THE HEIRLOOM
Can lightning strike twice in the same place? Ask the Goodwin family.
Unexpectedly repetitive fiction by strzeka (01/25)
It’s taken ages to get round to writing this—I don’t know what else to call it—family saga. Absolutely incredible story. I mean, no‑one would ever think it was true even if I stuck all the proof in their faces and told them to read it for themselves.
I hardly believe it myself and I’ve known all about it and lived it for as long as I’ve known anything. It’s only now when I seen the audiograms of my unborn son in the womb that I started to ask myself what the devil is going on. It don’t seem possible. Anyway, you ain’t got any idea what I’m waffling on about so let me go right back to the beginning, or at least as far as I been able to get. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was other poor buggers before my great‑great‑great‑grandfather who also come a cropper and set our family on its incredible way right up to the present day. And into the future, by the looks. I been trying to tell the missus that it ain’t her fault and everything will be alright but she don’t get it. I reckon she’ll be alright after the nipper’s born and she gets used to it.
My name is Nelson Goodwin. I was born in 1998 to Janet and Lance, my mum and dad. I am married to Emily and we are expecting our first child in a few weeks. It’s a boy and we’re going to call him Zack. My grandad is still with us, my dad’s dad. The other grandparents on my mum’s side died in an accident just before I left school. My great grandad had passed away the previous year, in 2015. He was called Richard, or Dick as everyone said. He was only 71. He was a lot of fun and had lots of amazing stories. It was Grampa Dick who explained about our family heirloom. I remember seeing it in a corner of their living room when I was little and asking what it was. Grampa said it was a peg leg. It was very old and he said it had belonged many years ago to his grandad who was born in the 1800s. I asked if Grampa Dick ever used it to walk on but he said it wasn’t really suitable because his bad leg was too short and wouldn’t fit on the peg leg properly. But he promised to hand it down to my dad, to his son Lance, who had refused to accept it, even though he could have used it. My dad’s stump is just below his knee, exactly right for the peg leg. Of course, my stump is too short to use the old peg leg. It should be cleaned up a bit. It needs some new leather straps, that sort of thing. It would be fun to give the old peg a new lease on life. It’s served our family well through the years. Grampa Dick sat me on his lap when he was telling his stories and I used to explore the leather socket covering his stump with my little boy’s fingers as I listened.
– My grandad was a proper Yorkshireman. The sort you see on telly with a cloth cap and a neckerchief, crusty old pipe in the corner of his mouth. We don’t have hardly any photos of him or his wife. The Goodwins have never been well off and although grandad had a Brownie Kodak camera, film was dear and it wasn’t to be wasted on taking pictures of each other. But there’s a couple of photos where old Pat is standing with his workmates outside the colliery gates. You can pick out Patrick easy enough by his peg leg.
– Is that his peg leg, grandad?
– It is. The very same. Your great great grandad had that made after he was in an accident in the coal mine where he worked. There was a big explosion and it knocked some of the wooden supports out. They’re what hold up the roof of the mine, see? And old Patrick was underneath where the roof caved in. They rescued him a few hours later and took him to hospital. He was alright apart from his leg which was all smashed up.
– So they had to cut it off, I expect.
– That’s exactly what they did. And from what I’ve heard, there was a friend of Patrick who had a brother who had also lost a leg in the same kind of accident.
– There were lots of accidents in the mine, weren’t there, grandad?
– Too true, Nelson. There were. It was a dangerous business. Anyway, this friend said ‘Don’t worry, chuck. I’ll get a pit post and carve thee a peg.’ And he did. Made it look nice with some varnish and the leather knee cushion which used to be red leather. Anyway, when Patrick came out of hospital and his stump was strong again, he started wearing that heavy old peg and went back to work down the mine. It was quite common to see miners with wooden legs because of all the accidents, see?
– Did they all have wooden legs?
– No, not all of them. But quite a few. It was what they had to use, you see. It was quite expensive to buy a proper artificial leg back then, but after the Great War, there were so many soldiers who had also lost a leg that they found a way to make tin legs quite cheaply and my grandad got himself one of those. It was metal up to his knee and leather the rest of the way.
– Just like yours, grandad.
– Yes, just like mine.
– Why don’t you wear the old peg leg, grandad? Is it always just in the living room?
– It’s not what they call convenient to wear, Nelson. It doesn’t bend, you see, like my ordinary false leg, so whenever you want to sit down, you have to make sure that you don’t accidentally kick anyone with your peg leg.
– If I was wearing it, I would be very careful not to kick someone.
– I’m sure you would, Nelson. But you have two fine strong legs under you and I hope you won’t ever need to worry about things like artificial legs.
My dad, Lance, was only 35 when he had his accident. It was just a normal sort of foggy day pile‑up on the M4. Everyone tooling along at seventy with visibility less than a hundred yards. Total insanity, of course. So dad went into the back of a minivan that had run into a furniture van which had run into an empty coach. That sort of thing. He was trapped by his foot and the fire service amputated his lower leg on the spot to get him out.
– You’re so impatient, Lance. Always have been. I never thought it would come to this but it looks like you’ll be inheriting sooner than you thought.
– You mean that blasted peg leg? I don’t want it, dad.
– Ah! That’s what you say now. Let’s see what you think after you’ve been patched up and fitted with a tin leg, my boy. You might soon change your tune.
– They don’t make ’em out of tin any more, dad. You know that. They’re much better than the old stuff your generation had to wear.
