When I was 10, my mom suffered another heart attack and was in the hospital. My mom had been an ambulance driver during the Blitz in London during WWII. She would attend to the injured and use an ambulance to get people to the hospital; she was a badass young lady, helping people while bombs were falling all over. During one night of bombing, one came close to where mom was looking after a victim of the bombs, the force from it threw her up against her ambulance, she lost all her teeth and a lung that night. She has suffered heart attacks numerous times since then. After a stay in the hospital, she was back out driving an ambulance. My mom was the oldest child in her family. She was 21, all her younger siblings were sequestered into homes out in the countryside, as were most of the English children.
While mom was in the ICU, my twin and I were being cared for by my oldest sister, Peachy, who had come down from Sayward to help. My sibling was so much older than I that she seemed more like an auntie than a sister. When I was very young, she was more like my mom and was pretty much my primary caregiver. Our mom was busy looking after our home, my siblings and working a full-time job. Peachy was born in 1940 in England during the war years. She was my favourite sister. By the time I was 5, she had married and was living a life of her own. I missed having her around, and it was delightful to spend time with her again.
One afternoon, I was playing in our alley just up from our house, where there was a great big willow tree growing in the corner of the yard. This tree played a major role in my growing up; it was in an empty lot, next to a sturdy wooden fence. The giant tree, with its branches cascading right to the ground, was like a fort within the confines of this beautiful old mother tree. I kissed my first girl here. All the neighbourhood kids hung out in this lot. There were fruit trees and raspberry bushes that we all ate from.
The fence was well built, and we could run down the top of it, holding onto the willow branches, then as we reached the corner of the property where the fence ended, we would swing off over the alley and back down to the ground. It was great fun, anyway, there I was, running along the fence top, but just as I reached the end, I noticed a car. A big black car, and it was slowly driving down the alley. There was an old guy at the wheel. I thought it would be fun to see if I could swing right over his car. I ran as hard as I could, and I was really getting height in my arch. Then suddenly, the branch broke, and I was heading straight at the car.
When I connected with the windshield, my right leg went right through, hitting the old guy with both glass and my foot, slicing my leg right to the bone. I pulled my leg out, most likely doing more damage, and half ran, half crawled the short distance to home. I was a ghastly mess. I was in shorts, and as I looked at the wound, I could see the bone, along with a steady flow of blood. My last sight of the old guy showed he was stopped, the car stalled, and he was blankly staring out through the hole in his window. I hope he got over it all. It must have been quite a traumatic experience for him.
By the time I got in the house, I had bled pretty badly and was covered in blood; my sister screamed at the sight of my leg. Then she just wrapped my leg in a big green bedspread, scooped me up and rushed me off to the hospital. She was pretty upset and worried. I bled all over her car.
At the hospital, they were taking me directly into the O.R., but my mom was also in transit from one hospital area to another. At the time, our hospital was not very big. Dr. Margetts, our family doctor, hoped to avoid running into Mom and having her see me covered in blood. I was bleeding so badly that there was a steady flow of blood from the gurney, leaving a red trail behind me. We ran into my mom in a hallway, and she saw it was me. They whisked me right past her, and all I can remember hearing was her screaming my name. I was just rushed into the operating room. The doctor got all the glass out, connected the arteries and stitched me up. I required a transfusion to replace the blood I lost and a few days in the hospital. All ended well with Mom and me going home together a few days later. Today, the scar looks like a scorpion.