Time To Go Home

It was a writing workshop, in a photographic gallery. We had to choose a photo, look at it, make some notes about the picture. Then tell the story.  This is how it went.

You can't tell if its' in black and white or not  -  it could just be a day with no colour.

Cold, so cold the snow didn't melt all day, not a drop had fallen from the lower branches. Maybe higher, where the sun touched it.

The sun would have been low all day. One tiny bird.

When the sun drops behind that break in the cloud there will be no more light today.

Only a few leaves hanging on.

A knot of children, cold feet, arms limp now, were playing but now they're not. One boy heading off in a different direction.

They are so close to home, you can see the houses on the other side of the hedge.

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He was watching, enjoying the children playing in the snow, enjoying the noise after the quiet of his house with just the clocks and watching TV in black and white and nothing left to say to each other.  It was just before the time when an old man couldn't stand and watch a group of children any more without them being afraid, or calling him names or running away. Not so long ago.

And it had been such a beautiful day, so few cars on the roads, so quiet. Look up to the sky and it was an almost Mediterranean blue, cold and dry, crisp, and the blue sky and the sun making the world glisten as it reflected off the ice crystals dusting the branches like icing sugar.

He was wearing his old man's clothes, still the suits he wore for work, but twenty-five years later - and the shoes, and the scarf, and the hat with a small feather in the same colours as the tweed and a scarf which we called check but he called plaid  -  clothes don't last like that now. Even his name is old-fashioned: Ernest.

He doesn't have to go home yet because it's still early, and he will wait to see the sun drop behind those last few clouds and tea won't be ready until five, and anyway he is waiting to make sure that the boy turning away will not be left behind and lost. Because he is a father too, and although that was long time ago, he never saw his little girl at that age because he was away writing his lists of tinned food and socks as if we could beat the Nazis with the neatness of our inventories.

So he sat for a moment on the bench already cleared of snow by someone else earlier and daydreamed about the line of dogprints in the snow, and the boy and the dog... and the boy and the dog in Germany, in Berlin, in the snow, on a cold day just like this, and that boy was the same age as his Marion.

Then it was dark quite suddenly, and the way back wasn't clear, and he thought it best to stay on the bench and wait until morning. When the man came back with his dog at first light, he could speak his name, but he was so cold they could not warm him back up.

We were glad he had seen such a beautiful sunset on his last day.