Children at Play

A Willerby Story

For the first time in two thousand years, apart from the years after 1348 when for a while the village was abandoned, there were no children in Willerby.

No ball games on the green.

No Robin-Hood-and-Little-John in the woods around the old Roman fort.

No pooh sticks on the river. No king-of-the-castle on the last troll’s old bones and nobody chanting and rhyming in the shortcuts to keep out the dark dead.

“It’s too quiet,” said Dan to Sally, looking from their lounge window at the grey empty street, “villages need children.”

Sally nodded, passed him a cup of coffee and moved closer to him.

“When we first moved in there was a real gang wasn’t there?” She said, their arms just touching, “the Donaldsons, Lily-Rose who was such good friends with Joe, Caitlin and Lisa’s boy.”

“The Davidsons, the Alderson twins, the Kumars” Dan said, “so many.”

“All grown and gone now,” said Sally. “All except Sammy.”

Both went quiet.

“He’s fine though, right?” Dan said. “He likes college, likes his course there, has friends.”

“Yes,” said Sally, but she didn’t sound sure.

“I know he seems happy,” she said, after a moment, “but his life’s – I don’t know – smaller than I’d like it to be? He goes to college in Beckworth in the morning then he comes back here in the afternoon and apart from the odd organised party or disco he’s here with us.”

“He loves being with us,” said Dan.

“Does he? How can we be sure when it’s all he knows?” Sally said. “I know he isn’t little now, but more kids here would help. He loves children. They’d be out and about more and then he could go and speak to them and their parents and just do more stuff that’s not with us. If there were children here, there’d be clubs and games. Meals round people’s houses. More things to join in with. Just more life. More of the things he loves most.”

There was another silence as both thought of the ticket Sammy had been given by Pippa from the travelling circus many years ago when he’d been small and the world simpler.

But neither was ready to say anything about it aloud.

They loved him too much to seriously think about letting him go.

“It’s the house prices,” said Dan. “They just go up and up. How many young families could afford a place here now? We wouldn’t be able to if it were our time now. Every time a house goes up for sale it’s bought by a couple our age or older whose kids have grown and gone.”

“Maybe we should move,” said Sally.

“But Sal..” Dan said.

“Oh, I don’t really mean it, I know we can’t,” she said. “But times like this makes me see how much we’ve taken on getting tied here and what it’ll mean when David and Mauve can’t do it anymore and it’s just us.”

“There’s a few years left in them yet,” Dan said.

“Yeah,” said Sally, “but it’ll be on us before we know it. We’ve been here twenty years. It won’t be another twenty before they’re gone. I don’t think it’ll even be five.”

There was a knock at the door.

“That’ll be them,” said Dan, “speak of the devil, eh?”

“Best not,” Sally said, smiling, “in Willerby he might take that as an invitation.”

…

“Thanks for having me round,” said David, later after the pudding bowls had been washed and put away, from the deep armchair by the stove Dan and Sally had come to think of as his, “Mauve sends her apologies – that cold’s still on her chest and she can’t shake it.”

“There’s some for you to take away for her on the kitchen table,” Sally said, “and tell her I’ll pop round tomorrow after work too.”

“She’d like that,” said David, “I will. But there’s other stuff to talk about tonight too. “Mauve says she sees people coming from the shortcuts.”

Sally and Dan looked at each other again.

“Is Mauve sure?” Dan said. “Her eyes aren’t as good as they used to be.”

David took of his glasses, rubbed his eyes and sighed. “You don’t need to be polite with me. She knows she gets confused. But it isn’t just her. I seen them too - mostly in the mornings and evenings in the mist. Going out and in.”

“What sort of things?” Sally asked.

“Ghosts,” said David, “but not the ones we know – not the ones who belong here.”

“We’ll keep an eye on it.” Sally said.

“We’d appreciate it if you would,” said David, then paused. “It’s good to have you both here. It’s all getting too much for us now. We need you and we appreciate it.”

