All the short stories were very good and made choosing very hard after a second vote for the 3 that tied Pat's was chosen.Next month back to the Monday and at chez nous
Attention
Attention! Our father said with a smile. The four of us were duly lined up in order of height and he proceeded to hang us upside down on the apple tree. Mother closed her eyes and went indoors. We loved it, and then he tied a thick rope up high with an old broom handle through the loop on the end. We took a huge swing out over the flower bed (musn’t touch the flowers) and pushed our feet against the bark of the tree to stop. We had lots of fun…no broken limbs, just scrapes and scratches. If one knee was bleeding he would say “lets scratch the other one so that you have a pair”..which made us all laugh.
On damp days we played on our plasticene board, which was carefully divided into four with a thin strip cross.We spent hours modelling tiny people, furniture,piano ect. Our brother made tanks and cars of course. Needless to say, the brightly coloured strips eventually became one large drab ball which our father used to graft a Cox’s Orange Pippin onto our Beauty of Bath apple tree..
No one else had an apple tree with two varieties!
There were chickens at the end of our garden,and we discovered, much to our delight, that if you disturbed the hen during her laying, she produced an egg with a raised ring around the centre. One day Dad brought thirteen duck eggs home and set them under a broody hen and hey presto! Thirteen fluffy yellow ducklings. However, all was not well..chickens like to roost on high and ducks don’t.One night a rat crept in and killed the lot. He didn’t eat them, just went for their throats. We were upset, Dad was furious and out came the prong. There were rat runs coming in from the orchard at the back of our garden and yes, he did catch some and one was pronged through by mistake, wriggling and squealing on the end of the fork.
Our father spent hours in the shed with a pot of rouge. You see he was smitten with Patrick Moore’s Sky at Night on TV and wanted his own telescope, out of the question in those days. So he built one. The heavy round glass took months to grind down and polish with jeweller’s rouge. Finally it all came together and we could see dark patches clearly visible on the moon! What a treat. Then we trained it on the chimney pot in the old orchard house which was empty due to being hit by a shell that went between us and next door, bounced of a tree and blew out the windows and doors. It was rather creepy to play in and once we found the skeleton of a cat or dog. However, we were able to spot tiny flies on the chimney from our telescope in the garden.
