Atomic Fireball

Back in the days before games consoles and PCs the closest you got to the Burnout or Need For Speed series involved Dinky or Matchbox cars and a lot of imagination. If you were really, really lucky your dad might have convinced your mum that a Scalextric or TCR set was what you wanted for Christmas so he could play too. An FPS usually involved running round a local bombsite, scrubland, park or the local churchyard firing at your mates with an assortment of cap guns and as for huge explosions, you only got those in war films…unless you were a ten year old with an unhealthy obsession in militaria and making things go ‘BOOM’. As mentioned before on here, my friend Dave and I both had that particular unhealthy obsession. I’m not sure what his excuse was but I still blame my granddad.

One bonfire night in the mid 70s Dave’s wheeler-dealer of a dad got hold of a quantity of Chinese fireworks from one of his contacts. In those days Chinese fireworks were a bit of a novelty sold in a rare few shops. Most of us made do with boxes of Astra, Brocks or Standard, nothing as exotic as these and tame stuff unless you count the time one nearly set fire to the conservatory. Usually it was only the rich kids down the road whose parents could afford them that got them on Bonfire Night, not that we did not reap the benefits too as we could see their display by standing on the garden wall and peering over the fence.

Unfortunately the provenance of these particular oriental fireworks could not quite be ascertained and to say that they were a little on the duff side would have been an understatement. About 70% of them failed to bang and sparkle as sensible fireworks are supposed to. These were thrown to one side and forgotten about as us kids stuffed our faces with the party food on offer.

However, come the following day Dave and I were poking through the detritus of the previous night as bored kids are wont to do when we discovered the huge pile of dud fireworks that had been thrown aside. Back then bonfire nights were, on the whole not conducted in the pouring rain as global warming had not yet been invented so the explosive contents of the brightly coloured tubes was quite dry albeit slightly chilled. It appeared that the cause of non-detonation was quite simply rubbish blue touch paper that had failed to convey the fire to the powder. Of course, the next thought was obvious, “Why not make our own firework?”

So we did.

Nearby was a row of local shops, this being the days when such things existed and they had not all been turned into trendy wine bars and coffee shops. One of them was a haberdashers shop selling everything from buttons to huge rolls of material. A swift raid on the bins at the back procured us an empty cardboard tube left over from a roll of material and in the case of Dave, a pair of ripped jeans as we scrambled back over the wall. Back at his dads shed we bunged one end up with a cardboard disk and best part of a roll of masking tape, filled the tube with the gunpowder mix from all the other fireworks with no thought of what they had originally been supposed to do, rockets, fountains, Roman candles, they all went into the mix. The original fireworks were pretty chunky affairs and nowadays would probably have large warnings on them about retreating at least fifty metres if not several streets away or even the next county just to be really safe so there was a lot of gunpowder and ‘stuff’ (‘stuff’ being a technical term known only to ten year old boys and used to describe most chemical compounds and the green slime found in water butts). Once we had filled the tube up with the gunpowder mix and given it a bit of a tamp down we then trimmed the tube down, covered the other end with a circle of cardboard and a lot more masking tape and added a bit of blue touch paper adulterated with some scraped matches and a bit of leftover gunpowder.

The ‘Atomic Fireball’ as it was grandly named was ready. Now we had to find somewhere to let it off in peace and quiet. It was decided that the churchyard was the ideal place as we could hide behind the buttresses whilst setting it up. It was a quiet area and passing cars were a rarity back in those days.

Dave managed to steal some matches from the kitchen whilst I distracted his mum and we set off. A few minutes later we were in position and ready for go. After a bit of “You do it!”, “No! You do it!” the blue touch paper was lit and we retreated to a safe distance, about fifteen feet, expecting a few pops and a lot of sparks. We were not ready for the 10 foot high jet of flame and sparks accompanied by vast amounts of smoke that erupted from it.

Standing amidst swirling smoke reminiscent of London pea soupers of the 1950s our trousers went a little bit brown as the flame scorched a black mark up the side of the church. It looked like Beelzebub himself had farted up the side of the building. The look that passed between us said it all, “Oh…arse!”

If this obvious affront to God, that was bound to get us excommunicated from Sunday school should the vicar discover the culprits was not bad enough, at that moment the local policeman rounded the corner by the far end of the church. Now, this being a gentler time before international terrorism, crack cocaine and body armour we might have expected a Dixon of Dock Green style “Ello! Ello! What’s going on here then lads?” or some such gentle enquiry to ascertain the nature of our crime. Instead we got a slightly more earthy yell of

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

A yell that was a touch more ‘Sweeney’ than ‘Dixon’ and one that hinted at dire punishments to come. At this point our trousers went several shades browner than they had been before and we decided that discretion was the better part of valour. We ran, scaling the seven foot high spiked railings that surrounded the churchyard in seconds before fleeing for our lives. The rest of the day was spent hiding in an empty garage on a local estate, convinced that it was next stop Borstal and we would never be able to bend down in the showers again.

Flight of the Rupert

D-Day, 6th of June 1944. In the hours preceding the seaborne landings thousands of allied paratroops dropped over Normandy to secure bridges, roads and harass the enemy. With them were dropped thousands of dummies known as ‘Ruperts’. These dummies, rigged with explosives to simulate gunfire were to confuse the enemy and make it appear that more paratroops were landing than there were.

Sanjeev, Stuart and I knew all this because we had watched ‘The Longest Day’. Sanjeev lived a few doors down from my grandparents in a similarly large five storey Georgian house along with his parents, grandfather and several brothers and sisters. His father was a lecturer at the local university, his mother a fashion designer like my own mother and his granddad had served with colonial forces in the far east and liked telling stories of how he faced the might of the Japanese army armed only with a Lee Enfield, a bayonet and his wits. It was only natural then that when I visited my grandparents that Sanjeev was one of the other kids I spent time with along with Stuart who lived over the back wall.

It was the tail end of the long summer holidays. In a few days I would be going home but we were hanging around bored. It was too warm to kick a ball around down on the green and there were not enough of us for a decent game of soldiers so we were wondering what to do. Somehow we started discussing the film ‘The Longest Day’ that had been shown on TV a few days earlier and in particular the explosive parachutists that had been dropped to sow confusion amongst the enemy. Wouldn’t it be great if we could make one of those? As usual at this point one or more of us should have said “Don’t be stupid!” and smacked the person suggesting it around the head until they suggested something a bit safer but being nine year old boys we all went “Yeah!”.

Stuart had a whole tin filled with bangers brought back from a holiday in France. In the 70s if you were a kid and you went to France you brought back as many as you could possibly conceal in your parents and siblings luggage without arousing the suspicions of the Customs people. We could use those to simulate the gunfire bit but what about the dummy. None of us wanted to sacrifice our ‘Action Men’ and anyhow I had only brought three uniforms with mine, none of which were suitable for falling from the sky. It was Sanjeev who came up with the second not so bright idea of the day. His mum had an old shop dummy up in the attic she had once used to display clothes she had designed. We could use that, attach a sheet to it and drop it from the attic window that was five storeys up. Brilliant! His parents were out and only his granddad was around and he was most likely to be asleep.

So it was that the three of us, Stuart clutching his biscuit tin full of bangers that he had nipped home to collect sneaked up into the attic. We were not really allowed to be there, his dad used to tell us off frequently but it was one of our favourite places. By climbing out of the window we could gain access to an area of flat roof between the houses from which we could snipe at passers by in the street with our spud guns and water pistols.

