Stuntman

Public information films were all the rage during my formative years. Switch on the TV and between Robin Hood and Tomorrow People you could be told not to throw Frisbees at electricity pylons, lock yourself in the fridge, hurl yourself into unknown waters or muck about with farm machinery if you found yourself out in the countryside. Of course, having a best friend, Alastair who happened to live on a farm meant that most of us knew these warnings were for the townie kids who might see the countryside once in a lifetime. We already knew that you stayed away from pointy things, did not climb inside the threshing machine and did not press the big button marked ‘Do NOT press this big button if your friend has crawled inside the threshing machine (unless you want to turn them into four stone of mince)’. Oh and if these failed there was always Alastair’s dad who gave us dire warnings of what to expect if any of us did muck about with the machinery…he would most likely kill us himself and that included the one who had been minced, bailed, threshed or trampled by annoyed sheep as well. In fact, not only would he kill them but would drag their remains back home for their parents to kill as well.

Thus it was with such a warning to stay away from the unlocked shed full of agricultural chemicals that nowadays would have a trainee suicide bomber salivating at the thought and an even bigger warning to stay away from the open cesspit that had been dug out and was waiting to be filled in that we found ourselves left alone with our bicycles in the farmyard one winter morning during the school holidays.

So, what were we to do? It was too cold to go up to the old pigsty that we used as a den and Paul had to be home by lunchtime as his grandmother was coming to visit so cycling to town was out as well. We were still trying to decide when Alastair who had been kicking stones into the old cesspit suddenly announced “I bet I could jump that on my bike!” Naturally we tried to dissuade him with that age old method used by nine year olds of “Go on then!”, “Bet you can’t!”, “Give you this bag of Blackjacks if you do!”

We had of course completely forgotten the dire warnings that his dad had given us less than half an hour earlier and having banished it from our thoughts, scouted around for something to make a ramp for Alastair to make his daredevil attempt. An old plank was dragged out of one of the outbuildings and set up against a pile of earth to one side of the excavation. Alastair cycled to the end of the yard and as we watched, pedalled as fast as he could. He hit the ramp perfectly, sailed into the air and…

…performed a perfect landing on the other side earning himself a chorus of “You jammy sod!” and a crumpled bag of sweets that had seen better days. Then for the next fifteen minutes or so the rest of emulated his feat and we all cleared the pit every time until Paul announced “I’m going to try it from the other way” and of course we tried our utmost to put him off doing so with “Bet you can’t!”, “Give you the sweets if you do!” etc etc.

So, the plank was moved to another pile of earth, this time at the end of the cesspit and Paul cycled to the top of the yard and as Alastair before him, pedalled furiously down towards the pit. He hit the plank and sailed across the 8’ gap to perform a perfect landing on the other side, not even suffering testicular trauma from the gear stick on his Raleigh Chopper which was a shame as that was what we had wanted to see. He was however, travelling quite fast having gained a fair speed from distance he had travelled in his run up and the slight slope of the yard. Also, it being winter and Alastairs’s dad having hosed the yard after bringing the cows in for milking in the early hours of the morning meant there was a large patch of ice and Paul hit it, skidding and losing control of his bicycle.

We could only watch in stunned silence as he slid towards the wall of the milking shed and the by product of a largish herd of cows that lay waiting for Alastair’s dad to return with the tractor to remove it sometime after lunch. Boy and bicycle met manure pile and shed with a sickening SQUELCH…THUD…ARGH! Long seconds passed as we stared open mouthed as Paul picked himself up and tottered towards us resembling some nightmare creature from the bog and as usual, being the lovely, caring children we were, ran away screaming “Argh! Crapmonster!”

However, that did not last for long as we realised we had to get away before Alastairs dad returned and discovered that we had disobeyed him. Not that the evidence of a bent bike in the middle of a pile of cow dung wasn’t enough to convict us in our absence. Ignoring that fact completely we cycled off rather hurriedly, propelling Paul ahead of us with a long stick from the hedgerow outside the farm gate until we reached his house…just as his grandmother arrived in a taxi to be presented not with the well scrubbed and well behaved young man she expected but by three urchins and a grandson liberally smeared in cow shit. Her face remains imprinted on my memory and the look that Pauls mum gave us indicated we would all soon find ourselves in much deeper shit than Paul had ever been in.

