Secret Hiding Place

The house backed onto a small, tangled clump of woodland. Beyond this stretched the park. It was this locality that he was revisiting to recall the scenes of his childhood.

Between the garden fences of the suburban, brick, houses ran a narrow, ill-defined path. It was overgrown with weeds and specked with garbage. The grass was never cut.

He stood hesitating, on the path. In his childhood it had unconsciously been the boundary between the real and the unreal. In childhood he had never hesitated to enter his fantasyland, his secret hiding place.

He ducked under a waving branch and stepped carefully between tall nettle plants until he was surrounded by a ring of trees.

The clear ground was dappled with the shadows of the branches, and spotted with dry pieces of wood, fallen from the trees.

At first his main feeling was one of surprise. Everything seemed so small. When he was a boy it had been a whole other world. Now with the perspective of adulthood he saw it for what it was; a clear piece of ground ringed with trees. Why had it been so important to him ? Probably because of the silence and peace.

He had been a solitary child and this was his "sanctum sanctorum". It had been his very own secret place, his hideaway, his refuge. It was a place closed to the real world he had never liked.

The man sighed and huddled tighter in his coat, against the wind. He had come back. Why ? Perhaps it was to find the only place he had ever really felt safe in.


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