The Cassandra Syndrome by Colin Brookfield, Colin Brookfield (an ebook reader .txt) 📕

We spent the rest of the day walking the streets, trying to get dry. To arrive home wet would have meant trouble.

Necessity, Mother of Invention

Following that episode in the water, it was obvious that I should learn to swim. For that, I had the help of my friend’s ‘Hotspur’ comic. It contained instructions on how to do the Australian crawl.

I got hold of a long plank of wood, and raised it up on house bricks at both ends. Then, lying along the length of it, I started going through the rhythm – three beats of the legs to each reach of an arm. After several days (and many sore places), I felt ready for launching.

With my sister as the Safety Officer, armed with a broom handle and a length of string tied to one end, we went off to the local Grand Union canal. I am sure it was a big struggle for her with such a heavy body on the end of her fishing pole. However, she did very well, keeping me near the surface most of the time whilst I performed the magical arms and legs motions.

A few days later I felt the time had arrived to go solo, so my sister cut the string. It turned out to be better on the canal bottom than I had expected. After all, I had not lost my breath and, swimming underwater proved rather easy but it gave my sister a shock when I came out of the canal on the other side.

After that, it became my unaided, underwater swimming place and was always quite safe, although I am quite sure I would have drowned had I tried it on the surface. It took another few months before I became reasonably secure on the surface.

Angel Wins

That same year, my father took my sister for a ride in his early 1930s car (its doors opened from the front edge). He had been speeding amongst other traffic along an arterial road with my sister at his side, when ‘mysteriously,’ her door flew open and she was ejected out, into the path of the following traffic. The story my father told my mother later was, that he had neither been aware of the door suddenly opening, nor that my sister was no longer beside him, so for that reason, had driven on for several hundred yards before noticing her empty seat.

When he did eventually turn back, he found her laying in the gutter, battered and scraped – minus her shoes – where the force of the ejection had rolled her and, saved her from the wheels of the following traffic but he never took her to hospital – they would ask questions.

Again, it was not until I was much older that I was eventually faced by irrefutable evidence that all these past destructive attempts upon me and my supportive sister, had been steered by infernal influence. This awakening followed events that were so astoundingly unnatural that they brought clear confirmation of ongoing otherworldly tampering.

The Guy Fawkes experience

Due to the war, there were no longer any fireworks in the shops. Nevertheless, a neighbour kindly invited my sister and me to his back garden bonfire, with a little bit of extra fun thrown in. The little bit of ‘extra fun’ turned out to be some gun practice. Firstly, a 45mm Webley revolver was proffered to my sister; the recoil, as I later discovered, was enough to have knocked her over and the bang was enormous, with stabs of blue flame spitting from the sides of the chamber and muzzle.

The next gun, which was handed to me, was a ten bore muzzle-loader of ancient origin and loaded with black powder and shot. My sister had sensibly declined the offer, so it was up to me to maintain family honour. Luckily, there was a wall behind me, otherwise the gun and I, would have left the area to some distant place and, done so at the same speed as the ammunition coming out of the other end.

Next, it was the neighbour’s turn. He double charged the gun but, when he pulled the trigger, it blew to smithereens. Shrapnel flew everywhere and the man stood there screaming – with a hand missing. All its elements were hanging down around his wrist. I ran for help to the outer road and scoured it for the rare telltale telephone wires leading to a house, indicating it had a house phone. Finding one, I knocked at the door and a woman answered.

I appealed urgently for the woman to phone for an ambulance as a man had just blown his hand off. She told me indignantly that it was a ‘private phone’ and shut the door in my face.

I cannot quite remember how he got to a hospital, but to my amazement, they did a remarkable re-assembly of the man’s hand and in later years, he was using it again.

Shadow fails, but others benefit

At about the same age, I was tagging along carrying some fishing tackle behind my father and his friend as they made their break-of-day tramp through the soaking wet grass of a gigantic field. My father, who was wearing his friend’s fishing waders had dry, warm feet and was laughing at everyone else’s predicament. So it continued, with everyone’s attention on their feet. The many cows kept moving out of the way unnoticed, as we moved through them. Suddenly, that all changed!

We were forced to raise our eyes to something huge that was not moving out of the way. It was a gigantic brown and white bull, scarcely fifteen feet away from us. The animal’s head was held high, so that its inflamed angry eyes could look at us from beneath a metal reinforced board that was strapped across its face. This bull was a killer! The purpose of the board was to close off the creature’s vision when it lowered its head to charge.