Still, at least we did not go near the unlocked shed full of agricultural chemicals. At least, not that time.

Apologies for lack of updates

Apologies to readers of this blog for the lack of recent posts. Due to illness (my own and other members of the family) and needing time outside of work to deal with this I have not been able to write as much as I would like. However, there are more tales yet to come so keep checking as I promise there will be an update at some point.

A sense of chemistry

It may have been years of sniffing fumes that the not quite as efficient as they could be fume cupboards at our school had allowed to escape. It could just have been a natural propensity towards insanity but most of our chemistry masters showed a shocking tendency to lean in the direction of the more mentalist end of the spectrum.

Mr Roberts was incredibly trusting to the point of naivety and would leave entire classes to their own devices for periods at a time, returning only at the sound of fire alarms or clouds of poisonous gases rolling down the corridor. Mr Peters bordered on the psychotic and his accuracy with a board rubber was legendary as many of us discovered with a chalky smack to the back of the head and Mr Burton was well, in a league of his own. Mr Burton was definitely not all there but Mr Burton liked practical demonstrations. He liked them a lot and did not take much note of health and safety, not that there was much of that back in 1983 and providing he did not burn the school down or lose too many pupils his little ‘accidents’ were on the whole overlooked.

His favourite demonstration was of distillation. He would mix up some copper sulphate, a pleasantly poisonous substance, in water, attach it to a set of distillation apparatus, distil the water off and drink it to show that pure water was produced from the toxic solution. He would do this every year without fail as the fourth lesson for the first years in the lab next door to the sixth form library.

Now, as it happened a number of us sixth formers were in the sixth form library that fateful afternoon. We were supposed to be studying. In fact most us were lounging around in a state of fitful torpor following a lunchtime not at all underage drinking session at the local pub whose landlord had appalling eyesight and who apparently could not tell a sixteen year old from a sixty year old. The lab and the library had a connecting door and it was Pete, spying through the keyhole that realised that Mr Burton was going to carry out his famous demonstration. It was also Pete who suggested pulling a practical joke and it was Pete who had the means to do so in his pocket.

Pete was our resident delinquent and punk rocker. He spent most of his out of school hours hanging around the local park with the older punks drinking whatever concoctions they had managed to steal from the local supermarket or in the case of Pete, his dads cocktail bar. Nowadays hanging around in parks drinking cider is the preserve of the local chavs, back then it was the preserve of middle class schoolboys with safety pins in their blazer as a sign of rebellion. As a result of this Pete habitually carried a half bottle of vodka around with him in his rucksack, something that would lead to him being carried out of the boys toilets one lunchtime during the A-Level exams, half conscious and mumbling something about how he fancied Mrs O’Hara, the head of biology and a lady who made Mrs Thatcher look sweet and cuddly.

Anyhow, a plan was swiftly hatched and put into action. Andy was sent to knock on the door of the lab and when Mr Burton answered, informed him that the headmaster wished to see him rather urgently. As Mr Burton left Pete was through the connecting door like a shot and began phase two of the plan. The distilled water in a lab beaker at the end of the apparatus was quickly poured down the sink and replaced with a generous helping of vodka whilst the rest of us threatened the class of new first years with the direst of punishments if they breathed a word when Mr Burton returned. The whole operation took less than two minutes and we were all back in the library before Mr Burton wandered back looking slightly more confused than he normally did.

Unaware that he had an extra audience peering through the keyhole and any chinks in the painted glass of the door he launched into his spiel, something about the “Distillate being pure water and perfectly safe to drink as the toxic impurities had been left at the other end of the apparatus”. With this he raised the beaker and took a huge swig…coughed…gagged…gasped…swore…gasped a bit more and staggered towards the door. We all looked at each other as the sounds of him lurching across the corridor were followed by the sounds of someone being violently ill in the staff toilets.

A couple of days later in the morning assembly the headmaster reported that Mr Burton was expected to make a full recovery after a lab experiment had gone tragically wrong although he may not return for a while due to the accident exacerbating a few other problems in Mr Burtons private life.

