I was driven to distraction in an old Ford Cortina, with pink fluffy dice and a nodding dog in the back window. I wasn’t paying attention, but we came to a field of poppies and pumpkins, and I thought instinctively of senseless slaughter and the smiling dead returning. They arrived in motley buses and open trucks, whistling songs from the war, holding aloft their candle lanterns, breath steam rising like balloon animals. There were horses, giraffes, elephants, and small marsupials that I only half recognised from kids’ wildlife shows with comic voiceovers, anthropomorphised for the young and scatterbrained. The engine hummed and I picked up the song, then all the animals and even the ghosts joined in. The driver turned the engine off, then turned round and turned to blackened paper. I honestly can’t describe the light, but it had that Maxfield Parrish glow. The car, now I think of it, had one of those sunstrips across the top of the windscreen, with the names of young lovers printed for the all world to see. They were, of course, written backwards.
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Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor
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