Chapter 1 - Introductions
It might have been the light coming in through the window that startled me awake that morning, but thinking back, it's much more likely something I was dreaming about because I felt my heart racing the moment I was aware. I have always had some nights of restless sleep and others of nightmares, but over the last year these had declined by quite a proportion. Troubled sleep the doctor used to call it, although I think it was more to do with troubles that, over the years, I had been a part of while I was awake.
Gazing through dried gunge sticking my eyes I notice my right leg, which during the course of the night has found its way out of the sheets and it brings back both the dream I'd just jumped out of, as well as the memories of what had caused it. Scars run up from my knee, and I lift my nightdress so I can trace them over to my hip. They run deep and appear to resemble rivers etched into a landscape, pitted with over a hundred little dots on either side of the runs where I was stitched back together.
In my dream, which was no more than a memory, I had been walking back from the shops, faithful trolley bag being pulled behind me. I remember seeing a couple, laughing and joking with each other neared them. I saw a nervous pause between the two and it seemed obvious that they were newly acquainted, just moments from sharing their first kiss as I passed them by. I smile, I can just imagine how delightful it must be for them.
The corner at the end of my road had been on the route to the shops, my schools when I was young and the places of my work throughout the years. I couldn't possibly tell how many times I had walked the pavement there, but this once was the one time I remember with such vivid shivers. For the rest of my days, I will always wonder why, when I heard the rumbling of the vehicle coming towards me, I didn't turn sooner. By the time I looked back, it was too late to do anything other than take a sharp intake of breath.
The first thing I recall after the impact was a scream, I think from a child, but I was too far out of my own body to tell you more. I don't remember actually being hit, and with blackness passing over my eyes after that scream, it was a while before I returned to myself properly.
Opening my eyes again the first thing I saw were faces of people crowding around me. I wondered at first why I was lying on the ground, for a brief moment before the intense pain rushed from somewhere near the bottom of my legs.
I didn't know then, as tears of pain filled up my vision that one of the people gazing down at me was the driver of the coach that had driven around the corner too fast and mounted the pavement I was walking along. It seems almost amusing now, as I lost myself into the black again, that my thought to help keep back the agony was that I would need to replace the eggs in my trolley.
“Are you Ok?” The voice jolted me back out of my half dream word, and I pushed my nightdress back down and slid my leg back under the sheets where it had escaped from.
“Are you alright?” Asked Uni, her head peering around the side of my bedroom door.
“Sorry Uni, I had a dream again.”
“That's alright, I just heard you shout.”
I forced an embarrassed smile, not the first and I doubt the last. Uni reciprocates with a sympathetic one of her own.
“I'm going out, do you want anything?”
“No I'm fine thanks Uni.”
A slight nod and Uni backed away through the doorway, closing the door behind her. I sigh.
More awake, I slide my leg back out of the covers for one last look, exposing the array of pink scars, tram lining around my right knee. It was a long time ago now, a memory, my calculus of felicity much greater since those days. I wonder if that is the case, why then do the memories still sting as if it were only yesterday?
The accident was unquestionably the worst period of my life, up to that point. It was worth everything that I had to suffer though, the Lord had made sure of that for me. If it had never happened then I wouldn’t have spent so much of my recovery time in the care home where I met the others, and from that, the change in my life that had led me to this point.
Oh! I forgot to introduce myself. As you may have guessed from the cover, my name is Lucy. I am seventy-three years old with more silver in my hair than the colours I wished it were again, and as I start to write this, probably more of a diary than anything else, I am being held, with my dearest friends Uni and Pippa, hostage; and I think the men down stairs are planing to kill us.
The Knitting Club
I started writing this book for the NanoWriMo 2012. The idea of the competition is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. This was the second year that I have tried the competition and the second year that I have won.
The story is about five old ladies who were being forced into a care home. They decide instead to pull their resources together and buy a house down in Cornwall. Caring for one another, they become not only very close, but as time goes by they become more and more dependant on each other. When one day a number of masked men come to their house, they will need to pull together in a way they never thought they would.
The Knitting Club will be a mixture of hilarity, the silliness that can come with old women given a new lease of life, and the horror that very few will ever experience. If I do it right, and no promises yet, I'm hoping that it will be the best one of mine yet.