The dummy Sanjeev had mentioned was easily located as was a large dust sheet covering an old trunk which on exploration contained a whole load of Sanjeevs’ granddads old belongings including of all things a tin helmet. “Cool!” we all exclaimed, we could tie it to the dummy for added realism. Whilst Sanjeev and Stuart hung several garlands of bangers around the dummy which had a few more bumps and curves than the average allied parachutist I made the parachute by tying four lengths of hairy string to the corners of the dust sheet and securing them under the dummies arms. With a flourish Stuart put the tin helmet on the dummies head and produced a box of matches from his pocket we were ready to go.

With a bit of effort we got the dummy up onto the window ledge and pushed it out onto the ledge that ran beyond the window so that it rested precariously against the roof . Stuart lit the fuse of the bangers and we gave it a mighty heave.

It worked quite well…for the first ten or so feet. The dust sheet billowed out arresting its fall and it began to drift earthwards…and sideways, straight towards Sanjeevs granddads greenhouse. Like my own grandfather he was a keen gardener. Every year his allotment produced a veritable bounty of vegetables and his pride and joy were his tomatoes, cucumbers and various exotic specimens with unpronounceable names that he grew in his greenhouse. Now our ‘Rupert’ was headed straight for it.

For an agonising second or two it looked like it might miss but then the inevitable happened, one of the knots I had tied decided that now was the time to come un-knotted. It was hardly my fault I had dropped out of the Cub Scouts before we had done knotting. The dummy dropped like a stone and the hideous crash as it plummeted through the greenhouse roof was followed by the gunfire like sounds of the bangers detonating. This in turn was swiftly followed by Sanjeevs granddad bolting from the shed at the end of the garden where he had apparently been having a nap to stand in incredulous silence at the spectacle of a shop dummy wearing his old tin hat dangling by a few bits of string engaged in the nefarious activity of blowing up his prized cucumbers. The silence did not last for long as spotting us clinging to the roof, white faced at the enormity of what we had done he let fly with a thickly accented yell of

“You…you little…buggers!”

It was no good trying to run, by the time we had pelted downstairs he was waiting for us and in those pre-PC, pre-childrens rights days that meant that all three of us got the seats of our trousers well and truly dusted and Stuart and I were marched round to our respective parents and guardians. That night my grandfather called my parents and suggested it might be a wise move if they collected me a few days early lest Sanjeevs granddad carry through with his threat to introduce me to cold steel like he had done to a number of ‘the nipponese’ if he happened across me again. Unfortunately only being a few doors away that was more than likely. My parents heeded my grandfather’s advice and did so and I may have escaped a fate likely to end in death but for the next six months I seemed to do an awfully large number of chores for very little financial reward.

Fortunately by the following year it had all been forgotten which was lucky given that that summer we almost burnt the shed down instead.

Ed

We were never quite sure where Ed came from or even when he attached himself to our group who on the whole had been friends since the first year of primary school. All we knew was that one day he was there and that put him anywhere near a pint of shandy and disaster was likely to follow. He was a nice enough chap, perhaps too nice who had obviously had a decent upbringing. His parents were both awfully middle class and he still lived with them in a large house in one of the up market areas of town.

Unfortunately Ed liked to think that he was a hardened drinker. Maybe he was providing that whatever they served wherever he was from was weaker than the watered down witches piss they served in some of the more tourist oriented bars in town. Having grown up honing our underage drinking talents in some of the more ‘interesting’ country pubs in the area the rest of us tended to gravitate towards the kind of cider that was still illegal under several European treaties and which could perform painless surgery to the knees after a couple of pints leading to many of its devotees waking up with a mouthful of cigarette butts and sawdust from the floor.

Ed was no exception. In fact on most occasions just walking him past the barrels of ‘Old poachers gumboot’, ‘Badgers Bollocks’ and other such quaintly named beverages would usually lead to him falling over in a stupor there and then. No matter how many times it happened he would not heed the warnings of those who had been there before him many times since the age of 14. On at least one occasion he had held a pint of cider aloft declaring “Looks like orange barley water!” before quaffing it in one go. Five minutes later he slid slowly off his seat and under the table. Of course, being the good mates that we were we allowed him to lie there for at least an hour collecting dog ends and crisp packets in his open and gently snoring mouth. Oddly enough many years later another friend used almost the same line in a different pub in a different town but the results were almost exactly the same.

Thus, when we set off on one of our legendary pub crawls from one end of town to the other we made Ed solemnly promise to pace himself and maybe stick to lemonade in four out of every five pubs. To be fair to him he did as he was told as the rest of us downed halves in every one of the twenty or so pubs we visited and got slightly tipsy. It was only when we reached the Red Lion that Ed forgot his promise and got stuck into some of the real ales on offer. Now if the country folk at one end of town liked their cider, the trawlermen at the other end liked their real ales and some of them were even pokier than the cider but lacking the bits of dead rat to add to the taste. Ed had at least four pints. Twenty minutes later he went a bit glassy-eyed and toppled from his chair much to the amusement of the assembled throng. Not that big a deal until we realised he was staring straight up the skirt of one of the trawlermens wives or girlfriends. Not only was he pissed as a fart but he was about to get himself and probably us too beaten to a pulp by some bloke who smelt of fish. Swiftly as two alcohol befuddled teenagers could Paul and Alex scooped him up and we fled the pub.

We had not travelled a hundred yards when Ed broke free, mumbling something about gymnastics and made a beeline for the railings that edged part of the harbour. Before any of us could scream “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” he had climbed onto them and in utter silence, vanished over the other side. We ran as fast as our own legs, numbed by alcohol, could carry us although we were sobering up rather quickly, waiting for the splash as Ed hit the murky waters…but there was no splash. As we reached the edge we discovered why. The tide was high and a new mooring pontoon had been installed. Ed was lying on his back on the pontoon, staring up at us, waving and giggling like a lunatic. Fortunately for him he had landed on a fishing net, the alcohol had relaxed him just enough and the pontoon was high enough that no damage was done. It was Paul, good, decent, Christian Paul who, mere months later went on to begin to carve out a future career in the priesthood who articulated all our thoughts at that moment…

“YOU COMPLETE AND UTTER FUCKING BASTARD!” was yelled at the top of his voice, causing windows and doors to be thrown open and at least one woman to yell out “You mind your language you fucking twat!” Ed continued to look up at us, still waving and grinning from the fish reeking net. It took us a good ten minutes to extract him from his predicament and set off for home.

Living closest to the harbour I was first to leave them so it was not until the next day when I met up with Paul and Alex for a greasy fry up prior to some hair of the dog that I discovered what they had done with Ed. Deciding that waking his folks who, judging by the lack of lights had already gone to bed, Paul and Alex had left Ed slumped over an ornamental lion in the garden figuring that he would soon sober up and find his own way in. It wasn’t until later that day that I found out what had happened after that when I received a phone call from Ed’s father, a rather pompous gentleman:

“Did my son go out drinking with you last night?”

“Errr! Yes!”

“Did you bring him home?”

“No.”

“Do you know who did?”

“Ummmm! Yes!”

“Good! Can you tell them that next time they do, can they not leave him on one of my ornamental lions. He woke up in the middle of the night and threw up in the pond. My Koi do not like it. What’s worse though is that he decided he needed to have a number two as well. My wife just happened to look out of the window after hearing the noise outside. I don’t think she will ever be quite the same after seeing her son shitting on the garden gnomes!”

Somehow as I desperately tried to quell the image of Ed squatting over a garden gnome I had the feeling that we might not be seeing him very much in the future.

