One Man In A Crowd Of Hundreds

Before I start, I have something to admit, I'm a rule-breaker. I am a rogue writer, and I am completely ignorant of the structure of language. I read the terms and conditions of the millennia-old preordained pact that the divine imagination assembled for writers, I even signed my name, but now I plan to shred the thing in favour of madness, or instinct, or both. I plan not to tell you all of a place, which was my original plan, such things are superficial without the very things that created them; people. I am going to tell you about a man, and I promise it will be no less enjoyable.

It was a typical English morning, with typically cold, rainy, cloudy, grey, black and blue English weather, so cold the top lip of my jacket had found itself near my nose, disjointed icy fingers of morning dew clung to my hair and beard. The town of Coventry looked no different than the previous months, ancient, nigh celestial monuments beseeched by metal ogres. The town retaliating with barrages of high street shops, pubs and roads, winding betwixt the ogres, an attempt to halt their progression, to force them back.

The usual pig-run took most to a clearing centered by a statue, a marble mimic of the Lady Godiva, who famously rode naked through these streets in order to precipitate a lowering of taxes. The story so often told about womens rights or elsewhat encouraging her historic action is incorrect, but I digress.

Passing the front lines of secret wars behind the façade of high street shops, I stopped before a more humble merchant. A news vendor, barely visible beneath layers of clothing, sat huddled over his stand, firing headlines of interest in loud baritone above the general lull of a busy Thursday morning. I bought him his wages.

Now this is where I need to explain something. Headlines come and go, the current fascination of the media trying to force the most controversial, shocking and upsetting news on us has become over-used and ineffective, often achieving the opposite effect from its readers. As with the every time before, myself and many, many others walked away, unaffected, unmoved, distant, until something very real froze my every muscle, every thought, every connection to reality.

A person.

A man, by guess around the age of seventy to eighty, stood not far before me, deep wrinkled skin that sketched out every emotion with infinitesimal accuracy. His gaze lingered for a long time on something behind me, and thinking myself rude for staring, decided to look instead at what had caught him so. I turned to see the news vendor, and for once looked at the headline with earnest. It sat in solemn black font with razor sharp edges.

TWELVE DEAD IN 'BOMB-LIKE' GAS EXPLOSION

Somewhere within, a nut came loose, a bolt sheared and pistons crashed, bits of me fell off in chunks, and suddenly I was unconscious. When my eyes opened what felt like hours later, not a second had passed, I was still stood upright, and the elderly gentleman stood with his jaw fallen loose. Pigeons raced, dogfighting for crumbs, and the crowd swathed around us and the clock continued to 'tick' forward as me and this man stood still, stuck in time.

This man was old enough to have experienced death, many times over, such is the unfortunate nature of life. In his face were the memories of something other, something long forgotten, the memories of a war that raged through his home town, one that he, as a child, was sent away to the countryside for, one that took his father, one that took his mother, one that took everything he knew from him. In his face were moving images of the war, of the death, of the Luftwaffe baring down onto the Cathedral, 14th November 1940.

Turning around, the streets and shops around me are gone, destroyed. Rubble in towering hills flanked me, and a blood-streaked sky descends upon the ruined cathedral. Ash and brick dust clogs the air in an ersatz shroud of fog, and walking is difficult as the roads are scattered with craters.

A boy, his age in single figures, sits alone on the collapsed midsection of the cathedral's roof, sobbing quietly and clutching a broken toy, his face has changed, but his eyes are the same.

Colour seeped into the blackness, and the familiar image of Coventry High Street faded back into view. The man had gone, and with him his memories. Coventry, to me, will never be the same again.