“Daddy?” says Kurtzhau, sitting up in bed. “Perhaps he lay down by behind the rock and popped his bow up and the enemy arrows just damaged the rock and he was still alive?”
“You can’t shoot a bow lying down,” I say gently. “And then he wouldn’t have been helping his mates.”
“Well, perhaps he was clever, Daddy?”
“He could have been, but he still got killed, because we saw him.”
“It makes me sad,” says Kurtzhau, hugging his polar bear and rehashing the last hypothetical fight of a warrior a thousand years gone.
A few hours before, Kurtzhau – aged 3 and a lot - saw his first dead body. We were in the Museum to look at “Viking stuff” (“…and will they have Celtic stuff too?”), and passed a hole in the floor with a display case over it.
“What’s that Daddy?”
“It’s a skeleton, Kurtzhau,” I say matter-of-factly. That’s how we come with the nasty side of life; no fuss, no histrionics, what is, is.
“I want to look… read me what it says.”
So we kneel down at the transplanted graveside. “He was a Viking, I say. About 30 – younger than me, a bit older than my friend
krumphau... you know, the one you were hitting with swords at the weekend. When this guy died, his friends buried his things with him… that was his shield… those were arrows…”
“Why?”