From my old blog… a timeless piece of interest.
Do you ever wonder about coincidence? What about the butterfly effect? Could a minor mishap result in total change to multiple lives if the event never happened?
For instance. You’re walking down a street and a rushing man knocks into you spilling stuff everywhere. No problems. You help him retrieve his bits and pieces and off he goes making suitable apologies.
How could this triviality make a momentous difference to his, and his families’ lives? He missed his train and was late to work? So what?
But; on that particular day, the train he would have caught was involved in an accident. Every passenger he usually sat with met their deaths, as would he, had he boarded at that time.
My father used to keep odds and ends in a miniature cabinet which was always on a shelf next to his favourite chair. There were two small doors which when opened revealed a few compact drawers, and whilst he was alive not even my mother was allowed to see the contents.
I’d had a brief look when I was sorting out after he died, but it was years later before I did a proper inspection.
The bottom drawers contained a couple of broken fountain pens, a couple of dead watches and a few foreign coins. The two drawers behind the doors contained similar, with a few cuff links and collar studs.
Then, a small thin panel just above the top drawer moved a little. A slight push released the spring and a hidden drawer slid outwards.
And there it was, a solitary object. A small square dark red cardboard jewellery box.
I doubted there was something of value in it, my old man didn’t do value. So, half expecting nothing at all, I gently removed the top and looked at the single occupant.
In a bed of soft cotton wool… was a spent bullet!
An old bullet with the tip flattened. Didn’t take much thinking to work out it must have been the one he was shot with (nearly died) during the war. He’d kept it hidden away for all that time! Mum would probably have insisted he threw it away if she’d known… obviously why the crafty old lad had kept it so well concealed.
Now, the coincidences!
I knew he’d been shot whilst in the army as he’d told me part of the story when I was about seven years old, then a little more detail just before his death a few years ago aged 88. A strange very short little story, but with an almost supernatural twist.
During the early stages of World War 2 my father, then an officer in the Royal Marines, was shot in the back during rehearsals for an overseas mission. This rehearsal with live ammunition took place clambering up steep wooded mountains in what is now known as Snowdonia, North Wales.
He was shot by another in the squad who apparently lost his balance whilst navigating an obstacle and accidentally fired his service revolver. The part he kept secret until the very end of his life was that there was bad blood between these two men, and the implication was, the shot may not have been quite as accidental as reported to the later enquiry.
The next memory he had was poignant. He was hovering, defying gravity a few feet above a wounded man on a hospital operating table. A surgeon had made an incision in this man’s chest and was endeavouring to extract a bullet which had entered from behind.
The hovering man nonchalantly realised that it was, in fact, himself on the operating table and the surgeon was desperately trying to bring him back to life. Somehow he’d become detached from his worldly body and the strange thing was, it just didn’t matter.
A tunnel of light seemed to stretch into the distance with its opening just over his head and he thought he could hear voices calling him.
Next thing he knew he was suffering from a sense of extreme loss having been dragged away from somewhere he’d really wanted to go and his father was sitting on a bedside chair where he had been all through the night.
Eventually, my father made a complete recovery and rejoined the war, serving all over the world.
So, just another boring near-death occurrence?
As I said, when my father first told me of this I was very young, long before near-death experience became a general term, so it was a genuine description. I never heard anyone else mention the subject until hearing a discussion about the then new phenomena, on Radio 4 late ‘60s I think.
So, the twist?
My grandfather was an Engineer Captain in the Royal Navy. His ship had berthed in Portsmouth harbour for repairs, and he had made a long journey by rail to be at his eldest son’s bedside. The strange thing was, he hadn’t been informed of the shooting. He had felt a compulsion to contact the commanding officer of my father’s regiment to find out if all was well!
At approximately two o’clock in the morning whilst he was sitting at his son’s bedside, desperately willing the young man to survive, there was an air raid over Portsmouth and a bomb crashed onto his ship ripping through the deck and eventually ending up in the hold where it was defused. On its way, it sheared right through the Captain’s cabin completely obliterating the bunk. The bunk my grandfather would have been fast asleep in if his son hadn’t been shot and lying critically ill in Chester Hospital!
So; if my father hadn’t been shot? And my grandfather hadn’t had a premonition…?
And then what of the repercussions if he had died? This bullet had a lot to answer for.
People he had saved from death during the war would have died, any offsprings born after their homecoming would not have been born.
I wouldn’t have been born!
My children wouldn’t have been born.
My second wife maybe wouldn’t have had a second husband… or married a rich man instead!
You wouldn’t be reading this now!
Unlikely, but the whole world could even be a totally different place.
Perhaps, I should also treasure this bullet… I wouldn’t be here without it!
Interesting to think about, eh?
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