Then, taking Mauve’s dinner with him, he went home.

Dan saw David out and, thinking about how cruel and sad the rags of old age were, watched his frail form dissolve into a late January fog that wrapped him like a shroud.

…

Over the next fortnight there was a weird thickening of the mist, white shadow drifting and banking, leaving clear patches in some places while in others the fog was so thick it was impossible to see further than an outstretched arm.

They were densest at dawn when to walk or drive through Willerby was to move through a familiar landscape made strange by forming and reforming white and grey shadow, hiding the sky and muffling the streetlights to pale and indistinct balls that marked the edges of the road without illuminating it.

There were noises in it – whispers, calls and cries, some disconcertingly close and some that seemed to come from far away. Most were indistinct and there was no continuity or momentum in the snatches that could be made out.

“It’s not far now.”

“Did you leave the oven on?”

“She’ll come around – she always does.”

“Play the top E.”

Sad and lonely fragments – broken up parts of conversation without context or meaning.

…

“Do you hear them outside? It’s the dead rushing in,” said Mauve to David one evening, suddenly looking up from a crossword she was long past being able to find words for, “they’re coming because bit by bit we’re all dying. They think it’s their time.”

David looked at her from the cowboy novel he was reading. “You aint dying, love,” he said, “neither of us are dying just yet.”

“Ha!” Mauve barked at him. “Soon as anyone stops growing, they’re dying,” she said, “fast or slow it’s coming to us all.”

One cough turned into a fit and by the time that was over she’d forgotten all of what she’d said just moments before.

…

Soon the ghosts could be seen as well as heard.

The fog was crowded with wraiths and spectres moving aimlessly between the banks and drifts.

Solitary pathetic things that did not see to know where they were – all lonely, all lost.

A tall, bony man in homespun spun around and around, pleading again and again for Roger to come home.

A woman in green muttering to herself about feeding the chickens.

A child calling again and again for his mother.

…

Sammy did not like the cold and when he was home stayed inside, playing his piano and reading his books in the warm glow of the kitchen where his mum and dad spent the most time.

He could explain the reasons he could not leave the village on his own to others and trusted they made sense – why he went to and from college in a taxi and not the bus, why once he’d finished studying, he would not go to live on his own as the Willerby children who’d grown up with him had done.

But he did not understand the reasons.

All people were fountains of fascination to him – beautiful, inspiring and endless fascinating.

Whether they’d been part of his life since he was first born or whether he’d met them just a moment before, for Sammy, to know someone was to trust them.

He knew this worried the people who cared for him.

They told him some people were wicked and might mean him harm – why it was best to be cautious around strangers who made exciting promises with treachery in their hearts.

He had learned this and when asked about it in his Life Skills courses he was able to say what his teachers wanted to hear – that he wouldn’t go anywhere with a stranger not ever.

When they did the role-plays, he was able to play his part right because he knew what was excepted and that it didn’t matter anyway because it was only a game.

“No!” He could shout assertively “I do not want to go to your house to see the puppies!”

They told him the plays and games were to prepare him to live independently one day, but he understood this to mean living alone and this baffled him because why would he ever want to do that?

He knew what others believed best for him. He just did not believe it himself.

To Sammy a person who would lie to hurt another was as mysterious and unreal a monster as a cartoon dinosaur or vampire.

Small children understood, but they changed as they grew older when their games became slyer as they learned to disseminate and trick.

Sammy could not find the knack to this. When he tried, truth followed on the heels of any lie and tripped it before it took so much as a step.

His nature was to trust.

He believed all promises.

If he were asked, he would give.

If he were beckoned, he would come.

“In that way – not every way mind - you’re childlike,” Auntie Mauve had once told him back when she’d been stronger, “And that’s a good thing. Not the same as being childish – don’t ever let anyone confuse you into thinking they’re the same thing.”

…

When his parents were not around the ghosts called Sammy.

In whispers and soft, plaintive cries, they asked him to follow and although he knew he should not he also knew unless he were stopped this is what he would do.