Porterhouse II

I’m sure that the liberal minded do-gooder who decided that it would be wise to educate us in the mysteries of human sexuality regretted it afterwards. If they did not they really should have given the mayhem their afternoon lecture caused the following day.

It wasn’t so much that the lecture, delivered to half of the sixth form, namely thirty or so seventeen year old boys, most of who were already engaging or at least trying to, in carnal ramblings with the other half of the sixth form that consisted of thirty or so seventeen year old girls that caused the mayhem. It was the packets of condoms that were handed out to us to promote safe sex and responsibility. No doubt the person who donated them presumed they would mummify in our wallets as most condoms handed out to teenage boys had tended to do in previous more sexually unenlightened times. How wrong they were!

So, there we were, thirty or so seventeen year olds, most of whom already had wallets stuffed to bursting with prophylactics stolen from older siblings bedside cabinets, from the local barbers having endured the gazes and knowing nods of the older gents when Mr Ginelli asked “Something for the weekend sir?” and in the case of Pete whose parents ran the local chemist, from the stockroom out at the back and all of a sudden we each had an extra packet of three. If we tried to cram any more in our wallets there was a serious risk of condom overload and resulting eruption that would cover the school playground from end to end with things that were ribbed, bobbled, nubbled and tentacled for his and her pleasure. So what could we do with them?

The answer was simple, why not inflate them and fill the sixth form year masters broom cupboard-like office with them. Brilliant idea! Mr Dart the previous incumbent had just retired and his successor was to be named the next day. An office filled with inflated condoms would be a jolly jape to welcome him or her into the post. Er…maybe not. Unfortunately, being seventeen our reading matter tended to consist of 2000AD and lurid books about SS Panzer battalions from the cheap bookshop in town. It did not stretch to ‘Porterhouse Blue’ and its potential warning about inflated condoms. What’s more we should never have trusted Pete with the inflation of said condoms as he had never read the book either.

The following morning we all arrived bright and early which in itself was unusual given that most of us rolled in sometime after morning assembly just in time for mid morning break and a game of poker before the first lesson of the day. Pete had obviously been in since the crack of dawn as the year masters office was filled with inflated johnnies that resembled oversized maggots. The 90 or so that we had all contributed had been supplemented by a fair few more stolen from Petes parents chemists shop and the room was stuffed as full as it possibly could be. Now all we had to do was attend assembly and discover who the lucky recipient of our splendid wheeze was.

Standing at the back we endured the usual badly sung hymns, the congratulations to the first 11 who had managed to escape with a 25-0 mauling against another local school and how the study garden was not to be used to play cricket in. Finally the revelation of who the new sixth form master was came…Mr Bowles, probably the single most humourless individual in the school. Over the years his reputation had grown worse with each passing term. Here was a man who would give a pupil a weeks detention for just standing in the wrong way. We had arranged for his office to be filled with contraceptives. In the back row the entire sixth form went a very pale shade of their usual colour and one thought passed silently through all our minds…”Oooooh fuck!” We were doomed to a lifetime of detention, in fact we would probably be old and grey before we would be let out.

Perhaps fortunately for us, at the back of the hall was a cupboard that connected with the PE department changing rooms. Hurriedly, three of us, Nigel, Andy and myself shielded by the rest of the sixth form crawled through this and fled the building, running across to the sixth form common rooms as fast as we could. We had only a short time to get rid of the contraceptives before Mr Bowles turned up as was tradition after the assembly in which he had been named but how could we do it. There were so many in the tiny room we could only just get the door open a crack. There was only one way, burst them with something. But what could we use? Darts! There was a dartboard in the common room, we all used it, we could poke the condoms with darts. There was only one problem with the plan, there were not any darts in the board, most of the players brought their own and kept them in their rucksacks. What about something sharp from the woodwork block next door suggested Nigel so he and I scurried off leaving Andy behind.

We had only just reached the door of the woodwork block when behind us we heard what sounded like a series of muffled car backfires, a slightly louder bang and the sound of breaking glass. Running back we crashed back into the common room to find Andy standing by the office door looking somewhat traumatised with a cigarette lighter in hand. Beyond him the sixth form masters office resembled an explosion in a contraceptive factory, which, as we found out later was not far off the mark. We had just enough time to bundle him out of the fire door and run round the building as the rest of the sixth form arrived with Mr Bowles. We had joined the tail end and were witnesses to the look of utter astonishment on his face as he surveyed what was supposed to have been his office but which was now an area of devastation, missing a window pane and littered with singed paper and bits of pink latex. Suffice it to say he was not a happy chap.

It was only later we pieced together the whole sorry tale. Pete had indeed arrived early that morning and faced with inflating almost a hundred condoms had cheated a bit and using the gas hose from the oven in the common room kitchen, had filled them with good old North Sea gas. Andy had not really expected them to be inflated with anything but air when, desperate to get rid of the Zeppelin like prophylactics, he had applied his lighter after managing to open the door a crack. At first there had been a brief chain reaction but this, as chain reactions have a tendency to do had turned into something bigger. The resulting gas explosion had blown out one of the window panes and shot a sheet of flame past Andy who had been lucky to have been shielded by the door.

The entire sixth form had their privileges revoked for two months, no darts, no cards and were expected to spend their free breaks and lunchtimes studying in the library. We were sternly reminded that condoms were meant for other purposes than blowing up the school, something that may also have been regretted when the head boy was discovered in bed with Miss Wilder, the new gym mistress at an end of term party that year.

The Great Rubber Band War

It probably started like so many conflicts with a relatively minor incident, an Archduke Franz Ferdinand style assassination attempt round the back of the boys toilets perhaps but soon the ‘Great Rubber Band War’ of 1978 had taken a momentum of its own. The minor incident became forgotten as the cries to arms went out. Hit and run border raids on the second year corner of the playground were unleashed and retaliated against and by the end of the week full scale open warfare had broken out. Just about every able-bodied boy in the 1st and 2nd years began packing heat in the form of rubber bands purloined from the bursars stationery cupboard and a pocket full of folded paper pellets.

From the stalemate of trench warfare hiding behind the walled flowerbeds of the ‘study garden’ to grand sweeping charges across the playing field nowhere in the school was safe and every break reverberated to the ping of rubber bands and the yelps of the victims as a lucky shot caught them in the back of the neck. Naturally the masters attempted to ‘discourage’ us by confiscating rubber bands and having us turn out our pockets, rucksacks, briefcases and bags but it was not like we were turning up to school with an Uzi and a couple of Glocks like most pupils of today seem to do so on the whole they were fairly laid back about it. After all, nobody was going to get killed, that task was covered by the PE department and their ten mile runs. At least they were laid back about it until the ‘East bank massacre’.

The ‘war’ had been humming along nicely for best part of a month. The massed battles had given way to a more static and ambush based conflict. Us 1st years defended our corner of the playground and had made significant gains around the library, Physics building and lower school toilet block. Along with our allies in the 3rd year we also held a chunk of the upper school playground. After a long stalemate and threats of a sound thrashing if we disturbed its solitude ever again, the ‘study garden’ had become neutral territory guarded by the fearsome Mrs Trotter of the music department. The 2nd years held the area around the biology labs, the school gym and the newly built ‘Home Economics’ suite as well as good portion of the area of land that bordered the playing fields. As in other wars our ‘generals’, three of the quieter kids who were members of the school war game club, decided that a major offensive must be launched.

