This story is based on a few truths my father told me. The rest is imagination. My siblings may remember this story slightly differently, but the facts will always remain. This is what we agree on.

One of the stories the little boy told his children was about the sowing of seeds. His father did not have a horse.  

The little boy’s hair was such a pale golden blond, it shone almost white in the sunshine. It was tightly curled and stuck up from his head in all directions. His sister’s hair was far darker, but it was the same in its styling, if styling could be a word used in this instance, which it really shouldn’t be. They played in the grey dirt for fun, making pictures with sticks for pencils. 

When the little boy showed his own children a black and white photograph many years later, his second daughter laughed at the two children’s hair, and he became quite annoyed by this. This was what his (very young at the time) second daughter remembered. She had been confused and upset at her father’s anger, for she had thought it was funny. She had been far too young to understand it was the picture itself that held importance, not the hair of the children.

Their father, though, needed to plant seeds to keep them fed. He had already walked up and down the paddock, making a furrow in the ground here, and a furrow in the ground beside it. It had taken a long time to clear this patch of land to plant these seeds, and the only trees left were the ones that lined the edges of the paddock. It was a grey day when he looked down at the children and showed them the tins.

‘These cans are filled with seeds,’ he said, and showed the seeds to the children. They were small and gold and there were so many of them they could not be counted. ‘I want you to walk up and down this paddock and put the seeds into these furrows.’

The two children looked at each other, and the little boy dropped his lower lip, which began to tremble. His sister glanced at him with her sharp brown eyes and frowned. He ducked his head.

The sister had overheard how their parents had scrimped and saved to get just a small bag of seeds. She always listened to what the grownups said. Sometimes it was very important.

‘Well, off you go then,’ their father said. He had more divots in the ground to make with the hoe he had purchased, and he didn’t have all day.

The two children began to walk along the furrows. The sun came out through the clouds, and it shone on the green of the Eucalypts and Wattle bush leaves waving in the gentle breeze.

‘One seed at a time,’ the little boy’s sister hissed at him. ‘One seed at a time, Doody. We don’t want to waste them.’

The tin was very heavy in the little boy’s hands and he had to put it down each time he wanted to plant a seed. This was going to take a very long time indeed.

Their mother watched from the little house they had built. Doody could see her there, standing by the open door with a cloth in her hands. After a moment she disappeared inside, then reappeared with what looked like some string and a nail. She did not bother calling out as she picked her way carefully across the paddock, for their father would not hear. He had become almost deaf from the war only a few years before. Doody looked up into her sparkling brown eyes as she finally reached them. She smiled at him softly and straightened the collar of his shirt before striding further across the paddock to where their father was walking backwards; the hoe swinging into the ground. She stood and waited until he noticed her presence, making sure to keep out of the way of the swinging of the blade.

Doody could not hear their conversation, and he knew he should be planting his seeds. He ducked his head again and placed one carefully into the dirt.

A large hand with thick fingers, and nails lined with grime, removed the tin from the ground next to Doody — the seed poured gently like a waterfall of gold into his sister’s can. He watched in amazement as his father took the nail from his mother and placed the tin on its side. The part of the hoe that was strongest was used to bang a hole in each side of the tin, before his father passed it to Doody’s mother. She threaded one end of the string through each hole and tied it off tightly.

‘You can hang this around your neck,’ she said, lifting up his collar. ‘But not yet. Let Dad do Mary’s tin first, and then you can get to work.’

This was the way Doody and Mary’s Dad sewed their first crop. We don’t know if it made a profit that year, or even the year after, for that wasn’t the important part of the story to a small boy who did not understand. Eventually, the family could afford a horse, and eventually they could afford a proper plough to go behind it. Life went on, and there were likely many stories Doody told us from that era which are now lost in time. 

‘I am height challenged,’ the short and rumpled man said softly to the raven of grey feathers who stood upon the slope.

The raven cocked its head and blinked.

