Family History

My mother brought some boxes down from the attic. The first two contained battered toy soldiers and farmyard animals. Some of the animals had odd puncture wounds.

“Looks like someone’s been shooting at them with an air rifle,” I said.

“Ah,” said my mother. “Your grandmother did have two brothers…”

Which takes us back to before the first world war.

Later we were looking through family photographs- and there laid out on a table at my grandmother’s house were the very same toy animals and there was me in the foreground, aged about four- a mere fifty years ago…