Time stood still as both prey and predator waited for the first one to move. It happened when the three of us exploded sensibly in three different directions at once, each heading for their own distant unreachable hedge. The bull detonated into a screaming, ranting nightmare as it danced around in circles, ripping great chunks out of the ground. Then it stopped, lined up its first quarry and thundered after it.

Even at that age, I had instantly worked out the game play. To survive, one has to keep changing tack at the strategic moments. It enraged the bull even more each time it arrived at the impact point – only to find the prey missing. Many times in turn, one of us would almost make it to the safety of a hedge to leap over, only to be cut off by the bull and forced to head back into the wide-open spaces.

That was amongst the longest days I had ever known. Fortunately, each one of us finally found a fence to leap; the last to do so was a bit slower than the rest, because he was wearing long fishing waders!

Shadow and its familiar - continuing

I was about eight or nine when my father and his friend went on another one of their camping fishing holidays and I was again, taken along to help carry some of the equipment. They had decided to fish the River Conway and visited its estuary first whilst the tide was out, to see if the Salmon were on the move. This entailed a long walk out over the densely packed growths of mussel beds to reach the seawards racing river stream.

We had all kept our shoes on over the razor sharp mussels. When we reached flat wet sand, my father said it would ruin my shoes and told me to leave them on the mussel beds until I returned back to shore. I thought that was a bit strange, because they kept theirs on.

After a while, the tide began turning fast and treacherously, so they started running back to the shore. As he went, my father grabbed my shoes and ran off with them. This left me in great danger; within minutes, the tide would carry me away. That barefoot race in rising waters to the distant shore, lacerated the soles of my feet and a few other places but, at least I had survived.

Strangely, my father’s friend had seemed not to notice anything unusual.

Satanic influence fails again

Afew months after my experience on the mussel beds, my father purchased a second-hand American cement mixer, sited in an open field where it could be worked on. It was an unusual machine, having a small opening on one side through which, ingredients were delivered from a mechanised hand activated skip device. A hole of the same size on the other side of the great drum provided the exit place from which the finished mixture could be extracted.

My father had started a raging fire within the drum to loosen the hardened concrete and then threw water in to cool it. With that over, I was the next part of the plan and was instructed to climb through one of the small apertures with my hammer and chisel then told (as he left) to “get cutting”.

After a while, I repositioned myself a little and the drum turned slightly. This started the engine running because my father had not disconnected it from the drum, as it should have been. It quickly built up speed and I clung on to the mixing blades for dear life. One slip and I would have been hacked to pieces. After about fifteen revolutions, the petrol ran out. Although soaked, battered by concrete chunks and covered in filth, I had again beaten the odds.

Dark desperation, leads to another

On one occasion in the early morning hours, I was ordered to our kitchen. By the side of me on the linoleum floor rested a bucket of water, several bars of Sunlight soap, a cloth and a scrubbing brush. “Get scrubbing and don’t miss an inch,” ordered my father and, that is how it went without a break until late evening. By then, the top and bottom floors had been scrubbed a total of seven times. It would have been more, had I not made an escape up the stairs.

My father was soon hot on my heels, brandishing a stair rod from the stair carpet; it had become a ‘do or die’ situation. A first floor window offered the only available escape route, so I leapt through.

Not daring to return, I slept the late September nights in the local wood, covered in leaves. My older sister kept me supplied now and again, with smuggled out jam sandwiches. Eventually, a friend and I decided on an adventure to the River Thames at Gravesend.

On arrival at our destination we were immediately awed by the mighty river and more so, by the prospects that lay ahead of us. We had come too far to get ‘cold feet’ and, certainly for me, there was no going back, so we got on with the business at hand.

Having accessed the quayside, we surveyed all the possibilities that seemed to favour our plans, and made a decision.

We spent the remainder of the daylight hours resting, in preparation for the evening’s adventure. It was very dark when we returned to our selected place at the quayside and could see the Tilbury lights twinkling across the vast expanse of black water, so the prospects ahead took on a frightening feeling but there was no turning back!

Having carefully edged our way towards our bollard at the side of the quayside, we checked to make sure the all important rope was still tied around it and hopefully, somewhere far