Every day after school my twin brother and I played ‘We’re in the army now!’ Dad was always at work and Mum was in the kitchen cooking our evening meal. We shut the living room door to make an obstacle course out of furniture.

It wasn’t done for girls to play with boys and vice versa in school, so this was our chance to let loose and be ourselves. We pushed over the big sofa, turned Papa’s office chair sideways, and placed a row of cushions from the smaller sofas along the carpet as stepping-stones across an imaginary crocodile-filled pool.

‘Raaa!’ my brother would roar as he jumped.‘Hai-ya!’ I would yell mid-tumble.Our living room was small, so our make-shift obstacle course became a twenty-circuit situation. We’d pause to catch our breath at the half-way mark, sipping from tall glasses of Ribena from the kitchen, before racing about again. There was no winner or loser in our game. The aim was to expel the pent-up energy of our day at school, to play until we were exhausted, to jump and tumble and cheer and work up an appetite before Dad came home and Mum called us to eat.As the weeks wore on, however, I noticed my twin brother’s attention begin to waiver. His best friend from school had lent him his Nintendo games console to play with and suddenly my brother became addicted to Sonic the Hedgehog, the blue icon making him forget he was in the army with me.‘I know!’ I said in a desperate attempt to recapture his attention. ‘Let’s extend the circuit. It’s simple really. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.’‘How?’ he asked.I pointed towards the living room window.‘We jump out of that, run around the front of the drive, go through the front door and back into the living room.’‘We can’t jump out of the window!’‘Of course, we can!’ I told him. ‘We’re soldiers. Besides, it’s on the ground floor.’My brother’s curiosity made him drop his computer game.‘Oh, we’re in the army now!’ we said, before high-fiving and racing about again.It was just before the summer holidays that it happened. I was mid-way through a superhero-like leap out of the living room window when my arm felt alive with fire. I had scraped my skin on the outside redbrick of our home. I stopped, my arm stinging with pain.

‘Quick!’ I told my brother when he saw the blood. ‘Get some toilet roll. We’ll wrap around my arm, and I’ll hide it under my sleeve.’

‘Shouldn’t we tell Mum?’ he asked.

‘Are you kidding?’ I told him. ‘Do you think we’re allowed to jump out of windows?’

Just then, Papa returned from work, handsome in his suit and tie.‘What are you rascals doing outside?’ he asked with smile.‘We were just playing,’ my brother blinked up at him, big-eyed and doleful.‘Well come inside,’ Papa told us, kissing us both. ‘Time to eat.’At the dinner table Mum ladled aloo sabji onto our plates followed by hot puris and mango pulp, my favourite.‘Aren’t you eating?’ Mum asked me. ‘Is that blood on your sleeve?’Papa rushed me to A&E and it was back at home, with my arm newly bandaged, that my parents sat me and my brother down to explain – very seriously - why we must never attempt such dangerous feats in the living room.‘We were playing soldiers,’ I offered through my sobs.Beyond our house, an ice cream van tinkled into presence.‘Do soldiers eat ice cream?’ Papa asked.

Mine and my brother’s faces lit up.

‘Come on,’ he told us. ‘First one to the van wins!’