On Bended Knee

"They're funny things, Accidents. You never have them till you're having them."
-From Winnie the Pooh

When I was five- I had barely begun my schooldays- I went out visiting with Mater and my brother to see some relatives who lived locally.
At the end of the afternoon my brother and I climbed into the back of the car and prepared to go home.
We buckled up our seatbelts. I remember that I was clutching a chocolate caramel bar called a Chomp which at that time cost a mighty ten pence.
As Mater began to cruise slowly out of the driveway I perceived that there was something a little odd about my right knee. It had a muddy partial footprint on it, and there was a considerably deep hole underneath.
My knee was bent; the hole enlarged some more. I felt no pain but I had the distinct impression that I ought to send out some sort of a warning signal. I could see the bone at that point and I leaned forward and tapped Mater lightly on the shoulder.
"I have a hole in my knee," said I quietly.
A word to the wise: the softly-softly approach only serves to undermine the urgency of such a situation. My lack of noise led Mater to believe that I was wholly exaggerating.
That is why she retorted without looking back, "be quiet and stop whinging."
I did not know what else to do. I put my hand over my knee, but the damage was winking at me. I was wearing a red dress and I tried to pull the material over the yawning wound so that I would not have to look at it. There was no blood. It did not hurt. But it was still rather disturbing.
I made another effort.
"I do have a hole in my leg. It's getting bigger."
Mater sighed once, a long and exhausted exhalation, and kept driving, bumping along the rickety roads.
I knew that the journey home was not terribly long so I gave up and hoped Mater would not stop for milk and eggs and cabbage and butter and bread and tea and sugar on the way.
I handed my brother the melting Chomp.
"You can have this," I said feebly. I had gone right off the idea. He took the chocolate bar and munched it happily, engrossed in a comic and not at all attentive to the low whining of his travelling companion and sister.
We reached home. I insisted that I could not get out of the car. Mater pulled open the door and made me get out.
She took one look at my leg, at my half-indignant 'well-I-told-you-so' expression, threw me back into the car almost as speedily as my brother had accepted the chocolate bar, roared the car into action and sped to the nearby doctor's surgery where he stitched me up and left me with the souvenir of a one-inch scar on my knee that remains to this day. I missed about one week of school, which at that time felt like an eternity, and I joined Mater at her workplace every day because of my inability to walk.
We suspect that a broken ashtray, of the plastic kind that typically used to be attached to the inside of a car door, had slashed my knee when the door was closed. How that went unnoticed at the time is a riddle and where the mystifying footprint came from no soul will ever know.
I say, poor Mater. For she still bears that knowledge and guilt and of course my bringing it up time and again- such as today- cannot help. It being, however, a significant moment in my life, I tend to ponder it aimlessly.
In her defence, she claims that I did not cry. Had I simply shed a tear or two, my mother says, she might have been alarmed enough to take me seriously.
In my defence, I suggest that any child who offers a chocolate bar to her brother in exchange for nothing is in actual fact sending out a high-level signal of the most exigent order.
We all make mistakes, of course, but dear Mater has had to live with hers for a considerable length of time.