Granny and the Soldiers

Mother is in the scullery. Granny's in the chicken run with a broom. She's chasing soldiers. "Bugger off!" she screams. "Leave my chickens alone you brutes. They won't lay for a week!"

The soldiers are carrying rifles. They smile sheepishly at granny, and run round the side of the pond. Suddenly more soldiers appear from the field. They chase the first lot round the pond, firing rifles and shouting. The racket is fearsome.

Granny is coming up in the rear with her broom above her head. Her voice is loud and clear above the rifle shots. "Clear off you buggers, clear off!"

I'm leaning out of my box on wheels. I am all tied up. They are frightened I will escape, and go looking for the wrong station where I was abandoned.

I can't even see the sea anymore. There is no canal, no deep blue water, no palm trees, and no warm sunshine. The sky is coming lower and lower. It is heavy and dark, and it has bundled up the sun and hidden it.

But the soldiers are coming down the side of the top field. There must be twenty of them. They stop at the gate. There is a conference. Then the first one opens the gate and comes back into the garden. Granny leaps out from behind the hedge and clouts him over the head with her broom. The soldier stumbles, and the one behind trips over him, and three or four of them fall in a heap. The head of granny's broom flies off over the roof of the chicken shed. She stoops down and picks up a rifle and throws it into the pond.

The shouts come up from the garden, and I can see the men shouting and gesticulating at granny, but her stentorian voice bellows them down, as she threatens them with seven shades of hell.

Mother comes to get me, and pushes me onto the landing, and then bounces my box down the wide stairway. We go thru the scullery, and across the hallway into the boot-shed. There are gloves, and scarves, and pullovers, heaped on heap upon me, until I can hardly sit up, and can barely see out.

Out thru the doorway, bouncing down the porch steps, and along the path, alongside the lean-to with the grapevine, past the dead stalks of hollyhocks, round the other side of the pond, towards the woods. The village bounces past on the other side.

I can't see granny or the soldiers any more.