36 The Simons

I liked the Simons.  I guess it was because they were just a nice retired couple and liked us kids.  Mrs. Simons was an artist of at least local renown and went by the name of Bessie-Fry-Simons.  She was a genteel lady and I kind of looked up to her with her English accent.  My sister and I used to go over to their place every week as she gave us art lessons.  I still have one of the primitive watercolors that I painted at her knee.  Her husband Dick to my eye, even as a child seemed an unlikely match for such a genteel petit English lady, but it seemed he worshipped her.

He was a big scraggy kind of man with a gruff voice and a scruffy kind of face.  He had fought in the Boer War and had sustained a big ugly scar on his neck that was at least 6 inches long and it appeared livid white against the dark skin of his hairy neck.  It seems he even had a medal from that experience but the story he tells is this.  On diving into a trench to escape a frontal attack a bayonet from someone’s rifle slit his neck wide open severing his jugular vein.  With blood spurting everywhere and no one offering any help he was written off as dead.  This did not sit to well with him so he grabs his neck with both hands to stop the blood flow and believe it or not was able to stay alive until he received medical aid.

He was really a gentle man and I can still see him with the pen in his hand as he willed to me his old roan gelding, tack and all.  He wrote it out with a great flourish, his stiff index finger sticking straight out. The calligraphy that he used was impeccable, and the document looked very official with all of the “here with’s” and  “there of’s” in their proper places.  I left Mr. Simons that day with the deed to the horse in my pocket feeling like a man of some means.  Even though I had never ridden a horse and was not particularly crazy about horses I still felt I had won a lottery.

Water Colour of Bird Cove by Bessie-Fry-Simmons