Born Running

I wrote this for J & E a little more than a year ago. It looks like page one of my autobiography. Now I want it here.

I was born running – almost literally.
Nine months later, I was already able to walk.

I was born in late-November, a true Sagittarian, in the year of the tiger.

I was born probably under grey skies, in the middle of the 20th century.

I was born in the middle of a place that had, 10 autumns earlier, suffered the brunt of the Nazi bombing storm on my native city and country.

I was born 5 years after peace returned to Europe; so, in a place and a time that was, most surely unwittingly to my family or any of those around me, to prove in the years to come akin to winning a lottery jackpot.

I was born into a family deeply scarred by tragedy, more of which was also to attempt to assert its total dominance on us in such a short time ahead.

I failed to die as I was expected to when I was only 20 months old, unlike my preceding brother, who succumbed to meningitis in the war-year spring of 1943, only 14 days after the birth of my sister, so that I became widely known as the ‘Miracle Child’, who had clung to life in the immediate aftermath of an appalling kitchen accident, when a young intern doctor, late into the first night in hospital, replied to my father’s tortured plea to know what were my chances of survival, since having lost their first son, they would not be able to stand losing the second:
“Well, there isn’t very much of him, is there?”
He then asked my father as the two of them stood in the silence, looking down at my terribly scalded body, me face down and tied like a political prisoner in a police state by wrists and ankles to the 4 corners of my cot, as if it were a jail cell:
“Mr Scott, do you have faith?”

Poor, wretched, desperate Mr Scott answered “Somehow, still, I think so. Why?”
“Because I’m going to ask you to go home now and pray. Stewart is no longer in our hands, there is nothing more we can do to help him pull through, only monitor. He may survive, but it will not be because of any miracles that we have”.

And wretched, wracked Mr Scott did just as the young doctor bade him.

6 months later, I went home. A miracle? Here I still am. However, no journey is that simple.

There is a long road between that distant, unremembered “then” and today. It is all – in so many ways – explained by that flashing instant of “then”……….
From the Flames? To the Flames?