The right thing to do

I don't know why, but I thought of this story at 1am, while I was changing Syd's nappy.

In primary school, there were these two sisters - the Carroll sisters. We used to have an extremely popular TV show called, Hey Hey it's Saturday. Naturally enough, it used to be on Saturday mornings, before moving to night time many years later. One of the characters on the show was an Ostrich, called Ozzie and he was voiced by one Ernie Carroll - the sister's uncle. Which they mentioned at every opportunity. One of them was in my brother's class, so we sort of knew them, but not so much. I remember them treating most of us like shit, which is pretty much a primary school thing anyway.

Well, the story goes that, one afternoon while, for reasons that escape me, the rest of the school was on one side, I wondered around to the other. I don't really know why, apart from the fact that I've always been a loner and like being by myself. Besides, while all the kids were screaming their heads off on one side of the school, I could be in some peace and quiet on the other side.

So I'm walking past the shelter sheds - we had one for the boys and one for the girls - and I go past the girls shelter shed when who do I spy, but the Carroll sisters. They're in the girls shelter shed and, for another reason that escapes me, the shelter shed is locked. But they can peek out through the gap between the doors and they see me. They're crying hysterically and begging for me to let them out. They see me and I see them. What do I do?

I walk on.

No words, no acknowledgement. I walk on. They got let out a few minutes later but I didn't care. I distinctly remember being happy that they were so distressed. I thought, 'it serves you fucking right.' Except I didn't know the word 'fuck' yet, so probably not. But I thought this morning that, what an arsehole I was. No matter that they treated everyone like shit, they were terrified and didn't deserve someone - especially me - leaving them there to, ostensibly, rot. But, I wasn't yet ten so, maybe my moral compass wasn't completely set. Nowadays? Nowadays I would've helped. At least got a teacher.

But back then..........back then I was a kid.