Day 49

A writing exercise – starting with:

…

The day he sold the house on Mulberry Lane where he had laid his head to sleep every night of his life was, he thought, the happiest he had ever been.

It was not as if it started out as a house of horrors, in fact, from the moment he could remember the house, about six or seven, it had been an idyllic refuge. That was what his mother had told him, before he went to boarding school, before she remarried, before that man who told him the first day they met he was going to send him away, as far away as possible.

Those days before his world was turned upside down…

…

He stood in from of the cottage, now almost resumed by the forest it had been nestled in. He just just barely see the window on the second floor, a special room his first father had built into the roof, a room with a view of the valley and the small stream that ran through it, of the fields with the cattle and sheep, or crops, and then grass as far as they could see.

It was his playground, the play hide and seek, to go down to the stream and swin on hot days in the summer, or pretend that he was a pirate on the high seas.

And then after dinner, a story from his mother, he lay his head on the pillow and dreamed of the adventures he would have when he grew up.

Then, on a cold stormy night that world changed a little. His father had been in an accident and he was not coming home. it was just going to be them, and that life would not change.

For what seemed a long time, it didn’t. Then another man came, a man who seemed to make his mother happy, but there was something about him. He didn’t like him, and he soon discovered the man didn’t like him.

There was a wedding, and they went away, leaving him with his Aunt, a rather severe woman who lived in Scotland, a long way away from his house in the forest. He was there for what seemed a long time, then hos mother returned alone and told him that his new father wanted to travel, and that she was going to travel with him and he would be going to a special school for children with parents that travelled.

He asked why he couldn’t go with them, but she said was that he was better off in the special school. He would live there, and get a special education, one that if he stay with them, he wouldn’t. Then, as suddenly as she appeared, she was gone.

…

He did not know that it would be the last time he would see her. He did not know that his mother had left responsibility for him with his Aunt. He was upset when she didn’t visit him at the school, or come get him during the holidays. Those times he went to Scotland to stay with his aunt.

He did not know until he left the school that his mother had died that first year in boarding school, or that his new father had murdered he and stole her fortune and his inheritance.

And now, standing in front of that house where he had been happiest, he tried very hard to remember his father and his mother, but not remember either of them. Only that horrid man who had stolen everything from them.

That man he had buried at the back of the house down the bottom of the well.

He spend six years tracking him down, and when he made an appointment to see him, the man had not recognised him. It took a week to assume his identity and take everything back. What was left of the fortune, the inheritance which hadn’t been touched, and the house which he discovered the man had not visited or maintained. The man had perpetrated the same evil of a dozen other women, and he took all of that too.

Then he told the man what he’d done and told him if he wanted it back to come to the cottage in the forest. He was surprised the man agreed.

He had advertised the property, and had a single buyer contact him. The original owner of the property. The offer was acceptable, they shok hands on the deal, and after a final look, and a lot of memories returning briefly, he left.

Those memories were of his childhood, and now that chapter had closed, he could finally get on with his life.

…

©  Charles Heath  2025