We are happy to share yet another submission from our 2025 WGI Invite to Write Challenge! 

Last summer, we asked our talented cohorts to create a piece on this prompt: Write a story where the end is also the beginning.

Next up, we are sharing Joe Cassels’ piece entitled, “End As the Beginning.” Stay tuned, as we will continue posting the submissions throughout the winter!

End As The Beginning

Everywhere in life an end usually means another beginning. Even death means new beginnings for those left behind. I’m drawn to the end of the old barn.

Our house was big and a couple of hundred years old. When Mum and Dad moved in, they thought it was a palace. My older brother had lived with them in their flat in Ealing, London, but this was their first actual house, and it was a remarkable place, with a decent sized garden, which included a huge old hay barn. The barn was pretty rickety and full of spiders. I remember us exploring it, under supervision, when I was little and the spiders were huge, gangly and, in my memory at least, orange. The closest thing I can think that I was seeing must have been harvest spiders, but they’re not orange, and, now I’m somewhat bigger, they aren’t so large.

Anyway, Dad decided to demolish the old barn. Perhaps it was derelict or an eyesore, or simply not in the place that they needed for a garage. I remember being old enough to help with moving some stuff, things like bricks or pantiles and stacking them, but I can’t have been all that old and I can’t imagine that I was all that much help, but I remember being told that I had to do it. Perhaps Dad was trying to keep us occupied while he did the important stuff.

Like most buildings, the barn had four walls. I don’t remember the roof coming down or the first three of the walls being dismantled, but I do remember the fourth and last wall coming down. That’s because it collapsed on top of Dad.

Mum and Tom, and I guess that my younger brother Jake was around by then, although it doesn’t quite track with me, as I’m sure the barn came down before he was born. He was probably a baby at this time. Anyway, the rest of the family apart from Dad and me had gone next door for some reason. I was on the swing that hung from the oak tree behind our house. Dad came up to me and pointed to the barn, or rather the last remaining wall of it. He was wearing shorts and no shirt and had been working hard on it.

“The barn’s nearly completely down now, Joe,” he said to me. I looked and, yes , there was a big space where the barn had been. One wall still stood, facing the lane, with a window at the top, that would have let a small amount of light into the barn, had it still have been standing. There was a huge supporting strut that held the wall in place, like a hypotenuse in one of Pythagoras’ triangles, that I’d yet to meet in school maths, and probably wouldn’t for several years to come. I was suitably impressed with the progress Dad had made, so he returned to work on the demolition, while I continued the important work of swinging forwards and backwards.

It’s not always easy to pinpoint the passage of time in memories. I know that I hadn’t finished swinging when I heard the scream. It wasn’t so much of a scream really, but more a gargling sound. I’d heard Dad make it once before when he’d slipped and fallen in the shower one morning and I’d had to get Mum up to go and help him. This time I hadn’t quite worked out what was going on when Mum came running over from next door. When I looked at the barn, the final wall was lying down and there was no sight of Dad.

“Oh my god, he’s under there!” Mum shouted. We couldn’t get to Dad from the garden, so we had to walk around in the lane to get to the other side of the barn. He was trapped under the wall and he couldn’t be seen at all, but I think Mum must have been able to talk to him. She immediately gave Tom, and me jobs. I suspect that this was to get us out of the way.

“Tom, go to the house and phone an ambulance, Joe, go out front and stop a car,” she cried. We went to our designated tasks.

I remember standing at the front of our house. It stood in front of a T junction in a through road on the way towards Bradwell and the nuclear power plant. There was a steady stream of traffic passing.
“Help!” I shouted, as loudly as I could. The cars continued to drive by. “Help! Help!” I continued to shout, unable to make anyone hear or, seemingly, to care. I kept on shouting as car after car passed. Vans and lorries went by, not paying any attention to the little boy crying and shouting for help. I don’t know how long I was there for. Time does funny things during emergencies. It seemed like an age passed as I shouted at the traffic and watched it going by. Why was nobody paying any attention.

“We’re coming, darling, we’re coming!” I suddenly heard a woman’s voice calling. One of the cars that had passed, had pulled up a little way down the road. The woman was running towards me, followed by a man. Just as I’d found it unbelievable that no one was stopping, it suddenly seemed unbelievable that somebody had stopped.

“What’s happening?” the lady asked me. I remember that she had a summer dress on and had dark hair.

“My dad’s trapped under the barn,” I explained.

“Show us,” she told me. I led them both down the lane and to the barn.

The man spoke to Mum and he managed to wedge the wall up a little so that Dad was able to breathe more easily. Tom had managed to get through to the Ambulance service and got them to believe what he was telling them. They arrived shortly afterwards and, together with the man from the car, they managed to lift the wall enough to wriggle Dad free. They examined him. He was cut and bruised, but essentially unharmed. I don’t remember him going to hospital, but I do remember that he had a shower, which must have been very painful, but he’d been covered in plaster dust. I also remember that his face was cut enough for him to be unable to shave for some time and strange, ginger hairs sprouted from his chin in the following days.

The day after the barn fell, Dad bought Tom and me a box of Matchmakers chocolates, which were like little sticks of chocolate flavoured orange for me and mint for Tom. “Thank you for what you did for me,” he said.

It had been the end of the barn, but it was also the beginning of me finding out that Dad wasn’t invincible.