The tunnel behind this man had been long and winding. There had been white sticks with pink ribbons to show his way. The compass in his pocket had stayed true and this was the slope he had meant to arrive on.

‘Do they know of this.’ The raven spoke quite clearly, for a raven.

‘No,’ said the man. He stood up and wiped off the dust from his knees. ‘Some of us are not fond of crawling in the dark. Myself, I found it interesting and enjoyed the discoveries. But that particular way…’ and here he turned back to look at the barely visible exit. ‘That is a way known only to a few.’

‘Tried and true indeed. Understanding something, and experiencing it are extremely important, don’t you think?’ The raven began to bounce up and down on his long and spindly legs. ‘How would they go?’

A distant rumble was heard. The thunder of shod hooves and a bridge that had been risen by the earth itself was what they had traversed under. The way had been safe, even if not well known.

‘Frankly,’ replied the little man. ‘Some areas would not accommodate them. It is highly likely some would get stuck.’

Where is this coming from, where has it been. Now what is it doing?

The whispers did not understand.

‘To feel such a weight over one’s head can be disconcerting for some, especially when the tunnel is long and hardly heard of anymore. Not even a large and hairy man would know of this one.’

‘He wouldn’t?’ The raven cocked his head to the other side. ‘Why not?’

‘He’s never been there.’

‘Where do we find this tunnel?’ asked another being. His voice was light, like a warm wind, but his glinty little eyes were calculating.

‘You can’t find it. You have to know it’s there.’

This makes no sense , this makes no sense. The whispers did not understand.

It is a trifling thing for someone to remember. It has been experienced in other places by other people, but this one was known only to a few. The entire experience of this darkness was had by only two. When a dolphin is not a dolphin, and a light grows dim, perhaps the adventure has been even more exciting.

‘Could you get back there, if you needed to?’ The raven was excited.

‘Not without help. It is difficult to find. People will think I speak of something else, but I do not.’ The man parked his little rump upon the tumbled pebbles. ‘I think I have mixed it up just enough to make it undiscoverable.’ He picked a piece of straw out of his hair. It shone like gold in the early morning sunlight. He turned to the being with the light voice and glinting eyes. ‘This was before your time,’ he said. ‘Coffee?’

What the others did not know, was that the man did not refer to pages, or books or even pay, this morning. What he did refer to, was memories, and pastimes, and the enjoyment of a hot beverage.

One hundred years is a long time.

I can still see where the tendon was sewn back together in my arm. There is a nerve called the median nerve, which provides feeling or sensation to the middle two fingers of, in this case, my left hand – my writing hand if I was writing with a pen. To someone with no idea of my past, this scar may look like something else. It isn’t. You see, when the glass bottle exploded, due to high temperatures from the day before, and because I acted too quickly in trying to get from the outside of the place I worked at the time, back to the inside, I dropped the glass bottle from between my fingers.

I was filling up a milk crate with bottles of cool drink, to fill up the drinks fridges inside the shop. 

I had three glass bottles held between my fingers, and the palm of my hand was facing upwards at the time. When the bottle slipped from between my fingers, and it only took one bottle to slip, it fell to the ground. I was bending over as well, so it was likely only sixty or seventy centimetres.

We had experienced days of high temperatures, and this was in the Mid West of Western Australia – the Batavia Coast, also called the central west. The shed the stock had been stored in was made of metal; corrugated iron – so it was still extremely warm.

When the bottle hit the cement floor, and I did see it falling, I turned my arm over so my palm was facing down. It was an instinct, a way to protect myself from getting glass in my eyes or in  my face. The bottle exploded, glass flew into the air, and some of it, quite a big chunk, went into the soft skin of the underside of my wrist.

I knew it was bad. I held my hand above my heart, higher than my heart, in the air, and returned to the kitchen. I am actually not sure whether I left the crate with the drinks in it behind or not.