Richard slapped his thighs and rose, leaving my dad twitching in pain from his amputation and wondering how on earth it was possible for all Goodwin family men to become amputees since time immemorial. And all using the same damned peg leg. It must be a hundred years old!
Dad refused to have the ‘damned peg’ as he called it in the flat. He was perfectly happy with his short pylon and rubber foot with its separate toes and fake toenails. But then Grampa Dick passed away and the peg leg made its way into our flat. It was no use to either me or dad. I’d also lost my leg by then, of course, the previous year. I was injecting and was warned not to, especially not into my thigh but I wanted it, I needed it and my thigh was easiest, so my thigh it was. Until it turned septic and started stinking. I didn’t know what to do. I missed a lot of school as they patched me up and weaned me off drugs but it cost me a leg. I have a couple of inches of stump next to my balls and get by well enough with my pros once it’s all belted onto my belly corset. I look at the peg leg, black and worn, and wish I had enough stump to try wearing it. When you’re as disabled as I am, even being able to wear a peg leg seems desirable. But it can’t be helped. The peg is at the back of our closet and Emily says my tiny little stump is sexy. I don’t mind if she likes fondling it. It feel quite nice and usually leads her on to feeling the rest of my kit next to my stump, so I shouldn’t complain. I don’t know if I should be thinking about such things knowing what I do about our new baby but it all seems so inevitable and I don’t know how else to think about it.
I haven’t mentioned Christopher yet. He was very much the black sheep of the family. The most adventurous, the most unlucky, the most determined to carry on. Christopher was old man Patrick’s son and father to my grampa Dick. He was born in 1920 and lived until he was 70. We don’t live long in our family, not on the father’s side. Christopher came a cropper in summer 1939, just before the outbreak of war. He had joined the new British Air Force the previous year and was already a cadet. He and his classmates were raring for the chance to fly in one of the training aircraft. Tiger Moths, they were called. They had two wings one above the other on each side. Real old fashioned but they were very responsive and logical to fly so that’s what they had. As you can guess, my great grandad had a bit of a mishap and crashed his aeroplane on landing. It wrapped around his lower body and ripped his legs off. He was left with a stump, a lot like mine, I suppose, on the left and a stump like his father’s on the right.
He was in military hospital for about ten weeks until the first war casualties started arriving. He was carried home by an obliging classmate who promised to stay in touch and did so until he was killed over Germany in ’42. Christopher was the only one in our family I could find who was completely legless. Patrick, his father, was happy with his tin leg and insisted that his son should take the peg leg. Christopher was apparently embarrassed at first to appear so completely disabled. Swinging himself around on crutches on only one wooden leg—it was such a peculiar thing to do. But my great grandma Hilda met Christopher at some garden fête in Sutton or Surrey and had other ideas about handsome young men without legs. She fell in love with him, legs or no legs. They were married the next year and soon after Richard was born, not quite nine months after but we don’t talk about that. Richard was used to seeing his father Chris lurching around on the single peg leg and crutches. It was quite normal to him and, of course, Richard’s grandfather was still around, not yet fifty, also hobbled with his creaking tin leg.
We have a few photos of Christopher and Hilda just before Richard was born. They are in some big park, which we think is probably Runnymede, with villas on the far bank of the river. Hilda is in a flowery summer dress and great grandpa Christopher is wearing a country gentleman’s jacket and deerstalker hat and plus fours and smoking a big calabash pipe. One trouser leg hangs empty and the black peg leg extends from the other. He is standing smartly upright on his tall crutches and great grandma Hilda has her arm around his waist and her eyes on his face. It is probably the nicest photo I have ever seen and I wonder how it has survived into the 2020s. You can say what you like about our family but we do have a tendency to show off and Christopher was the most extrovert. It’s not surprising Hilda was so in love with him. She died only two months after Christopher passed away in 1990. Broken heart, missed him too much. Almost the last thing she did was to order grampa Richard to take the old peg leg away. She couldn’t stand to see it any longer. It was all that remained of her husband and she couldn’t bear to see it. It was no use to Richard either, having such a short stump. When you come to think, grampa Dick was the only one of our family for over a hundred years who couldn’t use the peg leg, not because he wasn’t an amputee but because his stump was just too short. I think he was secretly pleased to have such a short stump. I know his wife admired it and it made him different from his father and grandad who had both stumped around on the peg leg for many years.
It does need some refurbishment, a good cleaning up. The wood seems solid enough but I think the old paint and varnish needs stripping and we’ll have a look then at what needs to be done. It sounds solid enough against the floor. I’ve not been interested in it much until now. My artificial leg is comfortable enough and I get around on it OK. It’s just that knowing my son is going to be what they call a congenital amputee makes me think I should know more about the family peg leg just in case little Zack wants to use it too when he grows up.
They warned us about three months ago that the foetus was otherwise healthy and developing normally except his right lower leg had no bones in it. It was just a bit of blurred flesh when they showed us the ultrasounds. I couldn’t make head nor tail out of them. A couple of weeks later, they had some new ones and you could see that the flesh was shrinking back. The latest pictures show that the leg without bones has been reabsorbed, leaving little Zack with one perfect left leg and a right leg which ends at the knee in a rounded stump. Zack is the first Goodwin to be born into the rôle. I think I’m going to insist that he’s always fitted with peg legs. I want to see him grow up one‑legged on the peg legs of his own choice. Our heirloom won’t fit him for years but he’ll certainly have it sooner or later. Zack will never experience walking on two legs but he was never destined to have two and it’s probably better to be born that way.
THE HEIRLOOM
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