It wasn’t until weeks later we discovered that he was a recovering alcoholic taking some seriously unpleasant drugs that would make him throw up if he so much as looked at a bottle of booze or walked within fifty yards of a pub. We just thought that the far away look was part and parcel of being a chemistry teacher inhaling all those noxious fumes, not that he was a bit partial to a bottle or two of Scotch of an evening to help him forget his days teaching horrible little bastards like us. Perhaps fortunately for us he eventually made a complete recovery but according to younger siblings who attended the school after we left he never performed the copper sulphate trick ever again without taking a good long sniff of what had emerged from the apparatus even if he had been standing watching the process from beginning to end.

Flour Power

‘Home Economics’, two words that struck dread into the hearts of most of the first year boys at my school. Apart from one or two who preferred needlework and making light fluffy sponges and well, they were considered a bit on the strange side anyhow. The rest of us would have much rather been in metal work making the kind of sharp, pointy implement that would give Rambo wet dreams.

It wasn’t that we hated the lesson as such, at the end of it you got to sample the things everyone else had made and on the whole the recorded fatalities from Salmonella and Botulism were in the low double digits. No, it was simply that the double period on a Tuesday morning was stiflingly boring, made even more so by Mrs Cash, our Home Economics tutor being the most safety conscious person in the whole world and not letting us anywhere near anything vaguely sharp as well as insisting we wore the kind of outfits more at home in the chemistry labs where at least there were substances that could bring about horrible and agonising death. In Home Economics the worst that could happen would be a fellow pupil running amok with a potato masher.

Suffice it to say we tried desperately to banish the boredom but all our attempts seemed doomed to failure. The tabletop finger soccer match using dried peas came to an abrupt halt when an over enthusiastic corner kick ricocheted off the blackboard and into the batter mix Mrs Cash was showing us how to make resulting in a ban on dried peas. The Spaghetti catapult incident led to just about everything being banned apart from flour and what harm could flour do?

As it happens, quite a lot in the wrong hands! In the hands of a baker it can be made into succulent, crisp crusted loaves or indulgent cakes. In the hands of a bunch of schoolboys it becomes a near lethal weapon.

It was a dreary November day and we were supposed to be making rock cakes when Mrs Cash was called away to attend an incident in the gym in her other role as stand in school nurse when the real one was incapacitated due to her medicinal brandy habit or on ‘holiday’ due to the same. Now was the time for mischief but what could we do? We had no sharp implements so murder and torture were out of the question. All we had was flour, water, margarine and currants and barring covering the class swot in ‘Stork’ there wasn’t much else we could do. It was Gavin who suggested the ‘pillar of flame’, as he had seen it done by some lads in the council flats where his aunt lived. All we needed was a stairwell, a bag of flour and matches and we had all three. As a precaution, just in case someone got a bit too enthusiastic with the flambé the classroom had a fire exit that led to a concrete stairwell, we had bags of flour and given the smoking habits of half the boys in the school there was no shortage of matches and lighters either.

The method of making the ‘pillar of flame’ was easy, someone, in our case Gavin, stood at the top of the stairs and shook flour down through the stairwell, someone at the bottom, Andy, threw a match into the descending flour and the result was a pleasing pillar of flame. All very spectacular the first two times we did it but we had failed to notice that not all the flour burnt and the air was getting thick with dust. On the third attempt Gavin, perhaps trying to impress may have shaken a bit too much as when the match was hurled the result was not so much ‘pillar of flame’, more ‘wrath of God’. In fact it may be that the whole ten commandments and burning bush thing was less a religious experience than a couple of Israelites arsing about with wheat based products when Moses arrived on Mount Sinai.

Fortunately most of us were shielded by the stairs and only received a superficial scorching but Gavin who had been leaning over the edge of the top banister took the full force of the flaming column that ignited with an audible ‘WHOMPH’ that rattled the door at the base of the stairs. This was followed by noises that could only be described as a strangled “Argh!” and a slightly louder “SHIIIITE!” We raced to the top of the stairs to find Gavin standing in a state of total shock, his face red, missing his eyebrows and with wisps of smoke rising from his hair. Below us Andy was frantically stamping on his white coat that had gone a distinctly sooty colour. Quickly we bundled Gavin back into the classroom and stuck his head under the tap at one of the sinks…just as Mrs Cash arrived back from whatever emergency had occurred in the gym to find us apparently trying to drown one of our number whilst another stood gazing forlornly at a coat that appeared to have been put in the oven at gas mark four.

