I was just about there! I started to walk more briskly towards the stage. But then, just as my stage fright had disappeared, I forgot to gather up my costume! It gathered around my feet like a rope trying to trap me. I tumbled to the floor like a sack of potatoes, and worse still a sack of potatoes that was being watched by loads of people. I had to get up! I carried on walking. It felt as if everyone was in fits of uncontrollable laughter. I now realise that there was only one little boy sitting next to his mother smirking.
One very important thing I had learned about that incident. Don't be too nervous. Be calm.
Summer had come early this year. It was a sweltering 27 C in early May. I dashed out to play in the garden with my cousin who had just arrived. I got my football out from under the overgrown, almost dead apple tree in the far corner of the garden. I remember the smell of the trees at the back of the garden, they had a very distinctive smell of sap.
We started kicking the ball to each other. The first time I kicked the ball I narrowly missed the rusting greenhouse, which had probably been there years. After a while we got bored of just kicking the ripped leather ball about. I had just moved into our new house a few days earlier, so I hadn't been into the garden that much. There was one part where I hadn't been yet, I called it the "jungle" because it was shrouded in darkness and was taken over by ivy as if that area was invaded by it. We had set out to "explore".
I walked up the mound of mud to the "jungle", my cousin followed slightly apprehensively behind me. There it was!
It sat there looking like a big boulder, not moving. It was a brown- green colour with bumps on its shell. My cousin ran away like a scared mouse. He ran into the house thinking that the tortoise was a monster out to get him. I picked it up and took it into the baking sunlight and out of the "jungle".
My Sister told me not to touch it or otherwise I would catch some deadly disease. I didn't listen to her. The tortoise didn't do much, it just sat there munching away at the grass that hadn't been mowed in weeks. I remember vividly thinking we could keep it as the new portable lawnmower.
We weren't allowed to keep it! I told my parents the lawnmower idea seeming that my Dad can't be bothered to mow the grass and that the tortoise could do it for him. Thinking about that now I realise what a stupid idea it was.
My dad took it to the vets the next day. It turned out that it belonged to the next-door neighbour and that the tortoise had escaped very slowly through the hole in the fence next to the still unexplored "jungle".
On another day that summer, we were invaded! It was the middle of summer and there was a drought for the first time in years. School had just finished for the day and I was on my way home in the blistering heat. Walking home on that day turned out to be one of the worst moments ever!
I walked out onto the main road, which was as usual jammed with a mass of cars, but today it was different, all the cars had their windows closed in the middle of summer and most with their windscreen wipers on when it was not even raining.
I realised why when one of them collided with my face and I squashed it with my hand. I looked at my hand in disgust and saw a dead bug in my hand with this sort of brown blood coming out of it. It looked like a queen ant. I looked around in horror and saw thousands of them swarming everywhere. The cars that had their wipers on were killing the bugs that landed on their windscreen like they weren't living creatures. There was also one woman across the road screaming and flailing her arms in the air as if she was a maniac.
I hadn't seen anything like it in my life. It was like one of the plagues of Egypt. When I was younger I was always scared of spiders and big flying insects, so this was one of my worst nightmares come true.
The ground looked as if it was alive in places, it moved where there was a mini swarm of them. Everywhere I looked there were these pests, I fought to keep them off of me. I couldn't take it anymore. I ran as fast as my legs could carry me to the nearest phone box to call my Dad to pick me up even though my house was only a few minutes away. The heat in the car was almost unbearable, but was still better than the mayhem that the flies were causing out side. For a while the normally bustling streets turned into a ghost town. The unknown "things" had invaded and taken over the street.
When it got dark and cooler they gradually went. Just as soon as they had come they had left. All that was left behind were the carcasses of the "things" that had died.
To this day it has always remained a mystery about where they came from and where the thousands of flies went. I think that presumably they came from a freak incident because of the really hot weather that year. I think I'll never really know.