Helen Summers spends every Sunday afternoon caring for small children, like little 5-year-old Peter who is intent on defying his mother’s instructions.
As Helen tries to inculcate a few life lessons in her little nephew, she’s reminded of the reasons why she has become the self-appointed guardian of Sunday afternoons.
“The Guardian of Sunday Afternoons” is available for the month of April 2025 on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores. You can also read this story in the collection Baverstock’s Allsorts Volume 1.
The Guardian of Sunday Afternoons
By Jessica Baverstock
HELEN BREATHED IN the warm sea air, filled with the promise of gray sand and lapping waves only half a block away, grateful the autumn afternoon hadn’t turned cold.
She had promised the seaside, and promises to little boys must always be kept.
This particular little boy, with a perfect head of blond hair and an upturned nose, tugged on her hand, as if somehow his five-year-old bulk would drag her forty-year-old frame along the sandy pavement just that tiny bit faster.
He was a determined little blighter, who had other plans for their afternoon, and she knew he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“It’ll be fun,” he said, bouncing along beside her.
“No,” she said again. Repetition was important with the young. It was vital to mean what you said and not go back on your word.
“It’s not like there will be anything bad there,” he said, making a fierce expression at her. “Not like tigers or anything,” he said, showing his teeth. He growled and pounced at a blueberry bush.
“Peter, do you know why I’m saying ‘no’?” she asked, pulling the berries from his mouth as he tried to shove more and more in.
“Because you’re mean?” he said. He bit down on her finger, not hard but enough to show he wasn’t happy.
She considered smacking him. When she was young they would have smacked children like him and it would have done the little blighter the world of good too. But now it wasn’t proper.
Instead she waved her reddening finger at him sternly. “Because I told your mother that we’d be going to the seaside. I told her we’d be walking along the sand and collecting shells. Perhaps we’d build a sandcastle. I did not say we would be detouring past the circus.”
“But you wouldn’t have to tell her,” he said, looking very sincere as he suggested deception.
“But I would,” she said.
“Why?”
She didn’t know how to explain it to him right away, so she kept walking as she thought. She remembered hiding things from her mother when she was a little girl—inconsequential things at first. She didn’t tell her mother about the red ribbon she’d bought with her pocket money, that she wore at school to impress the boys. She didn’t tell her mother when the boy she liked asked to escort her home after school. She didn’t tell her lots of things.
“Because, Peter,” she said, squeezing his hand, “you’re very, very precious to your mummy. She let us go out to the beach together today because she trusts me. If I lie about where we went, then she won’t trust me anymore.”
“But she won’t find out.”
“Mummies always find out,” she said.
They walked onto the beach together. He took his shoes off and shoved them into her hands. He raced towards the water’s edge, and then squealed as the cold waves touched his bare little feet.
She removed her shoes and dug her feet into the dark sand. Her toes scraped against something. With her fingers she unearthed an old toy. It was a small, plastic truck—buried by one of the myriads of children who came to this beach every year.
She held it in her hands, wondering how long it had laid beneath the sand until her foot happened to touch it. Funny how some things happened by accident, and other things were just inevitable.
“Look at me, Aunty Helen,” Peter cried out. His hands were covered in wet, sticky sand and he proudly held them up as proof of his location.
She laughed at the child. “Why don’t we build a sandcastle?” she called to him.
Together they sunk their hands into the wet sand and sculpted a mound. They gave it turrets and a moat and even a drawbridge.
“What shall we call it?” she said, sitting back on the dry sand to survey their creation.
“Blakey Castle,” he shouted, striking a pose beside the mound as if he were declaring it to a crowd.
She felt her arms and legs go cold. William Blake had been the boy’s name. The little boy she knew when she had been just a little girl herself. He had had a red bicycle and cute ears. She didn’t know why she’d remembered his ears after this long. She’d bought the ribbon with her pocket money to match his bike.
She would sit on the back of his little-boy bicycle and they would ride together along the oak-lined streets between school and her house. He would drop her off a block away from home and kiss her very quickly on the cheek.