I found a tea-towel, wrapped it around my wrist, and held it high. I needed to contact someone, so I had to release the pressure I had applied to my wrist. I then used the intercom we had in the kitchen of that particular business, and contacted the lady who lived less than 200 metres away, and told her I had experienced an accident. I woke her up, because it was the middle of the night, so she didn’t quite understand what I was saying, and was a trifle groggy (that means sleepy), so she said that she would just have a quick shower and she would be right there.

I said, ‘Ok,’ and put my hand back over my wrist with the tea towel in place.

Customers came into the store, so I served them. I went from the kitchen to the counter, holding my hand over my wrist to keep the tea towel in place, and I served them. They did not ask whether I was okay, they just looked at me strangely and paid for what they needed to pay for. I continued to serve customers until the lady I had contacted came.

It was 3am by the time I had got the local doctor out of bed, and I needed to catch a taxi there to see him. He was very young, just out of university really, and he sewed a few sloppy stitches into my wrist and sent me on my way.

I ended up going home. I believe I stayed until the end of the shift though, which was 6am.

Later that morning I woke up in agony and called a fellow employee who took me to the Geraldton Regional Hospital, where it was found that I had partially severed the nerve, and completely severed the tendon. The surgeon who saw me was a mico-surgeon, and, because my place of work was covered for this type of accidental insurance, I was then transported to St John of God, in Geraldton, which is where the surgery took place. 

The scar on my arm is extended, because the surgeon needed to extend what was already existing to retrieve the tendon and sew it back in place.

I could take a photograph, but I don’t see the point, because I think it would be better to see it in person.

C.S. Capewell.

At that time, my surname was Tew. I think if someone looked, they would find the correct year and date of the place where I worked, they would be able to find the hospitals, the surgeon who operated, and any other proof they were looking for. I’m not kidding. Have fun with that.

I took six weeks off, because that was the typical recovery period after a surgery, regardless of what type of surgery it was. I spent time with a physio-therapist, who had me put my hand in a tin of wheat and stir my wrist around, to make it stronger. I was told to use tins of baked beans or spaghetti to extend my wrist up and down to prevent the scar from becoming too tight.

I can see a bunch of particularly nasty people having fun with this. I’m not kidding.

It is always those who are dear to us that move quietly into the night.

They burnt the candle at both ends. They parried their way through the darkness. Some, they continue to walk but it is not quite as light and as fantastic as it once was.

Those of us who continue on, regardless of down and “out” we supposedly are, carry a flame.

A century passed for our own, not just yours. It may have been a small century, but it was a century nevertheless.

You, those who spit on their parents’ graves, I am sorry.

Those who have no understanding of what life means… Now is the time to take notes.

We hit the bat together, old man.

We can’t control our families. We live beside them. All we have asked is that when things get difficult, we move together. If we cannot move together properly, if one of our legs is twisted, or broken, we can’t move at all.

This is a single account of one person only. There is a place to go to talk about things. I am not banned from certain places, but I am Weary of them. Those who will read this, will understand. Those who do not understand should ask the question – What more is there in our past we have no longer access to?

This is worth nothing if it is not able to be presented to an account available and shared for free.

I’m taking it with me.

Catherine Sarah Capewell nee Tew.

The man with the luminous green eyes wished to show the world the joys of his country. For him, he said, they did it in the dance, and he wanted to share the similarities of his dance with the other warm countries of her Christmas season.

‘It will be a celebration indeed,’ they decided.

He lifted his chin and donned his cloth hat, showing the children how he strode imperiously back and forth before the court. His people stood in front and behind, their brightly coloured clothing swaying softly in the light breeze. This would be a joy to give, he whispered under his breath, for they had quite forgotten the beauty of their history as well, and although there were many things that had not been right, there had been pleasures to share…

He clapped his hands thrice and looked down his nose. They rose to their feet and he waved a hand languorously. ‘Begin,’ he said, smothering a grin, which rhymed and buffered the smile he had tried not to show.

