ブックタイトルeigo13

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eigo13

anything about them. After I crossed the bridge, I noticed I was alone and nobody wasaround me. I felt so lonely and helpless.In fact, I was a stranger here. My sister, a third grader in elementary school, and Ihad just moved in April 1945 from Tokyo to the suburbs of Hiroshima, where mygrandmother had lived. So I didn’t know where Ohkoh elementary school was. However,I kept plodding toward the south. It was getting dark and I saw no one around me.Suddenly, I was frightened to hear a man shouting, “Don’t come this way. It isdangerous. Go to Hifukushou.” So, I turned to the direction he was pointing at. Therewere some houses left unbroken on the other side of Mt.Hijiyama. Kindly, a woman tooksome white oil out of her first aid bag and applied it to my burns on my hands and feet,telling me the way to Hifukushou, a clothing factory building.Many people had already taken refuge when I got there. Feeling relieved, I wasunable to move any more. My face was so badly swollen that I felt as if my eyes would becrushed. I was laid down on a blanket that the army had spread on the concrete flooralong with other wounded people. Some people who were conscious were kind enough towrite our address and name on the tag and hang it on the blanket for us, so that ourfamily could find us even though we were beyond being recognizable. Near my left foot,there was a girl singing a school song, who was suffering from a high fever. She wasrepeatedly making an excuse that she skipped her work because of the fever. On myright, there was an old lady who was suffering from bad burns on her back, bendingforward and moaning in pain, “That hurts. That hurts….”We were a shortage of medication, so flies laid eggs on the festering wounds andlater they turned into maggots. Trying to pick them from the wounds, there was no wayto stop them.People there were asking desperately for water. Some were given water from thespout of a kettle, others, whose mouth was burned and peeled had drops of waterdropped into their mouth little by little using a cloth soaked in the water.Eventually, on the fifteenth of August my family came to pick me up with RIYAKA,a bicycle-drawn cart. I was fortunate to return home. However, I couldn’t get anymedicine for my burns. I don’t know how my family got the idea, but they applied juicesqueezed from a cucumber on the wound, they put powder on it, and then covered itwith a piece of cloth. The cloth clung to the wound, and it hurt so badly when theychanged the cloth for me. I have never forgotten how seriously it hurt.One day my friend’s mother came to look for her daughter. I couldn’t tell herhonestly that I had met her and she had been heading to the river. It has been 60 yearssince then, but I have still regretted not holding her hand and forcing her to cross the