Misplaced confidence

A rare treat, just Dad and me going down to town on a Saturday morning, and wonderful too in that he was enjoying just me, a recognition which transformed the weekday familiar high street into a bright and newly fascinating bazaar.

‘I’ve got a good idea – we’ll go home a different way’ - a treat intended both for him and for me, but when he headed further into town I was sure he was mistaken and would get us both lost, but didn’t like to say so because I didn’t want to make him feel silly.

Dubiously I held his hand as he took a secret muddy path beside the station, ragged-edged with yellow-flowered weeds, a thin, bramble-wrapped hawthorn hedge the only barrier between us and the railway lines, beyond which the ground dropped out of sight down to the wide grey-green river.

On our left were the blank red brick backs of the high street shops and beyond them a steep, grime-grassed bank, strewn with a litter of rusty cans, chip-wrappings and slit, grey-stained mattresses, which had somehow been manhandled over the sagging, square-meshed fences strung between angled-iron poles.

These I noticed, but their ugliness had little impact since I was by then in a state of terror since it was obvious, from the frequent patches of burnt cinders every yard or so along the muddy path, that there was every likelihood that the path itself would at any moment bust into flames: I could not be certain that Dad had recognised this danger and was torn between wanting to warn him and not wanting to undermine his confidence.

After a mute twenty minutes, the path reached the rough cropped grass of a field which adjoined the spinney known as ‘The Hangings’ and I sighed with relief at danger passed, now fully confident that Dad would protect me from the next potential hazard: the man who lived in these woods who, as everybody knew, captured and ate children.