As she stood staring in disbelief at the now soaking and eyebrow-less Gavin it was possible to see her struggling with how to phrase “What the fucking hell is going on here you little bastards?” in terms that could be delivered to a bunch of 11 and 12 year old children. It was left to Martin, always one to come up with a good answer to say

“It was the oven Miss, the gas must have been on and when he tried to light it there was an explosion. You really ought to get the caretaker to check it out, we might have been killed.”

That it was only the boys that had apparently come to close to death was probably what led to her being less convinced of this than she was that we had been mucking around with the ovens. As a result we got to spend the rest of the lesson copying out recipe books whilst frantically praying that she would have no need to go to the fire exit stairwell which was covered in flour and scorch marks and that we could blame the devastation on the 3rd form who had the lesson after ours.

Atomic Fireball II

You might have thought we had learnt our lesson. Messing around with things that go bang is not a good idea especially when it earns you a walloping from your friends grandfather for half destroying his greenhouse and most of his prize winning vegetables. However, the lesson had obviously not sunk in as a year after doing just that Stuart, Sanjeev and myself were once again dabbling in the dark arts of making things go ‘BOOM!’

My parents and I had moved earlier in the year and were living on the upper floors of my grandparents large Georgian House whilst our new house was being extensively redecorated to remove the kind of wallpaper that even by the middle of the 70s was considered hideous and brown, the like of which can only be seen nowadays in re-runs of ‘The Sweeney’ or ‘Life on Mars’, that the previous owners had so loved. This in turn meant that I was living close to Sanjeev and Stuart, my friends who lived close to my grandparents.

For some reason that summer the craze amongst the local boys was not bubblegum card collecting or something equally safe and not likely to end up in hideous death. It was making bangers from the metal tubes inside pens or small pieces of copper pipe. Naturally being the good, well-behaved lads we were we stayed away from such pursuits and played chess or read encyclopaedias in our spare time. Sorry, that would be a bare-faced lie. We blew stuff up by filling the tubes with scraped matches, crimping the ends and throwing them onto small fires we had built round the back of the derelict church hall just like everybody else.

They made quite impressive bangs and on the whole there were surprisingly few fatalities but then things started to get a bit competitive between us and a couple of the other gangs of neighbourhood kids who also hung round the back of the hall to blow stuff up. In fact it was not so much competitive as an arms race in miniature and we were determined to go nuclear first.

Now getting hold of the Plutonium and other stuff that goes into an atomic bomb was a bit beyond us as ten year olds even if Sanjeevs' dad did work at the local university so we improvised. As it would happen plumbers working on some new houses nearby had left several six inch lengths of one inch copper pipe lying around and these were duly purloined and after using my granddads tools to bend and seal one end, filled with a mixture of gunpowder from the bangers Stuart always seemed to have, all our available supplies of plastic caps, a Vesuvius fountain Sanjeev had saved from the previous years Guy Fawkes party and about three large boxes worth of scraped match heads. In fact, come that Autumn my mother could be constantly heard complaining that all the matches to light the fire seemed to have disappeared from the kitchen cupboard. I of course denied all knowledge. We soon had two ‘bangers’ that were in hindsight, not so much bangers as improvised weapons of mass destruction that nowadays would have the US marines storming our houses under cover of mass airstrikes and an artillery barrage to make sure they did not fall into the wrong hands.

Now, not wanting to seem like right lemons in front of the other kids if our handiwork failed to go boom in a satisfying way we decided that one of them should be sacrificed in a test run much like the Manhattan Project had tested the first atom bomb in the desert. We unfortunately did not have a desert or a test rig. What we did have was the back of Sanjeevs granddads shed and a largish plant pot. Looking back, spending our pocket money on a flight to the Mojave might have been a good idea. We filled the pot with paper, wood and anything else vaguely flammable and added a dash of methylated spirits just to make sure, rested the ‘banger’ with the least amount of our explosive mixture in it across the pot, flung in one of the few matches we had not turned into headless sticks and ran for cover.

We waited and waited a bit longer, none of us were about to go back and then suddenly:

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMM!

