How Soft?

How Soft

That day I didn’t even notice the boy with curly black hair standing over by the village hall with two smaller boys. Too busy running across a corner of rough land to get to a way onto the Glebe field pond.

Then with a carefully rehearsed movement, I edged sideways through a hedge fresh with berries, to get to the lip of the water.

I came here often to hide from things and especially in the evening to listen to the birds calling from across the pond, perched on half submerged hedge roots.
Across the way, hidden by the glare of late afternoon sun, brambles grew that promised next Septembers’ blackberries - if I minded the low voltage wire the farmer put up to keep people out of the cow pasture.

After a while of hanging on the edge and trying not to slide into the sunset reddening water, I decided I better go back before dusk became “almost bedtime” and a search party was sent to “children’s corner” playground where I’d told them I’d go - though since Mum had gone I felt awkward around boys my age.

So I edged out carefully only to find Christopher had put his bike down on my side of the road and was walking towards me as his friends looked on.
“Where you going to?” He asked. I could see this was going to be awkward
As he looked back at his friends as if to say,”…now watch this!”

Christopher had only come to our village recently. He’d told boys I knew that his Dad was one of the warders at the category two prison that had been built near a good fishing lake on the edge of the village.

I knew he want me to fight him but I didn’t want to, so I tried to push past but he managed to half trip, half push me over so I landed near some nettles, and he pushed my hand into the nettles to make sure I got stung.
Seeing I didn’t fight back despite this, he got back on his bike smiling and asked his friends “How soft is that?”

A few months went by and Christopher began to build a bit of a reputation.
In the playground talk was of him pushing younger boys off bikes and getting them to give him their dinner money. In school his success was building him a small circle of boys that laughed with him, when he cornered his victims.

Not everyone was so impressed, and early in the Autumn term, everyone heard that a few of the older boys had seen him on his own one break-time, and gone over to ask him to come scrambling down the Heath Pit with them that evening as they wanted to see if they could beat his Raleigh ten speed.

The Heath Pit was an old sand quarry on the edge of the village known for its steeply sloping edges. Not the best place to run a racing bike, but everybody knew that Christopher liked to race and often shot around the village back lanes whooping as he overtook the rest of us on our three and five speeds.
So it was no surprise then when I saw his smile that afternoon as he pushed his ten speed down Heath Pit lane with a few of the older boys, one of whom had his scramble bike with him too. As I turned the corner I heard them all turn into a plantation of trees that I knew wasn’t any sort of shortcut to the Heath Pit.

Guessing something was about to go off, I followed behind the group into the wood that my Grand-dad always called: The Nuttery. As far as I could make out Christopher had no idea of what was happening as he followed the leader down this turn and that turn into the furthest part from the lane. Then I heard a shout and saw the boys push him and his bike over and one boy jump on Christopher’s rear wheel to buckle it, before they all ran back along the path they knew well to the lane, leaving him tearful and surprised asking people to please wait for him.

The next day everyone at school was talking about it, saying how he was a bully and really deserved what he got and what did I think?
On the day I was all for leaving him there to sob; but as I looked on that late afternoon under the dark canopy of those closely planted woods, perhaps I was soft but I couldn’t do it.

So as I walked out towards the lane I shook a tree branch to let him know
a direction to go, and then when I heard him following I moved on and shook another branch further out. A couple more times and I had made Heath Lane
And before long the clump of Christopher’s buckled back wheel came out of the undergrowth.

Without a word he passed me pushing his bike back to his Dad’s house, ignoring the whoops of boys further down the lane scrambling their bikes around the Heath Pit.

March 2009