Heroes

I remember being mesmerised by the guy on the bike. There was a long tarmac road down the back of our terrace and all the kids used to play there. It had a slight incline so was perfect for sitting on skateboards and racing to the bottom, and also interlocked with a ginnel that lead to the main road so there was enough room to cycle too. This was before we ever did either though - I was five and I, along with all the other kids, were watching an older boy on on a motorbike. He was doing tricks up against walls and up and down the tarmac road, which to a bunch of four- to seven-year-olds was like being able to watch Evel Knieval, for free, just outside your back garden. We were all entranced, but having always had the fear of danger, I was perhaps more engrossed than the others and was paying far more attention to what the amazing stunt guy was doing, than I was to what i was doing. Anyone noticing this group of young kids watching a slick teenager showing off on a petrol-powered killing machine would doubtless have been expecting an accident at any moment - he was jumping and pulling off insane wheelies and driving up walls - he was bound to come a cropper at some point, so it was to everyone's surprise, mine most of all, when the inevitable accident befell not the daring motorcyclist, but the awestruck boy of five who, oblivious to all but the spectacle before him, had tripped and fallen face-first onto the tarmac.

I remember a sudden flash of pain, more than anything I'd ever felt before, then a bewildered numbness. Too stunned to move, I was jolted back to awareness by the crash of the bike hitting tarmac. First guilt hit - my stupidity had distracted the motorcyclist and he'd fallen off, no doubt sustaining injuries far worse than mine -then a glorious warm glow of relief as I felt myself being picked up and carried, very very carefully, but quickly, back to my house and the realisation hit that the older boy had been aware of us the whole time and at the merest sign of trouble had simply thrown his bike to the ground and was now getting me safely home. I suppose the next bit is patchy as my brain has either forgotten or blocked out all but the most pertinent details. Mum's horror at realising I was badly injured enough to have to be carried, wondering what new stupidity I'd discovered, then relief as it dawned that I was just too stunned to move, finally settling on ad hoc efficiency as she realised that amount of blood was going to mean a hospital trip.

How we got to hospital I have no idea - I don't know if I've simply forgotten, or if the surrealism of the event, made up entirely of feelings and thoughts I had never experienced was just too much and I just shut it all out - but I still remember the sudden, horrific petrifaction upon being told I was going to have to be stitched. I had learned how to sew at school, with one of those square bits of cloth with the holes pre-cut for small, clumsy hands, and the thick thread that went through them, making great big crosses. To my still very naive mind, this was what I understood as stitching and the idea of this being done to my face was quite simply too much to take. Everything after that is missing. To this day I don't know if I passed out, if they anaesthetised me, or if I've simply blocked it out, but whichever it was, I have no memory of actually being stitched. Something I can only be grateful for. What I do remember is being told afterwards that I had had three stitches and being confused when looking at my chin that I couldn't see them, just a big cut with a few lines across.

Some weeks later I went to have the stitches out and was very pleased and proud when I was told I could take the stitches home with me. The nurse very carefully cut them out (this surely must have hurt like hell, but I don't remember it, so I suppose either it didn't or it's just something else to add to the list of things I chose not to remember), and stuck them between two bits of sticky tape. Three long, wavy bits of purple thread. I took them home and proudly showed all my friends, and even more proudly showed the whole school, when I was allowed to take them in for showing assembly, where they were met with genuine awe as the teacher played up my bravery and the mere mortals beheld and revered my coolness at having been stitched up and survived. I was a battle-scarred hero and the stitches were my spoils of war.

But I wasn't the hero. The hero was the motorcyclist, who had been watching all along, waiting for one of us to do something stupid like jump in front of the bike, or fall off a wall only a few inches high. The crash of the bike and the miniscule amount of time that passed between that and me arriving home lead me to think he must have just thrown the bike down, engine still running, and picked me up in one swift move - no thought to his own possessions, my safety paramount. The scar is still there, at the front of my chin - my first real war wound - and each time I see it I am reminded of the lesson he taught me: sometimes you can help someone at your own expense and whether you know it or not, you can change someone's entire outlook on life and to  that one person you can be a hero. Unrecognised, unknown, unthanked, but a hero.

 

 

This is story number six. For more stories, click here.