#70 THE WELL

A very old, hand-dug well, quite similar to the one in which we used to play.

In the 30’s and 40’s, only the children who lived more than three miles away from school rode the ’school bus’, an old Ford sedan with a SCHOOL BUS sign on it. Tony and I usually walked the mile and half to school with two friends, Lloyd and Bobby. The walk was wonderful walk in all kinds of weather. Meeting House Road, at that time, was narrow and unpaved, with very little traffic. About half way to school the road was tarred and became Route 101 through Bedford Center, but still used by very few cars and trucks, a fraction of what it carries today.  About fifty years ago, a by-pass had to be built in order to preserve the center of town as a quiet village.  

On the way to school was an old, open well about six feet from the right side of the road. It had been dug and lined with stones many, many years earlier by homesteaders trying to eke out a living farming the rocky New Hampshire soil. The top of the well, finished with a circle constructed from six to eight-inch granite rocks, hand dug out of the pasture, stood three feet above the ground. The well, was a long, dark, rough hole, about three feet in diameter, with water about twenty-five feet down. The same type of field stones lined the well.

When we were little, we threw rocks in to hear them plop in the water, way down in the darkness, but by the time I was ten years old, we began to find it much more fun to climb down inside by bracing our feet and hands against the opposite sides. Sometimes, three of us would be down in there together. I think we were the only children who played in the well. In the summer it was delightfully cool and damp.

 It was a great place to sing and shout; even better, it was a good hiding place … until our legs got tired. We never knew how deep the water was. The further down we climbed, the darker it got and the slipperier were the rocks. There really wasn’t much to hang on to, but nobody ever fell all way down into the water, far below at bottom of the well.

 Just think how worried Mummy and Daddy would have felt had they known about this dreadfully risky ‘playground’ so close to our house!

From Alice: I, too, walked by the old well but I have no fond memories of it. Although I called it the Wishing Well, I was terrified of it. I had been told (probably by Janet) that there were dead animals in it that had fallen in and couldn’t get out and that it had snakes and lots of spiders. (Now, after having read this story, I understand how she knew this.)

One misty autumn day, when I was in the third grade, I was walking back from school, kicking the damp leaves. Just as I approached the well, there was a loud CRACK, something zinged by my ear and granite chips exploded from the side of the well. It was hunting season. Although, as a child, I had no sense of my own mortality, I remember very clearly thinking how much pain there would be if a bullet had smashed into my head.

It’s a wonder any of us survived our Bedford childhood.