The detonation was far louder than any of us had expected and a not insubstantial mushroom cloud of smoke rose behind the shed. “Yes, it had worked, we could go down to the church hall and show the other kids…hang on, why was there still smoke pouring from behind the shed ?”

Did I forget to mention that this was 1976? The summer had been hot and dry, roads had melted, people were frying eggs on the bonnet of their Ford Capri and the vegetation behind the shed was tinder dry. The explosion had shattered the plant pot and scattered flaming debris amongst the weeds and now flames were licking up the side of the shed. In a moment of the kind of blind panic that only ten year old boys who have just committed an act of inadvertent arson can have we ran back into the house desperately searching for something to put the flames out, totally ignoring the fact that right next to the shed was the garden hose. Anyhow, we had all heeded the dire warnings about not wasting water under pain of horrible death and a stern telling off from the government minister for drought.

In full fire fighting mode we pelted back out clutching a soda siphon and a number of bottles of Panda Pop lemonade that anyone who grew up in the 70s will tell you, were pretty useless at quenching thirst let alone fighting fires due to their rather small size. Desperately we squirted and poured only to be surrounded by clouds of steam smelling vaguely of burnt sugar but the blaze continued. It was perhaps lucky that Sanjeevs dad chose that moment to come home and that he had the presence of mind to totally ignore the dire water wasting warnings and get stuck in with the garden hose whilst we stood guiltily back and tried to pretend that we were not really there.

Five minutes later the fire was well and truly out although the end of the shed looked worse for wear and a swathe of the garden was well and truly crisped. Sanjeevs dad, who was one of the politest and well spoken people I had ever encountered stood looking at us as if unable to say what he was really thinking until finally he managed to slowly and with precise pronunciation say

“What is the meaning of this……..bloody outrage?”

It was no use denying it, we were caught red handed, bang to rights and could not even claim it was caused by plummeting space junk as Stuart had a box of matches, albeit mainly headless, in his pocket. The remainder of that summer holiday was spent reading encyclopaedias and playing chess as we were not allowed outside without parental supervision. Oddly enough though, whilst lying in bed one night the air was rent by an almighty bang from a nearby street. Either our remaining ‘banger’ had found its way into enemy hands or one of the other gangs of kids had managed to up the ante a bit. Whatever it was, ten minutes later I heard sirens and could swear I could smell slightly burnt sugar.

Bow Woe

As a child living in the 70s I had rather a lot of weapons. In the days before political correctness if you were a boy you were pretty much likely to have a toy cupboard filled with Action Men, Airfix soldiers, toy cars and an assortment of weapons. I probably had more than my fair share. In fact I could have probably armed a small country had the toy guns I owned been real. Just about every scenario in the games we played was covered. Cowboys: set of cap firing six shooters and a Winchester. Knights: Three swords and a very useful battle axe that came pretty tight if you swung it just right. Foreign Legion: Replica Enfield .303. Soldiers: Couple of Thompsons, a Colt .45 Automatic, an MP40 and if there was a shortage of evil Nazi officers I could even provide a Luger and march around saying “Zo Englander pigdog, you sought you could ezcape! Vell zink again!”, just like they did in the comics. Even if we were playing James Bond I had a Walther PPK as well.

Many of the weapons could as my mother was fond of saying “put someone’s eye out!” Some fired ping pong balls, others plastic pellets and one of the Thompsons and an Airfix FN SLR even fired pretty chunky replica bullets…or bits of sawn down pencil if you really wanted to bring realistic pain and suffering to the games of war.

However, the sight of a gang of lads and in some cases girls as well, charging round the streets, fields or through gardens caused no reaction whatsoever. We could run about playing soldiers, toting in some cases quite realistic weaponry without an eyebrow being raised or a couple of vanloads of firearms officers arriving to arrest us, fingerprint us and deport us to Guantanamo Bay. A ten year old with a ‘Tommy gun’ was a fairly common sight and certainly did not mean that a drive by shooting was about to go down or a drug deal done behind the allotment sheds. In fact the only interaction with the police was if the local bobby happened to be passing and asked us to keep the noise down a bit if we got a little too boisterous in our machine gun and grenade imitations or as happened on one occasion he saw my replica FN and commented that he had used one just like it when he was in the army.

