Mortars and mortality

My mother, a long time ago, gave me a Japanese lacquer box to keep my treasures in, and it has been sitting, with its prim and proper Japanese ladies on my dressing table all these years. In it there is a fragment from a mortar, about half an inch thick and two inches long. I dug it out from the wooden front door of my childhood's house, before its demolition as a sacrifice to progress and practicalities.

It was a dark afternoon, sometime in December 1944, when Greece was balancing on the edge between the west and the east: a communist revolution starting from Athens and spreading to all of Greece came on the heels of the departing German occupying army, and Athens was still precarious. The mortar was aimed from the Hymetus mountain where the insurgents were entrenched, to the orphanage of "St Saviour" ( Agios Sostis) two miles further down from our house, where the king's army was.

My mother was on the roof terace hanging up the clothes. My father was in his armchair reading a newspaper , I was next to him playing with a doll which my uncle had liberated from a Rimini shop during the fall of the fascists.(My uncle came from Rimini driving an army truck full of loot, but that is another story). This gurgling throttling sound went over us, and then there was a huge explosion. I found myself wedged under the armchair, in my terror. My mother came down white as the proverbial sheet. The mortar had almost singed her hair before exploding in the garden of the opposite house. The only damage was shrapnel embedded all over the front of our house and the windowless sidewall of the house across.

Were the aim a fraction of a millimeter lower, I would probably not be here writing this, or playing with my mortar fragment.