A Moment in Time

This year 2024 marks sixty years, from that moment in 1964 when it happened. When exactly in 1964 it happened, I cannot now recall; but that 1964 was the year, I’m sure. For ever since that time I’ve remembered it, year, after year, after year. ?

So I’ll let my memory take us back; I’m seven years old, and returning to my primary school from lunch at home, the whole journey only few hundred Metres (Yards, then of course) the usual route with just two roads to cross, one directly outside the school; even then the school was old having been built in Victorian times. Halfway there I suddenly saw my headmaster running full pelt, red faced and troubled, towards me. He passed without a word; I’d never seen a grownup run as fast before. Without knowing or with further speculation I continued on to school. Strange, but I must have seen the event my headmaster so urgently tried to reach, and yet I cannot remember it. For just behind me at the T-junction by the red pillar box, which is still there; Scott, a boy from my school lay in the road, hit by a car. There must have been a small crowd, and shouts of ‘phone for an ambulance, get his mother here!' Someone thought to ring the school, from the nearby red telephone box, hence my headmaster’s urgent sprint along Angle Road, past me.

A friend of our family was at the cottage hospital on the hill, when they brought him in… still alive. No big multi-storey, concrete hospital then, by the roundabout. His mother got there also… I believe in time. The next day at School, during assembly when we sang hymns and prayed; we were told Scott had died. So long ago, now, that event… he would have been 67 now, like me, well there abouts! But that opportunity was not to be. Some years ago, when my father was still alive I asked him, if he remembered the accident on Weldon Crescent in 1964. He replied in the affirmative, and asked what made me think of it… I’ve never forgotten it, I responded. Strange that he said, I’ve never forgotten a boy who died in the 1930s… no I’ve never forgotten him, also. It seems there’s nothing like the finality of a death in one so young; to teach others, however young… the innate vulnerability of the human condition! ?????????

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