammer and I had purloined a bag of six inch nails from my fathers workshop and we proceeded to nail the ark very firmly in to place.....now nothing would shift it.
We made a harness for the block and tackle and used it to haul ourselves up into the tree, it was perfect and could not easily be seen from the ground. Our delight was boundless....and short lived!
Less that a week after the completion of our Herculean endeavours Jenny;s father returned from the Wednesday market with two dozen Aylesbury ducklings. We were all playing hide and seek in the farm yard so the farmer asked two of the boys to go and fetch the ark. They went.....they returned ….without the ark.
The farmer was surprised but not too worried thinking it may have been moved, we were sent to go and look for the missing ark......we looked.
There is a limit to how long a person can convincingly look for something which they know is not there and one by one we drifted off, wondering what would be the out come.
By the morning the farmer had convinced himself that the ark had been stolen by a party of gypsies who had passed through the village some time before and as no more was said about the matter we dropped it from our minds. Except for the farmers son Alex who had the job of helping to make the new ark.....we sympathised of course!
Time sped on and the school holidays came to an end. We were kept busy in the evenings and weekends by our mothers who insisted that we spent our free time picking blackberries, bilberries crab apples and rose hips, all to be made in to preserves and syrups for winter use.
Autumn advanced and the days shortened.
On night in the middle of September a gale blew up during the evening.,all night it roared around our farm, whining in the chimney and rattling the doors and windows. The walls of our farm were three feet thick and it was roofed with great slabs of stone so we were not afraid.
The next morning was a Saturday and we set off in a body to survey the wreckage, Willie Simms hay stack had blown away, and several large trees were blown down in the lane.
We were at Jennies house waiting for a ride on the farm trailer to the crossroads when another farmed arrived in the yard
“Well Jim.” he said. “that was a wild old night.” “Aye it was.” said Jim. “There's been a lot of damage,I've never known such a blow as that.”
You;re right there said the newcomer it was strong enough to blow your duck ark half a mile and wedge it up a tree.”
“You don;t say .” said Jim
“I do say, and it was strong enough to tether it with six inch nails as well!”
The great gale had blown all the leaves off the trees and the ark was now plainly visible!
The strong wind may have blown the ark up the tree but even we knew that the six inch nails would take a lot of explaining!
By this time we were nowhere in sight. Of course we were made to get the ark back and it took even longer to get down than it did to get up. The wages of sin,I suppose!
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