So, as he had been taught, he told his parents.

“You mustn’t go with them,” Sally told him. “They’re not like the ghosts you know. They’re strangers.”

And – as he had been taught to do – he told her he would not.

But he knew he would.

…

The following Saturday both Dan and Sally took the car through the ghost-sodden mist to post a letter and get croissants from the big Morrisons in Beckworth.

Sammy was used to being left alone for short periods and was not afraid because the whole world was safe to him and Willerby especially so.

But he knew he would go with them if the ghosts asked him and that his parents did not want that, so as they left, he muted the world with ear-defenders he’d been given as a child and still just about fit him.

It didn’t work – with the everyday sounds of the washing machine and dishwasher muffled to the dullest of hums the voices of the ghosts were even clearer.

“Come, come, come,” they said, “follow us, come see us sleep, come join our dreams.”

Sammy paused at the door and made himself consider the possibility he might lock it tight and go to his piano, but the image was so absurd it made him laugh.

Instead, he stepped out into the morning of pale grey and shadow and wandered after many voices all calling him on, their figures appearing and disappearing in the fog.

“Come to sleep, join our dreams, come to sleep, join our dreams.”

They led him up the street and past the pub, past the church, past Jack’s Pool and past the farm-track that went to the Sharp’s cattle farm, all hidden in the mist.

Their figures grew darker and more distinct, surrounding him on all sides, whispering in his ear, pushing up to him, raising goosebumps on his skin and making him shiver.

They took him to a gap in the hedge that Sammy knew led to one of the shortcuts he’d played in with the other children before they’d forgotten the chants and rhymes that kept them safe and before they’d got too old to use them at all.

“Come with us, join our dreams,” said the voices, from behind the hedge.

But although he had never been in the shortcuts alone Sammy had not forgotten.

He would go in but first as he’d been taught by Theresa Donaldson long ago, he would say the right rhyme and do the right actions first.

“Touch your collar,

Touch your toes,

Never go in one of those,

Touch your knees,

Touch your chin,

Never let the burglar in.”

“Don’t say that, don’t do that,” a ghost-voice in the mist hissed, “be still, be quiet, come with us, join our dreams.”

Sammy thought about obeying but his memory of Theresa was too vivid and real, her strong sun-brown hands on his shoulders as she looked straight into his star-patterned eyes, “you have to remember these rhymes,” she had said, shaking him roughly, “if you’re going into a shortcut, you must remember them and you have to say them. Now say it again to me so I know you know it, so I know you’re safe.”

“Touch collar,

Never swallow,

Never get the fever,

Touch your nose,

Touch your toes,

Never go in one of those.”

The ghosts hissed at Sammy again, but the mist was pulling away, draining into the shortcut like water, leaving him in a column of bright clear, cold air.

“Say the last one!” The memory of Theresa said – or maybe it was Theresa there again.

Later, Sammy was sure he’d felt and not just remembered her hands warm on either side of his face.

“Cross my fingers,

Cross my toes,

Hope I don’t go,

In one of those.”

…

Dan and Sally returned to Willerby to find the fog and the ghosts gone and their teenage son sitting happily on a kerb by an overgrown gap in the hedge.

He was still wearing his ear defenders and was chanting softly to himself. He didn’t notice they’d joined him until they took his hands and helped him to his feet.

“Why are you here, Sammy darling?” Sally asked, “What’s going on?”

And because he did not know what it was to lie, he told them everything that had happened.

He tried to teach them the rhymes too, but as hard as they tried, they could not remember.

…

“Childlike, not childish,” said Mauve when she heard about it all. “People think it’s weakness but it aint. They forget the power in children at play – how that keeps out the dark and the dead. He’s got to keep saying those rhymes. He must. And he’s got to keep saying them until there’s children in the village again, and then he’ll need to teach them. He’s got a job. Same as you two. Same as we once did, me and David. I’ll tell you more tomorrow.”

But she never did because the next day she’d forgotten all about it.