Bill, Bingo and Bram 10
"What d'you think?" Ross asked eventually. "It's obvious," I replied, "There must have been a hole in the rain clouds - probably one, oh - a foot by a foot and a half, what you saw ..." But I didn't get chance to complete my smart response. He switched on his bedside lamp, and was sitting up looking at me, a furrow(皱纹,犁沟) of concern on his forehead. "Stop it! I know what I saw, I'm not making this up! It can't do that. Rain just can't leave a patch of dry!" Ross stood up, and walked slowly to the window, his hand near his mouth. "When I knocked on Bill's door, I looked around, and this patch started to get spattered. By the time Bill actually opened the door, it was wet, just like all the rest of the yard." "Did you tell Bill about it?" I asked, serious because of his agitation(激动,搅动) . "No." There was little further comment, it was late, and we both had to be up early next day. The business was forgotten, I gave it no more thought until perhaps two years later. Part of my degree course was to interview people I knew, and try to create a documentary radio programme using my source material. As ever, I left it very late to attend to, and finally found my way to Bill's house in Victoria Street, armed with tape recorder and microphone. After an initial wariness(谨慎,小心) , and several times being told that I wasn't recording when in fact I was, Bill relaxed a little, and started into his stories. I knew many of these almost by heart, and was able to coax him into telling familiar ones. Including the one about the shooting incident. When he was a boy, Bill's family had a dog, a mongrel(杂种) - no one in Basford in the early 1920s could have had any other sort of dog. It had been his older brother's originally, but his brother joined up to fight the Kaiser, and never returned from Flanders, so the dog had to adapt to Bill as a new companion. |