Fact or Fiction - 29

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The stories about my adventure in the graveyard - Here - is...

FICTION! Sorry (not sorry).

Totally made up story.

I don't remember my mother being pregnant (I wouldn't have noticed, I wasn't 5 years old when she gave birth to my sister, the last child to be born).

My father would never accompany us to visit my grandparents - not even his own parents - so that reason for assuming the story was fiction didn't make sense.

Every Saturday we'd walk to my grandmother's house, stay for the day, then walk back. On Sunday we'd visit my other grandparents.

I never visited that graveyard as I can remember and I have never fallen into an open grave. Children are not usually scared of graveyards if their parents are with them.

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My mother worked at a factory when I was a teen. She would get off the bus just after five pm, call at the local shop for something for tea (evening meal) and walk down the street.

We lived almost at the bottom of the street and if we were looking, we'd see her round the corner to make her way home. That gave us less than five minutes to rectify any damage/mess we'd made and get ourselves into an 'innocent' stance for when she walked through the door.

Not that she ever believed we (I) were capable of not getting into some kind of trouble.

One particular evening, my brother and I were messing about, rough-housing and generally behaving badly – if our mother had been home, we’d not have been behaving in this manner of course.

I chased my brother outside and he caught me out. He ran around to the back door, slammed it and locked it behind him, then ran round to the front, slammed the door closed and locked that door too.

The front door had expanded a little in the damp weather and it had to be really slammed to get it to close, so we had got used to putting our weight behind the door whenever we closed it (or pulling hard on the handle if we were outside). The same in reverse for opening the door – putting our weight to push it open, or jerking on the handle from the inside.

He put the safety chain on and jerked open the door to taunt me, knowing I couldn’t get in.

It was dark by then and the street lights were on. I banged on the door, demanding to be let back in – it was COLD!

He laughed, of course and taunted me some more. He went into the living room and sat on the chair to watch television – just to underline my situation, of course, not to actually watch the programme. I could see him through the gap in the door and called to him, but for once, he had the upper-hand and was making the most of it.

I took hold of the door handle and pushed and pulled the door to jerk on the safety chain. I knew I shouldn’t be doing that because if the chain broke or came away from the door frame, I’d be in serious trouble for damaging the door.

Still, it made a noise and we were laughing.

I saw our mother come around the corner and told my brother who of course, didn’t believe me. He thought it was another ruse to trick him into letting me in.

It wasn’t. She was on her way down the street.

I finally persuaded him that we’d be in lots of trouble if she got to the door and couldn’t get in, so he came to the front door. On his way into the hall, he checked through the curtains to see our mother on her way down the street. It was, of course, too late. She’d seen us and there would be no denying we were misbehaving.

He slammed his weight behind the door to close it so he could take off the safety chain and I screamed!

He’d caught my finger in between the door and the frame and with the force he’d had to use, I thought my finger would be crushed.

Eventually, in a panic, he managed to remove the safety chain and open the door.

My finger was crushed, like I had imagined and our mother was angry at the noise we had made.

At first, she didn’t believe I was injured. Then she said it was my own fault and I deserved it as punishment.

When my crushed finger turned black and the blood beneath the nail distorted the fingernail itself, she started to take a little more notice.

Eventually, my finger was put under cold running water to try to limit the damage. Unfortunately, the fingernail was already distorted.

When my father came home, he offered to run a razorblade across the nail to allow the trapped blood to escape and relieve the pressure.

I didn’t like the sound of that.

I wasn’t taken to the hospital to have it looked at. “It isn’t broken, so they’ll not be able to do anything about it,” my father said. No, he’s not a doctor and has no medical experience, but he obviously knew best.

I remember that night and a few more besides being agony and it seemed like every time I moved that hand, the injured finger caught on something to send shooting pain right through my hand.

The pain woke me up frequently and when it finally began to heal, the distress was by no means over. The nail died and started peeling away from my finger. Underneath the nail was a lump of old, black blood that had solidified (like a scab).

The nail took a while to grow out and when I could bring myself to investigate, the lump of blood/scab crumbled away in tiny pieces. It was easier to manipulate when I’d been in the bath, but it was always painful.

One good thing that came about is that I can use my left hand almost as well as my right hand – I had to train myself to do things with that hand because I couldn’t do much with my right.

Writing is not good, but it’s possible to read (barely), but things like taps, bottle tops, little tasks done by the right hand can be done by my left hand almost as easily.

My fingernail is still distorted.