More than a hundred years ago there had been cottages along the old road, but when the people left for America, or some other place with paid work and sunshine, the cottages fell into ruins.
‘Wow,’ said Shane. ‘Look at all that grass. Acres and acres of it. Gran says that there are huge areas in Africa where there’s no grass at all. Imagine that, Milo. Baldy fields.’
We left our bikes on the ground and wandered into the ruined cottages. Some of them even had broken chairs and rusty kettles and things like that, just left there.
‘Why did they leave their stuff?’ Shane muttered, picking up a dinged tin cup and shaking his head.
‘I suppose they were rushing away to catch the ship,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t you do a runner too if you were living in this misery? Anyway, this is boring. Let’s go a bit farther.’
We wandered along beyond the cottages and into a wilderness of weeds and half-hidden stones. It was Shane who found the first carving.
‘Hey, Milo,’ he called out. ‘You have to see this.’
‘What have you found?’ I laughed. ‘A dozy leprechaun?’
‘Don’t be so dumb,’ said Shane. ‘Look.’ He pointed to a stone in the grass. ‘That looks like part of an arch.’
We gave it a closer look. Sure enough, it was part of an arch with carvings on it.
‘Did the people who used to live in these cottages make things in stone, Milo?’
‘I wouldn’t think so,’ I said. ‘Their whole time was spent catching things to eat and knitting woolly jumpers. Anyway carvings like that were way before these cottages.’
‘Let’s see if we can find any more arches,’ said Shane, moving away.
‘Boring,’ I groaned. But I followed him. Sure enough, the farther on we went, the more we found lots of fragments of carved stones.
‘Maybe when they were building the town castle,’ Shane went on, ‘these were the ones that were rejects, like carvers made mistakes and had to dump them, because you can’t rub out mistakes on stones like when you’re drawing.’
‘Good thinking,’ I said, looking around. ‘Look there’s loads of them all over the place, hidden in the grass.’
‘Or maybe a World War II bomb fell here,’ whispered Shane, looking up at the sky. ‘KABOOM! And the whole place fell apart.’
‘Nah,’ I said. ‘The Germans didn’t bomb small places like this, in the middle of nowhere.’
‘It’s kinda spooky, isn’t it?’ said Shane, looking around the wasteland.
That brought up all the fears I’d been holding back. I gave a huge sigh and sank on to the grass, covering my face with my hands.
‘I wish we could rub out bad days, Shane,’ I sighed.
He laughed and threw some grass at me. ‘You daft nutter,’ he said. ‘Hey,’ he went on, when I still had my hands over my face. ‘What’s up, man?’
‘I have to go somewhere tonight,’ I squeaked.
‘Ha. That’s it?’ Shane laughed. ‘What’s so awful about that?’
I looked at my best friend, and I so needed tell him everything, but something in the grass caught his attention.
‘Hey!’ he shouted, looking over my shoulder. ‘Doesn’t Miss Lee wear shoes like that?’
‘She does!’ I exclaimed, looking at the shoes tucked neatly beside a broken carving in the grass. There was no mistaking the red high heels and the shiny little half moons on the toes.