‘I had this writing perfectly sorted while you were sleeping in your old bag,’ he cried. ‘And now you have awoken an orchestra of illuminati. Where the hell did I get that from,’ he added.

‘Get on with it,’ she replied, her tone equally as imperious as his own.

‘FINE,’ he snarled, but it was inside his head and his lips did not move like others had done the previous evening. Sometimes one does not need to run the words through their heads with their mouths, sometimes one merely thinks them first, decides whether they are worth repeating, and if and when it is time, they say them aloud.

His pantaloons flared softly with the warm wind, the curling toes of his boots just visible under the soft cuffs. I forgot it was so cold here, he whispered again. They don’t seem to mind so much now, but it was harder before. He spoke of a country far to the North, where icy winds blew over a landscape of pointed mountains. Even there, the beauty of dance had been recognised and honed to perfection.

A short nod brought the dancers to their feet, and the beautiful music of the middle part of the world began. It was not a dance of the islands, nor a dance of the men who had left the country so many eons before. It was a dance of drifting sands, and old regrets, of silvered clouds and horses heads. The sway and jingle of coins on each undulating hip reminded him of the beauty that had once been and he lifted his arms with joy.

The most important part of this dance was to keep one’s face as still as possible, especially when one was in such a position. Pasha had not been a word for a very long time in his country, and he understood the reasons behind it, but this… he gazed out at the swirl of light and colour before him… this should never have been lost.

He sent his message further east, and the laughing men of the Indies of old joined, their beautiful women recognising the beat. As they followed the arc of the moon to the south, the darker men rose to their feet.

‘This is not what we forgot,’ their lower neighbour warned them. He shook his spear and stamped his foot in the dust. The carved trunk of a tree growled a warning. diddididdiddidjadoo

‘May I lower my sails,’ the pasha asked. ‘May we step ashore, and dance with you? I’ve brought these things I grabbed from a palm tree and mashed them up and drizzled them with honey, and other things besides, and my friend says it’s the best thing she has ever eaten, and she didn’t ever want to share, even just a little bit. I think they’re called dates.’

The darker man raised an eyebrow. It was majestically bushy, and Pasha sighed. He had always wanted eyebrows like that. 

‘Give us a bite then, and I’ll tell ya,’ the man said. The crispy, soft yet sweet delicacy melted in his tongue.The second bite was much larger, and he shoved as much of it in his mouth as he could without choking. ‘Oh God yes,’ he mumbled around the wonderful dessert.

He turned back to the shore. ‘Let the bastards come and dance with us,’ he cried. ‘They have made the most delicious food on earth, and I need to tell my mum about it.’

Pasha smiled behind his recently grown beard. It would be much easier now to teach them the dance of his people, for this dance had not been forgotten in the under-countries of the world at all, although he’d thought it had.

‘An oboe, you say,’ he asked the musician holding up his instrument. ‘Is that where it began?’

‘Something along those lines,’ the musician replied.

They danced through the midnight and into the dawn, and Pasha swore he saw a man on a carpet fly off into the distant sunrise.

‘Your Christmas is going to be wonderful,’ he said softly. ‘I never knew you would be able to share with my greedy friends the secrets of my own country, but you know innately. It must be all that mixed up blood your family has.’

The writer of old grinned.

‘Must be,’ she said. ‘Good luck.’

He stamped his foot once and summoned the man who would fight a bull. ‘Begin,’ he said quietly and the man flared his cape.

This would be a dance of the ages.

He turned to thank the woman once more, but her voice was fading with each passing hour. Quite soon, she would only be a memory. 

A secret smile dashed across the skies of early morning as a lone horsewoman walked down the paddock to her mumbling horse. She would not understand the ramblings of writers, but that was okay, because this would remind those who knew how to place things in just the right spots.

‘I shall fix it later,’ the old lady wrote.

‘Impossible,’ snorted her companion. ‘One cannot fix perfection.’

