The orignial story I posted on this account can now be found on wattpad, and it's still not finished, woo! Okay, so this is just a short story I wrote because I had time to spare. I kinda like it but I kinda don't so I thought I'd just upload it and see. Lynsey, xoxoxo
The 226th Day
Part I
As I walked down my old street, three things crossed my mind.
The first: of how I was born in the house to my left- number seven of Guelder Lane; 18 years ago.
The second was of my sister’s wedding, to an inner-city man who liked to tease me about being younger.
The third was about the parades which marched up and down our street, the day I signed up for the army.
I was born almost a month early, on January the 11th, at half past two in the afternoon. According to my sister, parents and grandparents they had just finished having a lovely afternoon tea and were listening to a song which was surely very popular at the time (although none of them can remember the exact name,) when my mother started crying. Around two hours later, I was born.
I was a sickly child, prone to nosebleeds and headaches, fevers and rashes. According to my sister I had two bouts of the measles as a very young child which kept me, her, mum, dad and half of England awake at nights. Luckily, I don’t remember much of this and the sickness went away as I grew up. By the time I was eight, I was as healthy as all of the other children in the street; which pleased me to no end. We went out, playing stickball and chasing one-another up and down the street, hopping over the low walls separating gardens. I remember Mrs Hopkins, a sour-faced woman whose husband was always working, who would always stand in the back door, screeching at us with her bright blue plastic curlers unfurling themselves from her ginger hair and rolling off down the cobbled path as though they were having a race to get away from her. She hated us, we always thought it was because we ‘squashed her petunias’ but looking back, she didn’t have any kids of her own, and seeing us playing probably made her more lonely than she already was. Another thing brought to mind when talking about the games we played is football. Two boys, older and rougher than me, introduced me to football when I was ten and I never looked back- despite the broken noses and snapped wrist I suffered throughout my days as goalie. Those two boys (named Arnold and Marty) soon became my best friends, and we were known through our street of fifteen houses as ‘Guelder’s Rascals’ a nickname given to us, unwittingly, by Mrs Hopkins who had opened the window of her house to yell it at us one day when we accidently kicked a football into her garden, knocking over a precariously balanced garden gnome which had been sitting on top of the wall.
Sometime in the same year, I can vaguely recall my sister walking into our kitchen one evening with her hands clasped around a very tall, broad shouldered man’s hands and announcing they were getting married. I had never had much interest in her life before, as she was eight years older than me at the time and eleven year old boys don’t pay attention to their sisters’ lives. Something I vividly remember from that night was my mother dropping the wooden spoon she was using to steer some sort of soup and splashing it out of the pot and onto the newly painted cream walls, dripping it down onto the brown patterned laminate flooring. My parents were awfully house-proud and redecorated whenever a new fashion came out, so you can imagine the shade of puce my father went when he saw bright orange soup dripping down his clean white walls.
My sister married on September the third which was ‘a lovely day’. Everyone seemed to think it was anyway- a warm, sunny day- perfect for a wedding- except from me. As far as I was concerned it was too sunny, and the church was too stuffy and hot. The underneath of my collar was itchy and sticky with sweat and being the twelve year old boy I was, I would far rather have been out with my friends, exploring further and further from home every day. This was something I protested about regularly throughout the wedding ceremony; much to the annoyance of my parents and relatives as they thought I was setting a bad example for our younger cousins. They, of course, were right and as soon as the terrible five and seven year olds caught wind of my complaining they started as well; mimicking me like parrots and chortling whenever they were told off. If, however, I had thought aggravated my parents I wasn’t ready for the wrath of my sister, who was so furious I thought actual steam was going to come out of her ears. I remember her taking me to the back of the church, while her husband was greeting guests and welcoming them to the reception meal, and all but ripping my head off in anger. Two years later she gave birth to my nephew Andrew, a very chubby, round faced little boy who was apparently the face of me (I didn’t see it.)
Andrew was just turned three when it was declared that World War Two had begun. It’s funny, I can’t remember where I heard it first, simply that when I awoke on the first of September in 1939 something was different, and I knew something was coming.
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