It didn’t mean anything. They were far too young to expect something deeper from their simple, innocent friendship.
“Don’t you like the name?” Peter said, kicking the sand around the castle’s edge.
“It’s a very good name,” she said. “Shall we go back now?”
He pouted. “I haven’t collected shells yet.”
“Well, off you go then,” she said. “I’ll sit here and wait for you.”
She remembered the day—a Sunday afternoon just like this one. She’d told her mother she was going down the street to visit her aunt but she was going for a ride with William. It had rained that morning and leaves had blown onto the street. William was showing off, just a little, to impress her with how fast he could peddle. His front wheel slipped and they fell—right into the path of an oncoming car.
She shuddered with the memory of the impact.
The squeal she heard was not that of the tires, but of Peter—the little boy her adult self was now in charge of protecting.
She jumped to her feet. “What is it?”
“There’s a creature inside this one,” he cried, pointing at a shell as he backed away from it, his little feet making indents on the dark sand.
“Then we should leave him alone,” she said, walking over to take a look. “That’s his house. We shouldn’t take away his house, should we?”
Peter shook his head, his soft blond hair now mussed from having touched it with a sandy hand at some point. “Were all these shells houses?” He showed her the collection he had gathered in a small pile nearby.
“Once they were. They’re not now so you can take them home with you, if you want.”
“I like this one the best,” he said, pointing to an orange shell sitting atop the pile in pride of place.
“Shall we take it home and show your mummy?”
He nodded.
They stuffed the shells, along with some unwanted sand, into their pockets.
Walking back across the dry sand proved harder now they were going home. Peter’s tired little legs wanted to be carried but she couldn’t oblige—her hip and back weren’t up to carrying children.
Her young bones had healed as best they could from the impact of the car on that autumn day, but the trauma remained in her body as well as her mind.
Worse was the trauma William suffered.
He escaped the accident physically unscathed—thrown clear of the car—but the burden of guilt hung heavy on one so young.
While most people felt it was William’s youthful recklessness that caused the accident, her mother wailed about how she could not protect her little girl if she kept secrets and told lies. No doubt the consequences were caused by Helen’s untruthfulness, on a Sunday of all days.
It was the last secret she ever kept from her mother—from any mother.
Peter’s little blond head was drooping by the time they reached the front gate of his home.
“Did you have a good time,” said his mother, Grace, when she opened the dark red door to her perfect little home.
“Yes,” he said as he took each of his shoes off, raining sand onto the white porch step. “But Aunty Helen wouldn’t take me to the circus.”
He pouted.
His mother smiled. The same smile Helen must have smiled in her youth. They were sisters after all. Though Grace was younger, and their mother was wiser by that time. Grace copped the over-protectiveness of a mother sworn never to let a child out of her sight. Which gave her a blessed childhood and rebellious teenage years that Helen never dared have.
“Thank you, Helen,” Grace said, reaching forward to give her older sister a hug. “You’re a gem.”
“It wasn’t a problem,” Helen said, touching the boy’s soft head as he dusted his little feet off. If only such innocence could be preserved.
“Perhaps Aunty Helen could take you to the circus next week,” said Grace. “What do you say?”
Peter’s face brightened. “Yes!”
Helen walked slowly home, happy to be relieved of her charge.
And happy to have spent another Sunday with a small child.
It was her penance after all.
To guard Sunday afternoons.
So no child in her charge would ever experience the shock and pain she and her family had endured.
And perhaps she could teach them in the process how to be guardian of their own lives and experiences for every Sunday after.
“The Guardian of Sunday Afternoons” is available for the month of April 2025 on this site. The ebook is also available on all retail stores. You can also read this story in the collection Baverstock’s Allsorts Volume 1.
“The Guardian of Sunday Afternoons”
Copyright © 2018 by Jessica Baverstock
First published Baverstock’s Allsorts Volume 1, 2014
Cover and Layout copyright © 2018 by Jessica Baverstock
Cover design by Jessica Baverstock
Cover art copyright © ARIMAG/Shutterstock
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.