Maybe events would have been different if Mike had not decided to up the ante a little with his homemade multi-banded miniature crossbow that could be used to launch inky pellets with the potential to mark our foe as victims of war. Maybe they would have been drastically different if he had not shared his design with the rest of us and we, instead of being the blood-thirsty warriors of the playground out for honour in battle had not copied it in our dads sheds and garages over the weekend and turned up at school the following Monday with an assortment of inky paper projectile launching devices that would make Dennis the Menace go white with fear. Maybe too, things would have not culminated in the ‘East bank massacre’ if our generals had, like generals before and after not been relying on faulty intelligence.

Word had gone out that the 2nd form commanders would be gathering on the East bank of the playing fields at lunch break. Here was our chance to break the stalemate by not only capturing the area, but also humiliating their leaders with our new inky artillery. Double maths seemed to last forever that morning as we strained at the leash to launch our attack. No sooner had the lunch break bell rung than we were out of the classroom, stuffing our pre-Jamie Oliver sugar loaded snacks and fish paste sandwiches down our throats as we went, ready to do battle. Our advance parties were already in position, ready to sweep the opposition around the biology labs aside whilst our raiding party moved through to deliver the humiliating blow. At exactly 1pm we went over the top in more ways than one.

The few second years that had gathered by the labs were swept aside and our flank attack seized the high ground only to discover that the bank was deserted, no-one in sight. We stood confused for several moments then Mike yelled “I hear them, they’re in the bushes!”

With a bloodthirsty scream twenty or so 1st years piled over the top of the bank firing inky pellets. It took at least ten seconds, in which, thanks to Mikes brilliant design of multiple firing mini-crossbows several hundred pellets soaked in blue Quink had been fired, for us to realise that it was not our 2nd form foe that stood before us but Miss Ashton, the biology teacher who had been out gathering bugs for the forthcoming 3rd year double biology period that afternoon. What’s more her white coat looked like it had developed a strange case of blue measles. I can’t remember what I thought at that moment. I think it was something on the lines of “Oh bother!”

Suffice it to say that we found ourselves hauled up before the headmaster who, to put it mildly was a little on the unhappy side that one of his staff had been assaulted in such a way. We were lucky to escape with several thousand lines each especially after almost all of us had been forced to desperately hide our sniggers with a variety of coughs, snorts and sneezes when he demanded “So who was it that shot Miss Ashton in the bush then?”

The Cocktail of Doom

My father was ex-RAF and had spent much of his younger years pootling about the skies in a selection of very fast aircraft scaring the crap, sometimes quite literally, out of various cows, sheep and the inhabitants of a fair few towns with his low flying antics. Thus it was hardly surprising that when he left the forces it was for an exciting job in middle management in the DIY business much like many of his former colleagues.

Malcolm however, was different and had swapped his Biggles-like life of swooping about the skies shooting down ‘bandits’, strafing the natives in the various foreign conflicts of the 1950s and bellowing "Tally-ho chaps!" for the heady excitement of being a sales representative for a well known firm who purveyed dairy goods to the trade. The perks were good though and as Uncle Malc’ was a frequent visitor to our house being one of dads drinking mates we got a fair share of them. Thus it was that one Wednesday in the middle of August 1973 he turned up and unloaded from his van a quantity of a new brand of Yoghurt and what looked like a small oil drum of something. The something turned out to be prawn cocktail.

Now as anyone who grew up in the 70s knows, prawn cocktail was the sophisticated dish to serve at your gatherings. No intimate soiree was complete without a bottle of Blue Nun, prawn cocktail and throwing your car keys into a bowl at the end of the evening. Okay, round our way the whole key throwing thing had skipped people by, probably as most of the people who drove only owned a set of tractor keys and the rest had only just crawled from the 19th century and were still wondering what all the fuss was about the internal combustion engine but prawn cocktail was big and suddenly we had about two gallons of it. Naturally enough we got well stuck in and rather tasty it was too.

The following day we had prawn cocktail for breakfast, lunch, dinner and we did the same the next day. In fact I think mum even served up prawn cocktail sandwiches and prawn cocktail on toast at some point. By day three I wanted something other than prawn cocktail, even the 30 year old tin of Spam kept in the kitchen cupboard had started to look appetising but we still had a load of the sickly pink goo nestling in our old gas powered fridge.

Saturday came and with it came my older cousins Phil and Laura who lived just round the corner. My aunt had promised to take them and myself into town to buy various supplies for the new school term and they had come to collect me. Naturally enough as kids do, Phil started poking round in the fridge to see if he could find anything to eat and discovered the prawn cocktail. Having never had it before both he and Laura asked mum if they could and the answer was “Yes!”, anything to get rid of the stuff and make room for the Sunday joint so they both piled in and against my better judgement I did too, noting as I did that it tasted a bit ‘different’ than it had before but being seven I did not consider anything of it. After that we wandered up to my Aunts house and spent an hour or so mucking around in the back garden as she had a few chores to do before she took us into town. Time to go came and we climbed into the back of her Triumph Herald for the drive into town. Unfortunately for us, it being a summer Saturday, the traffic into town was backed up and in the car it began to get a bit warm. I started to realise that there were distinct rumblings in the Balkans and both Phil and Laura were awfully quiet. Arriving in town and being able to emerge from the car was a blessed relief.

Our first port of call that fateful afternoon was a large and well known gentlemen’s outfitters that also had a small section devoted to school uniform for the local schools. The shop itself was old fashioned with wooden counters, hats stored in hat boxes and various items of attire displayed on shelves. It was also cramped, dingy and on that August afternoon decidedly warm. Little did the assistant who emerged to serve us know of the apocalypse that was about to follow. He had just finished measuring Phil for a new blazer when everything erupted, well, when Phil erupted with a monumental “BOIYLLLK!” that covered the counter, a display of shirts and a rack of ties that happened to be in the way. The assistant, big manly man that he was screamed like a girl and leapt backwards just in time to avoid Phils stream of vomit but unfortunately straight into the path of Laura who with a massive and perfectly timed “HOOOORRRP!” sprayed him and an elderly gentleman who had up to that point been innocently trying on hats nearby not expecting to be puked on by a nine year old. In some ways it was good that he was trying the hats on as it meant that unlike my cousins who by now had covered half the shop in vomit I had something to throw up in, the hatbox, which I grabbed and added my own “BLLLEEERCH!” to the proceedings. It was only after that I realised I had grabbed the wrong box and had just brought my boots up over a brand new Homburg.

Aunt Anne, being the kind, caring and responsible adult she was, was by now trying to vacate the shop without drawing attention to herself, pretending that she did not know us and had not really brought three apparently demonically possessed children into the shop to let them abuse the customers and staff with foul demonic emanations. Unluckily for her she was spotted and we were ushered back into her care with the words “We’ll send you the bill!” ringing in our ears. It looked like our chances of getting any pocket money for the next twenty years were seriously screwed.

Swiftly we were ushered back to the car and in a style of driving that the ‘Sweeney’ would popularise the following year we sped out of town with us kids going a delicate shade of green in the back unsecured by seatbelts and subject to an un-merciless bouncing as Aunt Anne hurtled up the sea road.

Now those of you who come here from the Scaryduck blog will know of his frequent bouts of being “sick inna hedge”. It’s very possible we outdid him that day as no sooner had we reached countryside than the Sweeney-like speeding became a stop-start crawl as one of us bolted from the car every two hundred yards. We were sick in hedges, in fields, in a dustbin, in some poor sods Lupin patch, over several walls and in Phils case ‘onna dead badger’ which made him throw up again seconds later. Never have the words “Are we nearly there yet? I’m gonna be sick!” inspired so much terror. Finally though we reached home and as I pelted through the door heading for the bathroom and its merciful absence of shrubbery and dead wildlife I noticed mum and dad tucking in to bowls of prawn cocktail. Impending disaster was not far off.