The one thing I did not have was a bow and arrow. At least not until my grandmother decided to bring one back from a holiday jaunt during the summer of 1973 to complement the ‘Red Indian’ outfit with it’s tomahawk and rubber scalping knife she had bought the previous Christmas. Naturally the first thing my mother said on seeing it and it’s sucker tipped arrows was “Be careful, you could have someone’s eye out with that!”

So, the first thing I did was head out into the garden and find my friend Ross who was playing out in his garden that backed onto ours. Now, in our garden there grew a plant that when it died back left tough, woody stalks. These stalks made perfect arrows and it was not long before they were utilised as such, being fired around with not much care as to what they hit. It was not long either before mum, seeing that we were stalking each other through the shrubbery with arrows now tipped with sharp bits of slate from an old tile, came rushing out and confiscated our lethal weapons. However, on seeing our glum faces she relented and said we could have the bow back as long as we used it properly and in a safe manner. Properly and safe meant indoors with the plastic sheet target it had come with stuck to the back of the kitchen door.

The bow was quite powerful, probably in order to make the sucker tipped arrows stick to the target and we soon found that if you pulled it to full stretch a really satisfying, door rattling thud was the result and it was all quite safe. Or would have been if dad had not been in the habit of using the gate at the end of the garden to come via when he returned from work instead of having to walk an extra hundred or so yards around the end of the houses up to the main road and use the front door.

I had just stretched the bow to it’s fullest extent and let fly with the arrow from a kneeling position like I had seen in a recent swashbuckling Robin Hood film shown one Sunday afternoon when the kitchen door swung open and dad, half reading the evening paper wandered into sight only to take an incredibly well aimed arrow travelling at some speed in the groin. Any pain might have ended there had our cat, Sally not also wandered in to the kitchen at that point only to have dad stagger backwards and stand on her tail as she stopped to stuff her face with cat food on the way to her favourite spot on the back of the sofa.

Sally was quite a calm, placid cat but being trodden on unleashed the psycho-kitty within and from outside the door we watched as she raced around the kitchen in a clawing, biting, spitting fury as dad clutched his groin with one hand and tried to fend the demon possessed feline off with the other. It was a little like watching a live action version of Tom and Jerry as Sally hurtled around knocking cooking implements, spice jars, crockery and condiments flying as dad tried to batter her away with the newspaper. It lasted perhaps ten seconds at most before she fled through the cat flap and streaked up the garden leaving dad standing in a kitchen that appeared to have been the scene of a small war.

It was at that moment that mum chose to arrive home having gone to visit the corner shop at the end of the road only to find her kitchen a scene of total devastation, apparently caused by dad having gone utterly mental with a folded newspaper. Ross and I meanwhile decided to beat a tactical retreat and headed over to the fields where some more of our friends were playing ‘Knights of the Round Table’. A much safer game…at least until we turned up with my bow and a handful of plant stalks and suggested it became Robin Hood.

The perils of portaloos

It was a moment of teenage rebellion that caused me to become an archaeologist. Dad had wanted me to join his old RAF squadron so that I could travel overseas and, as the old slogan went, “meet new and exotic people, then drop bombs on them” but I had other ideas. Despite my military obsessed childhood I was not quite ready to hurtle round the skies like Tom Cruise with a bloody silly nickname like ‘Mongoose’ or ‘Chinchilla’. It was possibly down to a bit of an incident with a training aircraft in my cadet days and the probability that the RAF would not let me anywhere near anything expensive ever again that did it. Thus it was to my dads eternal disgust that I became an archaeologist or as he put it “a bloody gypsy”.

Now those of you that have watched ‘Time Team’ will know all about archaeology or at least the sanitised version of it. Archaeology is all about digging holes in the most disgusting conditions known to man. Invariably it is cold and wet, warm and wet or if you are really lucky the hottest summer in living memory where you can fry eggs on the environmental team and people are dying of sunstroke just by thinking of being outdoors. The ground is either so hard you need a drill to get through it, or as one former colleague had experienced, dynamite or is so wet entire surveying teams have vanished into the quagmire never to be seen again. No excavation can call itself a success unless at least three of the excavators have been lost to drowning or heat stroke. Most digs were out in the arse end of nowhere although there was usually a pub nearby, odd that, and free time was either spent in tents that were trying to launch themselves skyward in a force 8 gale or getting steadily rat-arsed in the pub on the pokiest real ale you could find. If you were lucky the group you were working for had a ‘diggers hostel’, which is a bit like a student hall but with a constant aroma of week old cabbage, last nights curry, stale farts and damp dungeons and dragons player. Far too many archaeologists either played D&D or were involved in live action role playing or historical battle re-enactment societies so there was also a high risk of death by tripping over someone’s battle axe or flintlock when heading to the toilet to get rid of the copious amounts of real ale everyone consumed to help aid in forgetting the positively grim conditions we lived in. Then there were the Portaloos…

