Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
The first time I hurt myself badly that I can remember was when I jumped over the creek and fell in. My friends were all shouting for me to ‘jump, jump, jump!’ as I stood on the high bank of the creek. It had looked so easy as the the others did it but standing on the edge, looking down my courage slipped away. I pulled myself together and went back, secretly rubbing my lucky stick, took a run up and sprinted to the edge. Hesitating at the top for a split second before I leapt out over the shallow, brown creek below was where it all went wrong.
As I landed in the water half way across I felt a sharp pain in my right ankle. Jane helped me get out of the shallows and I hobbled over to my bike. It was difficult to hold back my tears, as embarrassment flooded through me and my foot was really sore. I felt something sharp in my sock and noticed a short brown stick poking through. I pulled it out, put it in my pocket and then slowly made my way across the grass towards the end of my street.
“Look,” I said to Mum when I got home as I pulled down my sodden right sock. There was a lump the size of an egg over the outside of my ankle with a purple bruise seeping out around it. “It’s ok, just a sprain” Mum announced. “I’ll get you an ice pack” and she returned to the kitchen.
I had been reading The Famous Five by Enid Blyton and so was convinced that there was magic to be found in nature. I wondered about fairies that might play on the toadstools under the silver birch tree in our front yard. I thought it was brilliant that at the top of the Faraway tree there were magical lands and I would fanaticise that at the top of tall trees everywhere there was something amazing, even the scraggly gum trees down at the creek. My stick wand went everywhere with me.
“There has been a cancellation so you can see the doctor at three thirty” said the receptionist when Mum called the local GP. She had decided that I should have the doctor check my ankle after all. This was most unlike her, as a nurse she was suspicious of most doctors and usually managed without seeing them if she could possibly help it- she must have been worried! When we got there Dr Thomas looked at my foot, heard my story and said “I guess you thought you could fly over that creek like someone in an Enid Blyton book”. “Maybe”, I said, turning the stick over in my hands.