After that the mere mention of it was taboo in our house after the days of family bonding over the toilet that followed and despite its popularity throughout the 70s I don’t think I, or my parents touched it again until I was well into my twenties.

Sports Day

As mentioned on here several times in the past, the school I attended valued sporting prowess as much if not more than academic ability so if you were rubbish at sports you were almost certainly doomed to seven years of being treated with contempt by the sadistic bastards who made up the PE department. Of course the flip side of this was that if you were any good at sports you ended up in one of the school teams which meant after hours training and matches against other schools that were invariably held on a Saturday, a sneaky way of getting extra school attendance out of you when you should have been watching ‘TISWAS’ and stuffing your face with Tartrazine loaded snacks.

Thus it became a battle to try to strike a balance between making sure that you did not lose your chance to laze around at the weekend and making sure that you were not labelled a bone idle waster by Messrs Jackson and Stephens and forced to do the kind of physical jerks that could fell most SAS men in the playground in order to toughen you up whilst everyone else played basketball in the nice warm gym. In my case being unutterably crap at football meant that at least once a week I got sent on laps of the field but the rest of the time I managed to just about do enough not to be marked down as a weakling yet avoid getting on any teams. Rugby and cricket I was average at, I could run the four hundred yards and not stagger in last gasping for breath and throwing up behind the biology labs and as for cross country, well most of us had sussed that if we dropped out of sight on the first lap of the school we could have a crafty smoke for twenty minutes, nip out of the side gate and then reappear for the last two hundred yards just behind the keen types who really had done the running and it would look like we had completed the race in an average enough time that would not see us ending up on the cross country team either. There was only one time when we were almost caught out and that was when Kev’ crossed the line with a Lambert & Butler glued to his lip having forgotten to spit it out before he resumed the race. Luckily for us Mr Jackson happened to be looking the other way as Kev’ charged past emitting clouds of smoke like a runaway steam engine.

The one fly in the ointment though was school sports day. We have all had to do it at some time in our youth. It’s the day when the PE teachers not content with being the evil, sadistic bastards they are and hounding you round a cold, wet playing field for two hours make you do the self same thing but with an audience of parents and peers to see you stagger in last or try to throw a lump of iron like an uncoordinated chimpanzee on Mogadon in the one sporting event you are absolutely rubbish at yet have been made to do by the PE teachers because they want a bit of a laugh. After all, the sight of Neil in his coke bottle glasses veering off at a tangent into the crowds and the second year kid with the withered arm trying to putt the shot obviously had great comedy value amongst the staff.

Apart from football the other event I wasn’t any good at was throwing the javelin or at least it appeared that way. I was in fact very good at it but to ensure that my leisure time was not dented by hurling pointy sticks on a weekend I made it look like I wasn’t that brilliant at it, not completely cack-handed like Pete who managed to spear himself through the foot the first time we were let loose with javelins but not good enough to be noticed and appointed school spear chucker either. Thus on the last sports day before we left school after our ‘O’ levels I found, by some twist of perverse logic in one of the PE masters mind, that I was representing my house in the javelin events.

It was possibly because this was the last sports day we would ever have to attend as in the sixth form sport was optional that a certain spirit of rebellion came over me and when it was my turn to throw I thought “Sod it!” and hurled the javelin with all my might which given that I had just hit sixteen was pretty mighty indeed. As it happened the annual spectacle of the teachers versus first year pupils egg and spoon two hundred metres race had just begun and as usual the teachers were about fifty yards ahead of the first year participants who seemed to consist of all the asthmatics and kids who liked their chips too much chosen in order to make the teachers, who apart from Miss Hancock were hardly the fittest of beings, look good.

Now, in most normal and sensible athletics stadiums the javelin triangle is marked so that stray missiles pose no threat to spectators and other athletes. At my school it had been decided that as it was obvious no pupil would ever hurl one more than about ten yards, probably because generations of pupils wanting an easy life had never really tried that hard, that the javelin triangle would be marked out straight across the field instead of down it. As I stood and watched the sharp pointy metal thing I had just thrown descend in a graceful arc my thought of “Sod it!” became one of “Ooooo! Shit!”

With a thud the javelin fell to earth… slap bang in the middle of the running track about six feet in front of Mr Tate, one of the geography masters, who, unable to stop or react in time went flat on his face over it closely followed by two of the French Masters a history teacher and the head of Biology. The fat and asthmatic kids meanwhile jogged serenely past the teachers lying in a heap on the track, or at least as serenely as it possibly is for someone who is gasping for breath and going a funny shade of blue to jog past and on to the finish line, the first time the teachers had been beaten in about a hundred years. Behind me I could hear the sounds of apoplectic rage and turned to face Mr Jackson who, red faced glared at me for long seconds. Next moment the whole audience of parents, teachers and fellow pupils heard his bellow of “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE BOY…A…A FUCKING ZULU????” echo across the playing field.

An hour later, as if to rub it in I was presented with the rosette for first place and over the polite applause of the parents and teachers another sound could be heard, that of three hundred or so of my fellow pupils stamping their feet in a rough approximation of the moment the natives are heard in a certain 1960s film starring Michael Caine and Stanley Baker. Perhaps not surprisingly when the athletics area was marked out the following year the javelin range pointed down the track, not across it.

Death Game 1980

“Ridicule is nothing to be scared of!” So sang Adam and the Ants in the early 80s and it was a refrain that went through the heads of the dozen or so of us who had chosen ice skating as our sport of choice when we were allowed to choose whatever sports we wanted to do from the age of 14 at school. Little did our fellow pupils who had called us a “Bunch of poofs!” know as they continued to be hounded around wet and muddy pitches that we had discovered the most monumental skive ever.

As a child I had done a bit of skating and won a few awards. The school skating lessons merely went over old ground with the possibility of earning a few certificates that I had skipped having taken the highest level when I was five years old and missed the rest as I could do more than skate forwards and backwards. The instructors put me through my paces and realising that I could actually skate to almost professional standards more or less told me to stop wasting their time and bugger off and do what I wanted whilst they got on with teaching the rest of the class how to stand up and not get a wet arse. In my case doing what I wanted meant honing my talents on the video games and pinball tables and drinking vast amounts of Cola in the rink café as the master in charge of our school was an exceedingly deaf chap called Mr Jennings who was rapidly approaching retirement and who invariably fell asleep on one of the rink side seats.

Most weeks were the same. Turn up, put on skates, skate a few circuits, try for a high score whilst waiting for my mates to finish their fifteen minute lesson, play pinball and drink caffeinated beverages then all scarper long before Mr Jennings woke up. All in all it was a total and utter skive. However, one small object was to make things decidedly different.

It was Kev’ who decided to liven things up one week by dropping one of those high powered bouncy rubber balls onto the ice. Within minutes a game of ice football had begun and that is where things began to go a bit awry. We shared the rink with a number of other local schools, some of which were our rivals and some of which were the rivals of other schools. Despite its so called ‘Poof’ status skating was always an interestingly edgy affair and violence simmered just below the surface. The game of ice football gradually sucked in more pupils from other schools and began to get a bit more ‘competitive’. It began to resemble less of a school skating session and more an extra brutal real life version of the Action comic strip 'Death Game 1999' of a few years earlier. In fact it is very possible that the writers of the Amiga game ‘Speedball 2’ may have been at that very rink, witnesses to the carnage that was about to break out. There were 500 teenagers on the ice rink; most of them hyped up on cola and sweets from the vending machines and someone had dropped a ball in the midst of them. Blood was going to be spilt. All it needed was for someone to yell “Ice Cream! Ice Cream!”

