Cricket and strange days

I have just heard an old piece of archive radio which was commentary on a cricket match held on the green of the very English village of Tilford, Surrey.

The green is overlooked by a very English pub, The Barley Mow, and is a short distance from the ruins of the first Cistercian monastery to be built in England, Waverley Abbey.

I spent many evenings in this pub with my Norwegian girlfriend, and we even watched part of a cricket match on the green one sunny afternoon.

My friend was an au pair at a large country house nearby, and one night she snuck me into it under cover of darkness as her employers slept. A while later there was a knocking at the door and the lady of the house began shouting, Have you got someone in there with you?!

I climbed out of the window and down to the drive using the straggling - but thankfully stout -  plant covering the wall as a ladder. I spent the night in a haystack with the farmer's dog barking at me for several hours until it got bored. In the morning I held my breath as the farmer used a long pitch fork to toss out some feed for his animals and the dog continued to bark in an upwards direction. They did not discover me, despite the dog's frantic efforts to point me out.

Thursday was a very strange day here. It began with me arriving at my workshop to find the yard covered in parked cars, one of which was blocking my entrance. It was a big SUV and I saw the rear end of a woman protruding from the open back hatch with her husband standing passively by as if waiting for something. He was waiting for an ambulance.

The woman had dislocated her hip and any movement caused her to scream loudly in pain. They had called the ambulance three hours before I arrived and it still had not come. I offered them water and food but they had their own. I gave them an umbrella because the sun had moved round and the woman was overheating. Then I went to lunch and left them to waiting.

One of my colleagues told us that he had been diverted from his usual route because of a road closure, and it later transpired that the police had found a body in the woods fringing it. Half an hour went by and someone else remembered that one of our neighbours was a military doctor and may have some powerful painkillers to give the stranded woman, so he went off to find him.

They decided to put the woman right inside the car in case her husband would be forced to take her to hospital for want of an ambulance. This involved 15 minutes of screaming, so I guess the doctor had no morphine. I never found out if the ambulance arrived after four and a half hours, because I drove off to the Morrisons supermarket in town. 

I was turned away from Morrisons by a girl who explained that there had been 'an incident' and the store was closed. I later found out that a man inside had begun shouting 'I need help' whilst threatening people with a knife which he then used to slash both his wrists. Police and a helicopter ambulance arrived a lot sooner than the one which the dislocated hip woman needed.

So if you are still reading, I can tell you that I went to a different supermarket to get my shopping. I parked up and was just about to get a trolley when the fire alarm went off and the building was evacuated. I was forced to go to Waitrose.

If you got to the end of this I applaud you...