Random memory from my childhood #2

I was about 10, my brother was 12, my sister 8. My parents had gone over to the neighbours place for a minute, leaving us to continue our game of backyard cricket. Almost immediately after they left, my brother hit the ball straight into the kitchen window, putting a massive crack in it.

A recent window breakage by my brother had resulted in him being sent to his room without being allowed to watch Transformers (clearly we had a very rough childhood), and since no one wanted that hideous punishment to be doled out again, within seconds he had convinced us to tell our parents that a bird flew into the window and broke it.

We did and they believed us. That day was the magical, wondrous day when we realised that we outnumbered our parents, and if we stuck together we could get away with just about anything.


When I remembered this last week, I confessed it to my Mum because I wanted to know if she genuinely believed us or not. Usually when a bird would fly into the window, it would be too stunned to fly away for a while, and I had to wonder whether or not she believed us given our total lack of physical evidence.
Sadly, she didn’t even remember the incident although she was very amused to find out that we banded together to lie about it.

So I will never know whether our invincibility was imagined or not. I think I’ll choose to go on believing that it was. It’s like many of the things you believe in as a child – they're pretty unlikely to be true, but the world is a happier place when you choose to believe anyway.