Dinosaur in my garden

Further Info

This story was made at a workshop at Brislington City Learning Centre, led by Noel Goodwin and Danny Lau with support from Bristol’s Museums, Galleries & Archives.

Transcript

[The story is told as if spoken by an old man]

When I was a wee lad, my family took me on a trip to the Exploratory to see a dinosaur exhibition. A few nights later, I awoke to be greeted by a tyrannosaurus rex outside my window. It was holding a baby t-rex in its arms, and the baby was scratching my window. It’s cold, wide eyes fell on me and saw only… lunch.

I screamed. What else is there to do when confronted with your certain, grisly demise?

I ran to my mothers room and, in the urgency of the situation, words failed me. I finally sputtered out that there was a dinosaur in the garden, and my huge scaly death angel was dismissed as a bad dream. How could it have been a dream when I had been awake the whole time? I may have been only four, but I knew I would remember the simple act of waking and stepping out of bed. Alas, when I returned to my room, the monster was gone.

I’m a frail old man now, and the exploratory has been closed for fifty years. The dockland has been replaced, first by yuppy flats, and then the world’s largest death slide and, while I never forgot this moment, as the years passed me by, it had diminished into the back of my mind. I’ve been a fool: these things never completely disappear. I mean, it must have been at least forty foot high. In a city like Bristol it’s going to turn up sooner or later.

Well, it turned up later, but turn up it did, and now I’m on the run from the arch-nemesis of my past.

Credits

All media not otherwise credited created by the story author, or permission obtained, used under copyright licence.