Storytelling Sunday - The Day The Caravan Died

Come on in! I was just about to start..

I wanted to give you a summery story for August. I thought and I thought; and in the end I decided to borrow one.So let's go back to one of those long hot 70's summers, when boys were men and the whole lot of them wore shorts. Back to one curly haired nine-but-nearly-ten boy who was sitting in the back of the car. Thinking about his birthday and playing pencil and paper games with his sister.

Taken at lunchtime, just hours before it happened..

They had been travelling for a while, towing their caravan behind them; and he and his three big sisters were getting hotter and stickier and hoping for a break. There was food in that caravan. Maybe secret hidden birthday presents too...

It all happened so quickly and yet time seemed to stand still. It was three o'clock in the afternoon when the curly haired boy heard a bang bigger than anything he had ever heard before. He knew his Mum was shrieking, and then he knew that what he was seeing through the car window was the caravan swinging round in the road, and the caravan roof slowly unpeeling itself and flying through the air towards the layby, and the rest of it breaking into pieces, and then he felt life slow down and wait.

This wasn't good. This wasn't good at all. The curly haired boy felt his dad's anger rise and then start to fall away. Their caravan had been hit by a car; but now the driver barely seemed alive. He had suffered a huge heart attack. Wrong place, wrong time. But then there is never a good one, is there?

They put him onto one of the caravan cushions and then the ambulance took him away. When the firemen arrived they took their big brushes and started sweeping things out of the road. All the curly haired boy's things and all his big sisters' things and all his parents things. In bits. Being brushed up. They tried to find anything that wasn't broken. One of the firemen came across the road bouncing a ball and offered it to the curly haired boy. Yes, that was his. They offered him a little toy car, still in its box. No, that wasn't his. Ah, but it was. It was one of those surprise birthday presents he'd just been thinking about. Hidden by his siter, just waiting for the right moment. Now he was standing in a layby, beside a pile of plywood and he was being given his present two days early.

Good folk gathered to see how they could help. And things really started to look up when the local vicar arrived. What with the curly haired boy's Dad being in the same business. They were taken to the Rectory and cared for. No one was hurt. Things can be replaced. Caravans too. And the curly haired boy had a good birthday after all because, as a special treat, he was allowed to ring the church bells.

The new caravan being packed up. Everything they rescued? It's that little pile to the right of the picture

But he has never forgotten the day the caravan died; or the heart attack man (who did recover); or the firemne; or the kind vicar's family/ In fact, if you ask, he'll tell you how a Christmas card used to arrive from them every year after that until he was quite grown up. And caravans? He still loves them! But that, I think, is quite another story altogether..

Now that's my story for today. How about yours? Write your post, including a link back here so your readers can join in too, come and add it to the linky and then sit back and enjoy. It doesn't have to be long, it doesn't have to include a project or layout. It can be new, it can be from right back in your past. It's up to you. We love them all and everyone is welcome!