Playmates

It's sixty years ago, the people say: Two village children, neighbours born and bred, One morning played beneath a rotten tree That came down crash and caught them as they fled; And one was killed and one was left unhurt Except for certain fancies in his head. And though it's all so very long ago He's never left the wood a single day; I've often met him peeping through the leaves And chuckling to himself, an old man grey; And once he started in his cracked old voice: 'We're playing I'm a merchant lost his way, She's robbers in the wood behind yon tree, The minute we grow up too big to play' -