His Father

I sat on a stone with my feet up on the low tide someone had told me that everything is possible if you absolutely believe and I was trying to walk on water. I concentrated mightily and sweat broke out. Put my feet down as I got up and sank to my knees into the sea. So it wasn´t possible and I was gullible believing what adults said; an, anyway it, isn´t much fun to walk on big waves in a storm. Last night I had been with the gang stealing apples in the garden of a rich man, mainly because he got angry, when he came running calling us whore children of the Nazi occupation. We laughed because we´re born before the war…except a little boy who was born in 1941, we just him as a look out and he looked down and said nothing. He had no father we knew and we gave him extra apples because his pockets were small. I knew how he felt I had a father but he was always absent, sometimes I saw him in the street and on the bus and sometimes I stood outside the factory where he worked and waited for him to come out, then I followed him to his home at a safe distant, saw him kissing his new wife and talking to his children. I never told my mother and now that I´m old I think it might not have been my father, but just picked this man because he looked father-like. The little boy whose father was an enemy soldier and I who tried to walk on water, must accept that some dreams are impossible, and get on with the business of growing up.