Hi, my name’s Billy. I live on Rickman Street. It’s kinda dull and nothing ever really happens here. It’s your typical suburban type street, everyone gets on real great, there’s trees on both sides of the street making it look real pretty, it’s terrible you can’t even climb the things, my mum won’t let me. She just says ‘what will the neighbours think?’ Who cares what they think, look at the size of them, just right for climbing. But there is one bit of excitement for us kids, something a little out of the ordinary. There’s this strange old man that lives over on Wood lane, he’s called Crazy Joe for short, but if you want his full name it’s Crazy One-Eyed Joe coz he’s only got one real eye, the other’s a glass one which he pops in and out of it’s socket to whenever it takes his fancy. He’s so weird and creepy. He lives on his own and only comes out at night to get his food from the local store. We avoid he as much as we can as he hates kids and if he gets hold of you, well you’re a goner.
This one time a kid got real brave and snuck into Crazy Joes orchard to get some apples from his trees, coz they are the best tasting ones ever if you can get hold of one, and next thing you know the kids being taken out of the old guys house on an ambulance stretcher. We all watched from a distance and as they were taking this kid away you could see Crazy Joe come hobbling out onto his porch with only his one good eye in. We heard that he put his glass eye down the kid’s throat and he nearly died choking on it. I’m no ‘fraidy cat, but I keep my distance from him and so do my mates.

My name’s Joseph and I live on my own, my poor wife Emily passed away several years ago leaving me to live out the rest of my miserable existence on my own. She left me some beautiful memories though of times now long in the past. The house that we moved into after we got married would make her turn in her grave if she saw the state of it now. I don’t have the same get up and go as I did while she was alive, and although I’m not a messy man by nature, the house has slowly deteriorated over time and I’ve never got round to fixing anything. The one thing I have kept in pristine condition though is our wonderful orchard. I look after it meticulously as it’s all I have left of Emily. It was nothing but a barren bit of land when we first moved here well over forty years ago, but together as our love blossomed so too did those apple trees we had planted. I think we got a bit carried away with ourselves at the time, we planted way too many trees, but at least we had a good supply of apples throughout the summer. Like they say an apple a day keeps the doctor away, and to this day I still keep to that saying, I’ve never had no quack visit me yet so there must be some truth in it. I fondly remember Emily’s laugh or the smell of her sweet perfume each time I bite into one of our juicy apples and I make sure that each tree is looked after properly, I would never let my Emily’s trees suffer, they are well looked after, unlike me. I once caught this young ‘un sneaking into the orchard to steal some of them. Now don’t get me wrong I like kids, and god bless her soul, Emily couldn’t have kids and so we never had any of our own, but to desecrate Emily’s memory was wrong, not that the kid knew how much those trees and apples meant to me though. I knew Emily would’ve just given him an apple if he’d asked for one so rather than go mad I knew the right thing to do was offer him one too, but I had to find him first; I’d heard him land from climbing our wall but I hadn’t seen him, so I started to walk slowly between the trees to where I thought he was. I heard a rustling behind me and turned round and quite by accident bumped into a pair of legs dangling from the tree above me. I don’t know who was more scared by this, him or me, because he fell clean out of the tree and landed on his back right next to me, which must’ve winded him quite bad. Well, he gave me quite a fright too, I’m not as young as I used to be and I took a step backwards, tripped over my own feet and fell on my backside opposite him. This tickled me pink for some reason and I started to laugh. I was too old for this though and it took me a while with laughing and all to get up on my knees. I had just put my hands on my knees to push myself up with when I saw the young lad was in trouble. I guess he must’ve had that asthma condition that folks where talking about. He’d gone a funny colour, was clutching at his chest and his breathing was strained; I could hear it now that I’d stopped laughing. Well I didn’t know what to do, Emily had been the nurse of the house, and I was always fit as a fiddle and so had never had to deal with an kind of illness myself. I scooped the young boy up in my arms, he barely weighed anything he was so light and I noticed that he wasn’t even struggling, which I knew was a bad sign and I got him inside quick. I phoned for an ambulance and they told me how to look after him while they were on their way, luckily they were there before I knew it and sorting him right. Poor little mite had gone unconscious by the time they carried him away, but they said he was fine, thank god. To top it all though I suddenly noticed my bad eye felt different, my glass eye must’ve fallen out along the way. My eye had been damaged a long time ago, it was an old war wound, they had removed my eye saying they couldn’t save it and I was told it would look better if I used a glass eye rather than a patch to cover it. What did they know, but at least I didn’t look like Long John Silver the infamous pirate.