Walking to School

School was a mile and a half walk from home, across roadways, busy streets and railway lines and through parklands patrolled by swooping magpies in spring. We thought nothing of it when it was pouring with rain or hot as hell. Six year olds walked a gauntlet of risk back then. Memory can almost recall an image of each house along that daily route, the smells that gathered in the doorways of shops, the reek of urine wafting out of a laneway beside the pub and, still mapped upon the mind, where fruit trees overhung a fence and were good for a seasonal treat. Each step taken fed the senses with familiar signposts marking the way between home and the schoolyard gate. Time has passed into a more protective and yet more dangerous age. Children are shuttled to school by parents in bull bar protected SUV's and buses with flashing lights. Souls have become more brittle under the weight of an insidious world, perhaps no better or worse off than when I walked to school and danger hid in places where the senses could go. In my day, bully boys had names and were dressed in uniforms. Now, it is in the odorless corridors behind digital screens and in promises where lives tick away in the sterile waiting rooms of mortgaged dreams.