Enter the surreal world of Julia Barrow, who wrote to us at Home Truths to let us in on peculiar goings on in her neck of the woods ...
"Driving to work on a country lane near our home, my husband David and I were astonished to see what appeared to be a disembodied human arm whirling towards us at about six feet in the air, apparently from a passing van.
I sat, frozen, in my seat, but my husband, showing quite some presence of mind, pulled up the car, walked back down the lane, and returned with a prosthetic arm, minus the hand and rather muddy from the hedgerows. We speculated as to what kind of driver would drive on, without stopping, when his artificial arm had flown out of the window and my husband said he’d hand it in, no pun intended, to the police station after dropping me off at work.
Arriving at work, I told my employer what had happened. Anyone who lives in a small, tightly knit rural community, won’t be surprised to hear that my employer replied, "Oh, that must be Roger’s". So I said: "Well, no problem, he can collect it from the police station."
That evening, I told David that the arm probably belonged to someone by the name of Roger, who’d be collecting it from the police station. David looked horrified and then admitted that he’d decided not to bother going to the police station, as the arm was obviously handless and damaged, but had instead chucked it into the paper recycling bin at the nearby coastal village of East Prawle.
Almost that instant, the telephone rang. It was Roger’s wife saying she’d just been to the police station and they had no knowledge of the arm, or us. Where was it ? We were forced to make the humiliating confession that we’d dumped her husband’s arm in a bin at the coast. My husband pleaded mitigating circumstances and said the arm had been damaged and handless …..but the lady, Roger’s wife, said that the arm didn’t actually possess a hand at all, but only a clamp, and that the clamp had fixed the arm onto the handle of her husband’s lawnmover, which he’d been pulling along behind his van on a trailer.
We then drove out to East Prawle to see if the arm could be retrieved, but although we could see the arm in the bin, we couldn’t reach it. By then we were beginning to worry that it only needed a one-armed corpse to be washed up on a local beach and David could find himself in a very sticky situation indeed. Eventually we returned home…I hesitate to say empty handed, and took the sensible decision to phone the council’s recycling department and confess all. The "key holder" of the recycling bin was summoned to unlock the padlock and finally Roger was reunited with his arm."
