Oh Give Me A Break

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A show I was going to take part in on Friday involving short true story talks on the theme of ‘broken’ sadly got cancelled due to low attendance. These are the experiences I would have talked about there. In about 1970, aged eight, I was playing lunchtime ball games in the playground with friends when I slipped and fell. My ankle hurt like crazy and so I hopped, assisted by friends, to see the dinner ladies who doubled up as first aiders. They decided that my foot was a ‘bit sprained’ and sent me to afternoon lessons. My pain was increasing and friends tried telling the teacher that I looked really unwell, but I was told to stop being so soft. At home-time, my mum fortunately came to pick me up in her car, and she was concerned when I came out of the school being carried with my arms supported on the shoulders of two of my friends. She could see that my ankle was extremely woollen too. She was a nurse and she rushed me right round to the hospital, where as she suspected my ankle wasn’t a bit sprained but actually broken. I’d been left to put up with the pain for over three hours. I got nearly a month off school, but my mum went to the school the next day to talk to the headmaster, and apparently frightened him so much in her anger that he tried to run away. She eventually found him hiding behind a desk in one of the classrooms. A year later when I openly and loudly rejected Christianity despite being in a Catholic school, the headmaster considered expelling me but when I pointed out that that would mean he would have to talk to my mother again; he decided to just ignore the situation. Arthur Chappell