Deus é grande

Outside the kitchen door there was a concrete hard standing with a depression in it running the length of the courtyard towards a metal door in the wall shielding the view of the back garden from the road.

It was hot, so we five kids begged my mother to let us dam up the gap between the bottom of the door with towels, and run the hose pipe so that the depression filled with water for us to play in.

She agreed, so there we were, my sister and I, our two little boy cousins and the girl from across the road, all sitting naked except for our underwear on the concrete, splashing each other with a pitiful amount of water.

There was a lady at the school gate telling people about Heaven, where our souls go when we die. That is what we were talking about. She said that we had to repent of our sins, whatever that meant. Then my friend from across the road said it was that if you had been bad you had to say you were sorry. We had to be good to get into Heaven. We all looked up at the bright blue sky and wondered if you could get to Heaven if you had been mainly good and only a little bit bad.

We didn’t know. I laughed at my sister, because she couldn’t say “damnation” properly. She laughed at me because I did not know what it meant. We decided that God must be very big. Then, our cousins splashed us, and tickled us. That is all.