by Alan Townend«Charlie the Brave»
Charlie is a teacher and his wife, Maria is an artist. One of the main
differences between the two is that Charlie has no imagination well
perhaps a little whereas Maria has the most vivid imagination you
could think of.
Now — imagination is an essential quality if you’re an artist but
sometimes it can lead to — problems. Take the night before last, for
example. It was a fine summer night and you could see the moon
and the stars quite clearly, it was shortly before the longest day of
the year. Charlie was sitting in a deckchair enjoying the warm
summer air when he felt something touch his shoulder; it was
Maria’s hand and he could tell immediately she was a little worried
about something. He had noticed this sensation a hundred times
before. He asked her what the matter was and she replied that there
was a strange thing on the jacket that was hanging in the bedroom.
Now you must remember that they had both lived in the West Indies
and had seen a lot of strange creatures in their house before. But
now they were living in — England and so Charlie just laughed and
said he would have a look at the «thing».
He left the garden and made his way to the bedroom. He could see a
jacket hanging in the bedroom and went up to it to have a closer
look at the«thing». The moment he touched it, the thing sprang
into— life. Now Charlie experiences — fear like the rest of us but
when this creatures opened its wings, he jumped out of his skin and
ran screaming from the room like a small child doing about 100 miles
an hour.
What a fuss you may say and the brave among you may well regard
such behaviour as pathetic but — bats (for this thing was a bat)
bring out the worst in many people. For a moment the next-door
neighbours thought that Charlie was murdering his wife because of
the noise they could hear. In fact the bat was the one that was
frightened and it fluttered its wings and flew from one side of the
bedroom to the other.
Eventually Charlie managed to trap the bat in a box and went out
into the front garden clutching the box as if it had a bomb inside it,
took off the lid and the bat, obviously delighted to be free, flew away
into the dark. Eventually Maria, who had been playing the guitar
while Charlie was upstairs, asked Charlie if he had found out what
the thing was. «Oh, nothing to worry about«, he said casually hoping
that the terror could not be seen in his eyes, «it was just a bat.»