The first casualties were a party from a local Catholic girls school. Whilst their mates tried to cop off with the lads from the local Catholic boys school a few of the ‘wallflowers’ had elected to stay on the ice and skate round holding hands and talking about ponies or something only to be violently cut down by Kev’ who was trying to get the ball from one of the pupils from our rival school by barging him into the side barriers. They went down like ninepins and this was followed seconds later by a St Trinians like scream as the rest of the girls leapt the barrier and went after Kev’. The ball rebounded off the barriers and smacked another lad in the forehead with a resounding ‘CLUNK’. He too went down like a sack of spuds dropped from a great height and at least four other kids went arse over tit over the top of him. The ball meanwhile rolled into the throng and with a few kicks gathered momentum as most of the skaters oblivious to the bodies littering the ice continued to circle menacingly. By now Kev’ was skating for his life pursued by several vengeful girls. Perhaps unluckily the ball chose its moment to return to him and hit his ice skate with some force. The impact caused him to wobble and slip, the resulting tumble propelled him into half a dozen young ladies from one of the more exclusive girls schools in the area…who hated the Catholic girls with a vengeance and thought they had pushed Kev’ into them. Within seconds a full on catfight had broken out and it did not take long for about fifty other kids all bearing grudges or just up for a scrap to pile into the fray. Soon it was like ‘Fight Club’ on ice.

Meanwhile, myself and two classmates had grabbed Kev’ from the midst of the brawl and dragged him back to the changing rooms as the rink security and skating instructors joined the battle. As Mr Jennings woke up, disturbed from his nap by the sound of combatants screaming, yelling and trying to batter each other we were standing behind him beaming angelically and pointing out that “We left the ice because some of the other schools were misbehaving and getting rather rough sir!”

A few weeks later I was called up on stage during assembly to be presented with a handful of skating certificates by the headmaster. Apparently I had done the school proud by winning so many and in a school that valued sporting achievement that was a high honour indeed. I didn’t have the nerve to tell the headmaster that they had really been earned for drinking cola, getting a high score at ‘Galaxians’ and being part of a near riot that had resulted in most of the local schools being banned from the ice rink for an indefinite period. Luckily we were not one of them and our skiving continued unabated.

Raiders of the lost...AARGH!

Nowadays the government and various health professionals relentlessly badger us about getting five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. It did not used to be like that. In fact the quickest way to get a kid to eat fruit was to put it behind a 10’ high wall with a big sign saying ‘Keep Out’ on the gate. If you did that you could guarantee that within an hour of doing so half the neighbourhood kids would have forgotten their ‘Dinosaur chews’, Blackjacks and other treats loaded with enough E numbers to make a Sloth hyperactive and be over the wall and helping themselves to your fruit.

Mrs Carters house was one such example. It had originally been a farm on the outskirts of town but time and progress had resulted in it being just another house in the suburbs where my grandparents lived. To the rear of it was an orchard surrounded by a high wall. The only way of getting to it was through a locked door set in the wall, a door with the dire warning ‘DANGER – KEEP OUT’ written on it in six inch high letters. From the lane that ran alongside it we could see the juicy crop of apples, pears, plums and elderberries that grew behind it. We also knew that Mrs Carter, being about eighty would never pick the fruit and resolved to liberate it for ourselves.

Thus it was that our gang, hyped up on adrenaline and Corona Limeade gathered in the lane that ran alongside the wall all cunningly disguised in the military camouflage outfits that our parents had purchased from the green shield stamps catalogue. That is all apart from Rachel who turned up in jeans and a Bay City Rollers top so we sent her to the corner to keep a look out whilst the rest of us put the master plan we had cooked up over Jaffa Cakes in Stuarts bedroom into action. We would hoist Elizabeth, her being the lightest up onto the wall with a length of rope from granddads shed. She would drop down the other side, tie it to the nearest tree, toss the rope back over the wall and we would use it to shin up to get at the treasures beyond. Dead easy and utterly foolproof.

Now regular readers will know that as soon as the phrase “dead easy and utterly foolproof” is mentioned around here then everything is about to go the same shape as some of the fruit we were trying to ‘liberate’ and this time was no exception. Elizabeth was duly hoisted to the top of the wall and we had no sooner stepped back to check her progress when we heard a most un-nine year old girl like “Oh fuck!” and she vanished from view as the part of the wall she was sitting on crumbled away like the hundred or so year old un-tended wall it was. From beyond we heard the sound of a body and stonework plummeting through undergrowth. As fast as we could, Stuart, Nick and I scrambled up the wall and peered over expecting the worst. Luckily for Elizabeth an Elderberry bush had broken her fall. The bad news was that it was in the middle of a bramble patch.

The dire warning of ‘DANGER – KEEP OUT’ probably referred to the fact that Mrs Carter was obviously a mad scientist in disguise and was experimenting in hideous genetic mutations of the carnivorous kind. The orchard was completely overgrown with the kind of brambles not seen outside of the magic forest in ‘Sleeping Beauty’, the kind that thrived on human blood. We could not see Elizabeth but we could certainly hear her. A nearby bush had apparently developed a bad case of sweariness and from it came a stream of “OW! FUCK! OW! OWW! FUCK! SHIT! OW!”

If the ‘Ringing Singing Tree’ ever developed Tourettes this would be how it sounded and it may have been this that alerted Mrs Carter to our presence as despite her advanced years she was obviously not deaf and suddenly a window that overlooked the orchard opened. In our haste to get to the fruit we had overlooked one tiny little thing, well, small, four-legged thing. Mrs Carters Jack Russell and it came flying out of the window like a furry missile heading for the extremely sweary bush.

It was the thought of being viciously savaged by the dog as well as being torn apart by the brambles o' doom that galvanized Elizabeth into action and suddenly she was free of the brambles and scrambling up the wall. As we dropped down the other side Stuart muttered those famous last words “Phew! Safe!” at the exact moment the dog came hurdling over the wall half way up the lane. How were we to know that there was a pile of rubble at the top end of the orchard that allowed it to reach the top of the wall? What ensued was something out of farce as the neighbourhood was treated to five kids who, with the addition of Rachel looked like refugees from the paramilitary arm of the Bay City Rollers fan club and one of whom looking like they had been dragged through a hedge backwards and indeed had, being chased through the streets by a small but very yappy dog. All that was needed was the music from Benny Hill and the scene would be complete.

We must have run around the area for around half an hour and the terrier only gave up when we finally reached Stuarts garden and began pelting it with dirt from the flowerbeds. By the time we got back to our gang ‘hut’ all thoughts of healthy fruit had vanished from our minds. The only fruit we wanted was the ‘Fruit Salads’ and ‘Rhubarb and Custard’ chews we had bought earlier that day.

Fate though had other ideas. That weekend my grandmother suddenly announced that she had volunteered my services to someone she knew through her women’s guild. The elderly lady had an orchard full of fruit she needed picking but could not do it by her self and she had already had kids trying to steal the fruit so could I round up some of my friends to do the job for her. Perhaps fortunately for us Mrs Carter’s eyesight was not as good as her hearing as she did not recognize us when we were herded round to her house by my grandmother. The dog was a different matter and his growling and barking made the old lady remark “It’s most odd, he’s not usually like that with children!” We did not dare tell her that it probably had not chased most ‘children’ around the streets for best part of half an hour before having those same ‘children’ proceed to hurl large clods of earth at it. Wisely we kept our mouths shut but the presence of the dog certainly made the afternoon of fruit picking that little bit edgier than it should have been.

