not a slave

Not quite a slave After war number 2 when the time was hard and oil was undiscovered, hidden under deep waters when our town stank of stale fish oil and people made their booze called “sats” guaranteed free of constipation for a lifetime. The Social Welfare Council did not have room for all children were sent to farms as free labor paid for by the state The farm I was sent to had two daft women from the town, one had broken into a military enemy camp spent days there before being thrown out naked from the vest down. The other woman was a tragic case, beaten half to death by her husband, she went blind and kept falling every so often, still, she was useful doing the dishes. There was a boy too good with the animals milked five cows at six in the morning cleaned their stall fed the hay and water. The boy was there because he had a foul temper that didn't include the animals, which defended from people, casual cruelties toward all animal going to school at a small village to an hour walking through fields and woods and occasionally attacked by rams or angry bulls I met another boy who had been sent to a farm from the town, as a boy, was ugly, with strange features like they had been wrongly assembled We were friends for a while til he was sent back Years later, I met him, he was the chief engineer on a big tanker, and when the ship was unloading he always went ashore alone I wondered why and followed him discretely when realizing whom he met, I understood his plight To be gay back then, on a ship, was viewed as a crime I met him years later, sitting in the park feeding ducks his loneliness hung around him for him, his freedom to be himself had come too late I had been lucky the farmer and his wife were kind people, but to be sent away as “Legd” another word for slave, gives you a sense of inferiority that is hard to shake off