Almost Drowned

A Memory of Cudworth.

It was a hot summers day and dad let me borrow his bicycle. It was a bit on the large side for me (I was 10 years old) he had taken the saddle from off the saddle-bar and had tied it to the crossbar. I rode the bike along the canal pathway, all the way from Royston towards Woodmoore 4&5 Colliery and beyond. I was training my eyes on the side of the canal, when I saw a coat near to the waters edge (it was something of a steep slope to the waters edge). My mind ran riot as I saw this coat - had somebody fallen in and drowned? Nobody was in sight and I began to fear the worst. Just then on the top of the pathway I heard voices from a short distance away. I heard one calling out "what you're doing with my coat, thief?" I tried to explain to them what my true motive had been, but they were all on in having it, that I was a thief! The idiots threw me into the Canal; I could not swim but managed to grab hold of the reeds and pull myself onto the side of the banking. But one lad was determined to make sure that I was going to go back in, he was a sadistic piece of manure of which I would wish upon him five fold of what he had done to me. I managed to grab hold of the other lad and held tight onto his shirt sleeve as the other was pushing at me. The shirt sleeve of that lad was totally ripped off the shoulder. At first the lad whose shirt I had hold of was trying to get his mate to leave me alone, but when I tore at his sleeve and pulled it off the shirt, he then got angry and pushed me back into the water. These lads were believed to have been going towards Monk Breton at the time, they could have lived anywhere from Carlton or Cudworth. They'd be aged about 18-20 years of age and I often thought on what I'd love to do to them. They'd be born around 1936-1938 and would be about 73-76 years old now, I doubt if they would be alive today. Strange as it seems although I have a bad memory for putting names to faces, I most certainly recall their faces and even at the age of 62 I still sometimes wake up with a jolt. I'm sure that they would have bragged to their mates about how they had got this 10 /11 year old boy who'd been trying to steal from a coat which was on the side of the canal. Except I was not stealing, but thinking that some unfortunate had fallen into the canal and drowned. I know that Warncliff Wooodmoore was shut down many years now, but at the time there was the Monkey Tunnel where one could get to Cudworth. On the Cudworth side of the tunnel there was an upright section of what was once a support for holding up a Railway Bridge. There were graphics painted on the brickwork, some of the writings were somewhat explicit and of which I care not to put filth into people's minds. But there was, some fifty feet up on this brickwork, in bold capital letters 'Jesus Saves'. All comments, please reply to Roland Mitchell

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