The Mystery Mob

As a child whose parents both worked, a good proportion of the summer and other holidays were spent with my grandparents. As a result of this I made friends with a number of the kids who lived near them. My grandparents lived in a fairly quiet part of town where nothing much happened and the most exciting thing was the yearly street fair held a few streets away. Us kids however, were determined to make the place a bit more exciting.

Stuarts house backed onto my grandparents so a quick climb over the back wall meant that I could be into the old caravan belonging to his dad that we used as a gang hut in moments if I heard a yell from his garden. So it was on this particular day. Like most summer days seemed back then it was warm and sunny, too warm to be running around playing soldiers even with water pistols so we were slumped around the caravan, bored, slurping on a selection of Panda Pops liberated from Stuart’s mums kitchen, the stack of Beezer and Victor comics read through and the prospect of a long afternoon with nothing to do apart from go a bit hyper on the E numbers in the Panda Pops ahead of us. The trouble with being nine and bored is that it isn’t long before someone suggests doing something really, really stupid and the others instead of saying “That’s a really, really stupid idea!” all say “Cool!”

It was Elizabeth, one of the two female members of our gang who suggested that we explore the old church just around the corner. The church had probably been built in the late 18th or early 19th century when the area was not as large as it was and then as the area thrived and gained several more churches and many more houses it had become a back street chapel and then become run down and abandoned prior to WW2. It was grimy, boarded up, in disrepair and was reputed to be haunted by spirits disturbed when it was almost hit by a bomb in the early years of the war. Basically it was the place that our parents, grandparents and most of the adults in the neigbourhood warned us to keep well away from. Oh and then there were the Satanic sacrifices that a kid at Stuarts school reckoned he had found in there although according to Stuart the same kid reckoned he had been abducted by aliens, was part bionic and had discovered a secret bunker under the school playground full of guns and tanks. However, with nothing better to do we might as well check to see if the story was true. Having watched Scooby Doo we all fancied ourselves as the Mystery Mob although lacking any canine pets between us there was some argument as to who got to be the cowardly dog. The alternative was to borrow my grandmother’s pet budgerigar and put a collar on it and somehow I didn’t think that she would approve of that. So, arming ourselves with high power torches, well, okay two reasonable power torches and third that was a gift from a seaside vending machine and shaped like a fish we set off on our expedition.

Getting in to the old church was easy enough, it was a simple matter of climbing over the wall whilst avoiding the barbed wire and broken glass that someone had thoughtlessly arrayed across the top of it to keep small children and tramps out, picking our way across the small overgrown graveyard without breaking our legs, necks and other body parts tripping over fallen tombstones and slipping through a hole in the corner of the rusty and jagged corrugated iron sheet that covered one of the doors without getting tetanus.

If restless spirits were looking for a place to hang out and do the things that restless spirits are wont to do then this was it, a definite des-res for the dead and not quite shuffled off to the afterlife to get down and party. It was dark, spooky and filled with rubble and pigeon shit. Despite the warmth outside there was a noticeable chill in the air and there were strange rustlings in the corners that our frankly feeble torches could not penetrate. As we explored we heard a door banging, floorboards creaked as though someone was walking upon them and the wind sighed through gaps where the boards did not quite cover the windows.

By now four out of the five of us were thinking that maybe going into the old church was a really, really bad idea and that maybe instead of saying “Cool!” we should have pointed out how incredibly bad an idea it really was. Nervously we looked each other as dust illuminated by one of the few shafts of light that penetrated the boards swirled in strange vortices across the floor. Stuart’s brother, Nick laughed and forged ahead of us. Then came a ghastly creaking and a hideous scream of abject pant wetting terror...

...and that's when we found out that no self respecting Satanist would ever hold a black mass in there. Their health and safety executive would have had a fit if they had. The raising of demons would have been unlikely, the high priest and most of the coven plunging to their doom was a distinct probability. Nick vanished through the floorboards that had been somewhat weakened by time, hungry woodworm and a bad case of dry rot. Luckily for him it was not too big a drop, about six feet, into the void under the floor and he landed on an old and musty smelling tarpaulin.

Nervously in case he had been grabbed by ghouls or zombies lurking under the floor we crawled to the edge of the pit only to discover him lying on the tarpaulin surrounded by nothing more sinister than ancient mouse droppings and staring up at us. The distance was not that great but it took us ages to haul him out, getting ourselves covered in dust and desiccated mouse poo in the process. I'm not sure what was more terrifying, the moment Nick vanished or the telling off I got from my grandmother when I got home looking like I had just crawled from the grave myself. At least in Scooby Doo the kids always discovered that the phantom was really old Mr Brown the janitor, they did not get sent to an early bath and told to get themselves to bed and not to darken the house with their presence until the next day.

After that we gave the place a wide berth and decided that if anyone suggested an idea that sounded ‘cool’ we would pelt them with clods from the compost heap. Well, until someone suggested finding the secret bunker underneath the school but that’s another story.

Kaboom

As regular readers will know, as a child I was fairly obsessed with making loud bangs with homemade explosives, napalm and the like. Back then it was the sort of thing any ordinary child whose grandfather was a scientist and of Irish extraction did and unless we blew up the old folks home or burnt down the school nobody really took that much notice unlike now when just striking a match gets you a quick ticket on an unmarked aircraft heading for the Caribbean and a nice orange jumpsuit.

When I was 12 a woman and her daughter moved in next door. I soon discovered that she was the type to complain about anything and everything, especially anything that disturbed her wet blanket of a daughter who was something of a sensitive soul despite being about 18 at the time. For three years I suffered being complained about if a football sailed within ten feet of her house or if I was spotted with a cricket ball, tennis ball or even a bag of marbles anywhere in the neighbourhood. Such items could be lethal if they came in contact with her daughter. That is if her daughter ever left the safety of the house, which was something of a rarity. It was possible she could not actually get out as her mother had taped the windows shut in case any insects got in and caused her daughter to be frightened. In fact, my mere existence and the existence of any child in the neighbourhood was a cause for immediate complaint. Little did I know as I was hauled before my parents over some minor incident on a roughly twenty times a week basis that in my fifteenth year revenge would be spectacular…

It was bonfire night 1981 and I had a couple of my mates around for a bonfire party and to fill our faces with my mothers top quality cheese and bacon scone. Between us we had acquired an industrial quantity of top quality Chinese fireworks from the local joke shop instead of the more usual and somewhat tamer ‘Standard’, ‘Astra’ and ‘Brocks’ varieties. For so called ‘Garden Fireworks’ they made some pretty fearsome bangs, roars, pretty lights and the occasional crater in dads flowerbeds. Nowadays they would probably be banned or if not banned, they would only be sold to responsible adults who had letters from the police, the vicar and at least three magistrates to prove their utter responsibility to be let anywhere near high explosives. They certainly would not have been in the hands of three fifteen year old pyromaniacs with a box of matches. In the case of some of the rockets even we were not sure whether to send them skywards or keep them in case the cold war Communist threat saw Warsaw pact tanks rolling down our leafy suburban streets. These things would take out an armoured column, no problems.

After several hours worth of screeches, thuds, a near miss that almost removed our other neighbours television aerial and only two complaints from the local airport about anti-aircraft fire downing the 8.15 mail plane, we had just finished making the neighbourhood sound much like downtown Baghdad does nowadays when who should appear but the neighbour to complain that the noise of our fireworks had "made my daughter wet her knickers in terror!"