Even out in the middle of nowhere we had to have a Portaloo, probably to stop bearded, real ale drinking wannabe orc slayers peeing in the bushes or vanishing into copses with a wad of leaves and scaring the local wildlife. However, without fail the Portaloos were absolutely foul. Those of you reading this that have ever been to a festival should imagine the worst toilets there, multiply it by ten then plonk the whole lot in the middle of the Somme circa 1916 on a wet Sunday and you probably wouldn’t be close even then. They went far beyond the word ‘minging’ and well into the territory of banned by several biological warfare treaties. That however did not stop Rick our finds supervisor from disappearing into one for several hours at a time with a copy of the Guardian that cunningly concealed a gentlemen’s periodical of the kind where young ladies were displayed artistically and requests were made of gentlemen readers to provide photographic illustrations of their nearest and dearest. Okay, why beat about the bush, it was a copy of ‘Razzle’ or some similar top shelf fare and Rick would vanish for several hours to read the paper and have what was known as a “leisurely J. Arthur” over Deirdre (44-28-32) from Bolton.

We had been excavating one particular site for several weeks. It lay at the top of a hill and as we expanded ever outward in our search for bits of grubby pottery and stains on the ground that might indicate an iron age settlement the Portaloos were steadily pushed back towards the edge of the site until they were precariously close to the steep side of the hill. That however, did not bother us, they were perfectly safe, after all, our resident ‘engineer’ John had shored them up with some old railway sleepers from a nearby farm and a bit of drystone walling. As long as you did not practice tap dancing in one then you were perfectly safe and to be honest there were not a lot of tap dancers on site and nor could you swing a broadsword in one either. Thus, most of us were pretty safe.

Perhaps the couple of days of almost continuous rain played its part but that will never be known, what is known is that Rick would probably not have visited the Portaloos, Guardian tucked under his arm had he known what was about to happen.

It was a site joke that if you saw a gently swaying Portaloo you knew that Rick was in residence and this morning was no different. About half an hour after he had vanished, just enough time to scan through the paper the toilet began to shake ever so slightly, then over the course of the next half hour it began to wobble a bit more and a bit more as the delights of Deirdre and her fellow readers wives had an effect. Suddenly the stones and railway sleepers began to shift. A few of us spotted it and were dashing to warn Rick when the Portaloo slowly toppled backwards as the ‘engineering’ supporting it gave way. From within came a strangled howl as the whole lot vanished from view over the edge of the hill. As we reached the edge of the hill we were rewarded with the sight of the runaway toilet crashing into a bramble patch and coming to rest against the fence that ran along the base of the hill. About five seconds after it did, the door flew open and with a blood curdling “AAARRGGH!” Rick popped up like a demented Jack in the box, or would have if Jack in the boxes popped up with their jeans and underpants round their ankles, a rapidly fading erection and were covered in the assorted waste products donated by forty or so real ale swilling, bearded, battle re-enacting archaeologists who had not crapped in a hedgerow for weeks.

Naturally, being the kind concerned lot we were we did not stand at the top of the hill almost bent double with laughter at the sight of Rick, covered in shit, ‘Mr Floppy’ out for all to see standing in a crashed Portaloo in the middle of a bramble patch with a look of mortal terror on his face and clutching a soggy, toilet roll festooned copy of ‘Fiesta’. Of course we did not, we were far too mature to do such a thing. Well, maybe we laughed just a bit and one of our number having an asthma attack because she was laughing so much was nothing to do with it. Honestly!

Funnily enough after that the Portaloos were kept well away from the edge of the site and Rick, well, let’s just say he did not spend half as much time in them, perhaps just enough time to read the paper without the distractions of the ample charms of Deirdre causing him any further woe.