The Fellowship Of The Bridge

By Robert E. Simmons

In 1950, in southwestern rural Ontario, two boys who had lost their fathers in the 2nd world war are on their way to swim in the river. They rescue a girl who has fallen in. She and her brother have moved into the farm across the river. They decide to design and build a bridge between their farms. The bridge is discovered by an older boy who threatens to destroy it. The four children, joined by a younger girl who has also lost her father in the war, inspired by Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring, which was published during the War, form a secret Fellowship to save the bridge. In the bully's attempt to sabotage the bridge, one of the builders- and the bully- is injured, and his sister must fetch her father, who was a medic in the war, over the half-finished bridge to rescue them. A summer cloudburst has raised the height of the river and threatens the bridge, already weakened by the attempted sabotage. Will it stand?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert E. Simmons
• Release date: Nov 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9780991774708

Robert E. Simmons

Robert E. Simmons is a retired professor of creative writing, English literature and linguistics. He has written essays on William Blake; a book about stylistics; a book about urban Canada; two musical comedies; several plays; and poetry as well as fiction. He lives with his wife in Toronto and is active in writing groups, art groups and community theatre. He designed the covers of his books. He is currently working on a book about William Blake called How to read William Blake: and why you should.

Book preview

The Fellowship Of The Bridge

By

Robert E. Simmons

Copyright 2012 Robert E. Simmons

Smashwords Edition

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Credits: cover: Bob Simmons; drawings and maps: Barbara Simmons.

For print copies or for other works by this author or to comment on this work, mailto: [e-mail]

About the Author. Robert E. Bob Simmons is a retired Professor of English and Creative Writing who taught at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Ontario. He and his wife, June Blair, live in Toronto where he writes stories, poems, fiction, non-fiction and plays. He has published two non-fiction books: Urban Canada, with his brother James, an urban geographer, and The Language Of Literature, with Michael Cummings, a linguist. He has written two musicals, set in the dam country of the Saugeen River, about two families who live on either side of a dam: Dam Neighbours, music by Tim Dawson, a bass player in the Toronto Symphony, and Dam Nation, music by Judy Cross. Both were directed by him and produced at the Bijou Theatre in Chesley by the Chesley Community Players.

As a boy he lived on a farm just outside of London, Ontario, and he and his brother Jim played two-after-two- a hide-and-seek game- with identical twins who lived up the hill from them. One of his two sisters, Jo Shawyer, is red-haired and writes children’s books. When he was a boy one of his aunts said he would grow up to design and build bridges. His father lied about his age and fought in the First World War when he was seventeen.

A Note To The Reader. A book, like a bridge, needs to be structured. Each chapter has five sections, each focussed on one of the five members of the Fellowship. These are written in different styles and from different points of view to reflect their different characters and emotional states.

Chapter 1

There must have been a bridge there once.

Strangers

In the summer of 1950, five years after the end of World War Two, across a green hillcrest in the deep farming country of South-Western Ontario, two boys were running. Barefoot, shirtless, in ragged shorts cut from worn out jeans, they fled across the grass. Behind them the land dropped away in long rolls and folds to fields, wood-rows, rich farming country. Ahead lay a steep slope, tangled brush, and through the trees a glimpse of water far below. The boys raced over the ridge, trees blurring towards them, the beaten path slapped beneath their bare feet, tall grass bending and straightening as they passed.

The lead boy, Jim, was thirteen, his brother Joe, twelve. Their father had died in the last days of World War II. Their mother had continued to run the farm, as she had during the war years, with the help of a succession of hired hands.

Many of the neighbouring farmers had been in that war. It had changed them, changed their families. The next farm over had also lost a father. Liz, the daughter, who was nine now, helped the boys’ mother with picking and putting up fruit and vegetables to be shared by the two families through the long cold winter. Liz’ mother worked at the grocery store in the village. The big farm up the hill, where the boys sometimes worked at harvest time, was owned by an ex-major who drank and dangerously ran the threshing machine, staggering between it and the big stationary tractor as the long drive belt that connected them whipped and whistled past his ear. As had happened in the war on a daily basis, death was only inches away.

There were other farms also where men and women had been in the war. South-Western Ontario was a patriotic part of Canada, as the name of its major city, London, suggests. Its settlers had come from the British Isles and had been quick to respond to the call from their homeland to help in the war, as they had responded in the first World War. The wife of a local farmer had been a truck driver with the Canadian army in France, and now drove like a maniac along the gravelled roads. A young neighbouring farmer had been in the invasion of Sicily.

