The quiet hero

This is the fictionalised account of the occasion when my grandfather saved the life of a young boy while out reading meters when he worked for the gas board. The account is fictionalised because my grandfather was a quiet hero who never once spoke of what he did, my family only found out after he died when we discovered a letter from the Gas Board praising my father’s actions.

“Help!”

Up to that moment it had been a normal day for Sid Carter; it was ten a.m. and he had just checked his sixth gas meter, with the meters of the houses in several more streets to check before the end of his shift.

“Help!”

A second cry drew Sid’s attention down the street as he strode up the path to the gate so he could leave the garden of number forty-six Kenmore Road. His height enabled him to see over the privet hedges that bordered every front garden in the road to the clearly distressed woman, who was looking every which way for someone to assist her.

Without thinking about it, Sid lengthened his stride, threw open the gate when he reached it, and hurried down the street to the woman. His long legs carried him to her in moments.

“What’s the matter madam?” he asked politely, his usual courtesy unaffected by the situation.

“It’s my…my…my boy,” the woman sobbed. “He’s…he fell in the pond.”

Sid grasped the situation immediately. As it had during the war his mind was clear, he knew what he had to do. “Where is he? Where’s the pond?” Looking around he saw that the front door of number fifty-four stood open, he took that to mean it was where the woman had come from and without waiting for an answer to his question he strode through the gate.

Since there was no pond in the front garden he assumed it was out the back of the house. He hurried up the path and into the house with the still sobbing woman trailing along behind him. His stride urgent he made his way through the house and out the kitchen door at the rear to the garden, where he found what he was looking for.

Darting across the garden Sid waded into the pond without a thought for his clothes. It wasn’t deep, the water barely reached halfway up his shin, but that was deep enough for the young boy who floated face down in the middle of…

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