‘One will perform perhaps just a little more magic before you steal it away,’ she replied and he knew she would teach him again on how it helped to bring his story to a brighter future. For, although he could see it clearly in his mind’s eye, beside her as he was at the desk in the green room, he knew there needed to be changes and adjustments so the dream he had shared would be clearer and clearer to those who needed to read it rather than see it.

Meanwhile though, he had a show to create and an audience to bring it to.

He stamped his foot and stepped across the stage, his nose in the air… it wasn’t too high, but just high enough to make it appear as if he were pointing at something with his chin.

‘Begin.’

Let’s start with what’s been happening in the past year and how, no matter how hard one may try to prevent it, companies like to use your information for advertising.

This is the thing about advertising. Advertising is used to sell your own product and interests back to you. You don’t make anything out of it. I know I certainly didn’t.

‘Harry? Harry…?’

‘Oh Connie,’ he whispered brokenly. ‘You’re old.’

Things seemed to happen rather quickly after that. We were both shuttled back down the corridor. The security guard was to escort “Mr Blackman” back to his room, wherever that was, and had been given strict instructions to return to mine afterwards. Why, I didn’t know, but assumed I was some kind of security risk.

The above is an excerpt from the original manuscript.

I have an unpublished manuscript. Over the years I renamed it a few times. The starting story, a complete fiction, was called “The First Door.” Its beginnings were published on another WordPress website, and I expanded on the idea in an app by Scrivener called “Literature and Latte”. This app was taken from me when it was “noticed” that someone else was looking at my manuscript at exactly the same time I was. I supposedly lost all my work on That Day… Unfortunately for whomever it was who tried to take the story away from me, though, I had copies. After all, I had been working on the story by this time for many years. I knew exactly how the story, and its following stories, went.

The story behind that story was used from my own life experiences (but perhaps a little before the time I had actually become what a much younger generation might consider “old”). This is how we write stories. We use “what we know”. It is a given. If we do not use what we know, we need to research. If we cannot research truths in a library or in a book, we use the internet. Sometimes, this can go terribly wrong. It can go terribly, terribly wrong when the story one has written, a fiction, gets repeated back to that person again, and again… and again. If one does not have a strong mind, nor a strong heart, nor a strong soul, one can get lost in these lies and believe them to be truths, or, as the case may be, a vengeful, nasty person might decide this is a great way to send a person completely insane. I have some very succinct words for people like that and surprisingly, not so many of them have only four letters.

So, we invent stories. But we label a story clearly as a fiction when it is a fiction. When it is not a fiction, well, that’s not my department when it came to the particular story of which I speak.To invent means something must have a certain element of truth and experience. If one does not have the experience, or the truth, the lie is almost immediately known by those who have experienced the truth, or the experience. If one does not understand the difference between the truth and the lies, one is either too young to be given a fictional story, or too ignorant to understand the difference.

To create fiction we expand on truth, on history, and on experience. This is how a good story is formed. If one does not know, one can also ask the people who have experienced these things, to get an idea of what the truth is. If one does not ask, one does not learn. If one does not learn, one has chosen to be ignorant. We learn throughout our lives, and we listen to those who have come before us to have truth. The concept of “this is my truth” is dirtied by so-called “reality TV” and the calling out of a lie, so I will not use that catchphrase.

This is the start of my story to you — Kate (AKA Catherine) Capewell. Author of “Ambrosia Honeybun Polka Dot” and “The Top Secret Guide to Australian Slang”. Writer of “The First Door” AKA “That Day”, “Demented”, “Strange Bedfellows” (not the same as the original story at all) and “Out of Time”, a body of work that had its name changed many times over many years, but ending up with the title “Temper” or “The Temper”. This story remains unpublished, but sections of the story have been presented to you (in truth and in fiction), the people, in many forms over Twenty Twenty Four (2024). This story was written in Two Thousand and Fourteen (2014).

My personal or real–life story began in 1969.