The children, too, had been changed by the war. They had grown up serious, doing the men’s and women’s jobs on the farms, helping their mothers and learning independence in the absence of their fathers. They had waited for peace to resume their childhoods. Jim and Joe had walked the long mile home from school five years before and speculated how the war’s end would be announced in the London Free Press. Would it be a single enormous headline occupying all the first page? WAR OVER!

But in the event it hadn’t really ended for them because their father hadn’t come home and life simply went on as before. Money was short on the farm, though not as short as in the days of ration books and collecting milkweed pods for stuffing life-jackets. The two brothers had longed for adventures like those they had read about in boys’ books about the war- Dave Dawson at the Russian Front. They imagined their father had experienced these things. As very young children they had played with toy guns and raided each other in mock battles. Before he left for overseas, their father had made them tommy-guns out of scrap lumber. But that kind of mock warfare had ended with news of their father’s death, and their realization that real war was different from war in books. Their only excitement now was sneaking off from the hired hand to go swimming.

Across the green field the boys ran. Jim, five yards in front, was tall and thin, and ran with sinewy ease. His eyes were almost hidden, set deep in a close-cropped skull. Joe was stocky, panting hard. Sweat gleamed on his chest. His lips and cheeks were strained in a wide grin.

The ridge ended with a sharp ten-foot drop to the trees. Jim cascaded down, brought himself to a jolting stop with one hand wrapped round a young hickory. Joe followed, tumbled headlong into a bush, rolled off into the grass and lay panting. A wrinkle of expression flared across Jim’s gaunt face. Joe laughed aloud.

Jim nodded, then was all alertness, put a finger to his lips, flowed back up the drop to peep out over the hillside. A long, searching look and he was down again. Okay, made it clean. No sign of Mel. But keep it down till we hit the river.

Joe beamed and nodded. One after one they pushed aside a tall bush, squeezed into the woods.

Under the trees all was speckled light and dark. They followed a narrow, hard-packed path curling downwards through the trees, dropping from ledge to ledge. A murmur of water surrounded them. Shafts of sunlight striking between the leaves caught a glitter from seeping springs. Where the path disappeared in ooze, stepping stones had been placed. Jim flitted across. A stone shifted under his foot but he did not waver. Joe slowed a little but crossed nimbly, grinning.

The trees became larger and farther apart. Ahead, smooth planes of moving light- reflections from the river- alternately appeared and vanished between the trunks. The path scrambled down a last slope, ended on a grassy ledge. A short cliff dropped to the water, screened by a last line of trees.

Jim slid to the ground, smooth and silent. At once Joe, still on the slope, checked his descent, sank behind a birch. Jim eased forward, stretched up his head. A moment later he was back, bending close to the other’s ear.

Strangers. He barely breathed the word.

Joe’s eyes swelled wide. A grin flashed.

Boy and girl. On the other side. Never saw them before. Heading towards the old railway embankment.

Can I see?

Yep. Stand up where you are. Easy, they’re right opposite us.

Joe rose slowly, looked once, subsided. Nope. Never saw them before.

We’ll circle round to the embankment. Beat them there.

At once he was gone into the bush at the back of the ledge, racing silently parallel to the river. Ten feet behind, Joe followed.

They ran jerkily, delicately, on tip-toe, careful where they placed their feet, alternately watching the ground and the trees ahead. Jim’s face was set, jaw out-thrust. Joe sweated and frowned. Their eyes gleamed.

Joe snapped a hidden stick- instantly all was still. The wind stirred a branch above two motionless figures. At last, slowly, Jim raised his head, looked. He motioned with his arm. They raced forward.

The ledge widened and they turned inland, away from the river. At once Jim lengthened his stride, ran less silently. Joe panted openly. A short, steep slope covered with bushes appeared through the trees. Jim darted, turned, wriggled under and over branches, was through. He crept forward along a narrow track atop the embankment. Water flashed ahead.

He lay flat, gestured to Joe to stay down.

The top of the embankment was a level green tunnel snaking smoothly through the woods, on each side curtained with trees, berry bushes, sumac. At the river bank it ran out into sunlight, ending abruptly in a grassy mound overlooking the water.

Joe crept up beside him. They slid forward to the river end of the embankment. Tall grass screened them. Jim inserted one hand, gently parted a crack.

Across the river, twenty yards away, the embankment continued. The opposite bank was lower, the embankment higher. Struggling up the steep slope were the strangers.