Bridges and Boundaries II: The blue car

We walk past all the Idas - Ida Terrace, Ida View, Ida Mount: three little blonde girls in falling-down socks and our Sunday frocks. We pass the infant school, ghostly with echoes of hopscotch and Mr Wolf. We pass the concrete works; no dusty workmen with floury faces and bloodshot eyes there today. The walk gets lonelier now. No streets, no factories - just  a sooty hedgerow that borders factory playing fields and wasteland. There's a pavement on this side of the road only and no other pedestrians at all. Mums are cooking the Sunday roast, dads are in the pubs and clubs having a pint.  Cars rumble past and are sucked into the black entrance of the tunnel that looms ever closer. We start to look out for our own portal - a gap in the hedge that leads to the banks of the beck. We're not supposed to play there in our best clothes so we'll have to be careful not to fall in. A dark blue car slows down just ahead of us, then stops. Its passenger door swings open, partly blocking the pavement, but no one gets out

The Idas 

Bridges and Boundaries I: A Sunday walk

I was six, my cousin Linda seven, my sister Ann eight. We had the freedom of the streets and the rhubarb fields. Our playground had its own self-imposed limits, however. We never played on the railway lines or near the canal and we only ever walked out of town as far as the tunnels across the main road at each end (one low and dark with damp furry things hanging from its walls, the other higher and shorter with a sloping wall by its entrance that we used as a treacherous slide). It's a Sunday morning and we've decided to go for a walk before dinner. Cousin Linda wants to go play in the beck that runs alongside the road near the furry tunnel. So off we go.

Image of Stourton Bridge

  © Copyright Glyn Drury and licensed for reuse under thisCreative Commons Licence

Portals

This entrance entrances. A new blog on stranger dangers and untested pathways.