Now what total spoon says to a bunch of fifteen year olds with particularly hyperactive imaginations and three years of complaining to gain revenge for that they had made a 21 year old woman wee herself and not expect something to be triggered in said fifteen year olds minds? Especially as over the years her complaints about us playing football, cricket and even just lounging around the back lawn of my house had curtailed our leisure activities most severely. In the annals of stupid things to say that one sentence has to rate pretty highly. In fact it probably rates up there with “That Mr Hitler is a very nice man, he’ll never invade Poland”

Naturally this little fact fermented in our minds until a month or so later when the chance for spectacular revenge presented itself not so much on a plate as on a silver salver carried by a retinue of liveried footmen. Despite her utter wet blanket-ness the daughter owned a moped. Presumably she was unaware that mopeds might be even slightly dangerous. This was kept at the back of the house and to get there she had to wheel it down an alleyway between my house and hers. At one end of the alleyway was a flight of steps with a surrounding wall leading up to her garden that she had to pass. Every day at 5.30 on the dot she would arrive home and her mother would come out to help her push the moped down the alley to the back of the house as it was way too dangerous for her to do it by herself.

As it happened, on the day in question I had discovered a large banger left over from bonfire night that I had sort of increased the power of a bit, possibly to take out a tank or two that the rockets had missed. My two mates and I just happened to be outside at 5.30pm wondering what we could blow up. It was after all far better than doing maths homework. We saw mother and daughter arrive at the end of the alley with the moped and under the cover of darkness the banger was lit and lobbed behind the wall that surrounded the steps as we ducked behind my fathers shed.

The detonation could not have been better timed if we had tried. Just as they were about six feet from the wall it went off behind the brickwork...

BLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMM!!!!

It was closely followed by dual screams of "AAAAAIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!!!!" and "YAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGGHHHH!!!" and seconds later a whimper of "Muuuummm! I've pooed and wet myself!"

Meanwhile the three of us were hiding behind the garden shed trying not to wet ourselves either. Not through terror but because we were in absolute hysterics as the moped was forgotten and the daughter waddled inside like a cowboy who had forgotten his horse.

Unfortunately a few hours later the neighbour turned up on our doorstep to regale my parents of how their son had made her daughter...well, you already know that. I was hauled out and given a right royal bollocking for it and the fact that my IED might have blown up the moped with apocalyptic consequences. I was made to apologise profusely but when the door was shut and she had gone my dad nearly bust a gut laughing. From what I could gather he and mum were fed up with this woman and her daughters constant moaning about everything as well and considered it justice well done. Oddly I got a pocket money rise soon after. Nowadays it would have got me an ASBO.

The next day a solitary pair of Bridget Jones pants appeared on the washing line next door as if to signal our victory to the entire neighbourhood and for several years to come every kid in the neighbourhood referred to the daughter as ‘John Wayne’.

Football Crazy

Unlike my uncle Ernest who had played professional football in the 1930s and several other members of my family who could be found kicking a ball around the local park pitches as part of the Sunday League my own football skills left a lot to be desired. To tell the truth, an uncoordinated Gibbon on tranquillisers could have probably played the beautiful game better than I could. I loved football but put a ball anywhere near me and I immediately developed two left feet and a terminal loss of direction. Naturally this led to me being relegated to the side that included the asthmatics, the academics and the blind kid with the gimpy leg when it came to school games lessons and in a school that valued sporting prowess as much as and possibly more than academic achievement this was a bad thing indeed. Even though I was not too bad at cricket and could hurl javelins with the best of them my total inability to send a football in the right direction marked me as a useless loser in the eyes of certain masters.

One such master happened to be our games master who was an ex-paratrooper by the name of Jackson and who it was rumoured had been kicked out of the regiment for brutality. He loathed any sign of weakness and being useless at football was a sign of weakness in his book so he took it on himself to toughen us up by any means possible. This usually took the form of ten laps of the school field and an hour and a half of trying to kick a heavy leather ball that had been manufactured circa 1863 around the flooded bottom pitch that was rumoured to harbour a breeding colony of crocodiles and a couple of hippos in its swampy environs. By the end of the session most of us would be tottering around on leaden limbs and doing passable impersonations of a Glastonbury reveller on a particularly muddy day. Broken legs were not uncommon and the local ambulance service kept one of its vans permanently parked outside the gates that led to the fields. The lesson would normally be overseen by Jackson and the slightly effeminate maths teacher Mr Davies, to whom Jackson had been heard referring to in an unguarded moment in the PE masters staff cupboard as “That Welsh poof!”. That Mr Jackson himself had been relegated to teaching the uncoordinated and the sporting inept amongst us said a lot about what the head of PE thought of him as he was never let anywhere near the star pupils who could actually kick a ball. We hated the man with a vengeance but revenge was to be at hand albeit unintentionally.

The games lesson had begun normally enough with its lung bursting run around the periphery of the field that had left several of our group throwing up behind the pavilion and Neil whose bottle bottom glasses had steamed up getting severely lost and vanishing at a tangent behind the biology labs. Despite the losses Mr Jackson then produced the ‘Cannonball’ as we called it and those of us who were left were divided into two teams. For about an hour the game progressed without incident. Occasionally one of us even managed to coordinate our limbs for long enough to get a shot somewhere within fifty feet of a goal, which was lucky as both the goalies were asthmatic and any further exertion would have probably killed them. Then it happened. The ball suddenly landed at my feet and I heard Jackson’s bellow of “Run with it laddie!” from nearby. Mortal terror kicked in and I froze. I knew that if I tried to run with the ball I would inevitably end up on my arse in the mud, such was my lack of coordination in the vicinity of spherical objects on football pitches. I could hardly pick the ball up as we were not playing rugby that term. Thus I did the only thing possible and gave the sodden leather ball as mighty a kick as I could possibly manage.

True to form, the ball, instead of sailing gracefully up the field to where team mates stood waiting in hopeful expectation, or possibly waiting to see which of them the ball was headed for so that they could run away from it, shot off my boot at an angle and at high speed like a navigationally challenged Cruise missile. With a loud and sickening thump it thudded into Mr Jackson or more precisely an area slightly south of his waistline. The sound brought play to a halt not only on our pitch but the top pitch as well as even the head of PE winced. Only I was close enough to hear the strangled “Meep!” as Mr Jackson folded to his knees and curled into a foetal position in the soggiest, muddiest part of the pitch. His whistle slipped from his lips and tears rolled down his ashen cheeks as he lay there for several moments before rising unsteadily to his feet and as he staggered back to the changing rooms clutching his injured groin, Mr Davies was heard to add insult to injury with the polite enquiry of “So, do you need some liniment rubbing into that?”

Luckily the football term ended that week but we were treated to the sight of Mr Jackson wearing an uncharacteristically baggy pair of trousers and never once sitting down for several days afterwards and all those present at the time agreed that the ball could not have been better targeted than if George Best himself had kicked it.

Booze Club

Our Chemistry master, Mr Roberts, was an extremely trusting soul, perhaps a little too trusting of our sixth form chemistry group given that in the eighteen months he had been teaching us we had managed to almost gas the school, leave a large smoking crater in a demonstration bench after a thermite reaction went a bit wrong and nearly kill the headmaster as well. Perhaps these incidents had slipped his mind on the day he asked us to bring some alcohol in to the next weeks lesson for an experiment in distillation.

I’m sure he only meant for us to bring a small amount of alcohol in to school but when the fateful day arrived it came with the sound of clinking bottles from various rucksacks and shoulder bags. Taking his request a bit too literally we had all raided our parents wine cellars, sideboards and cupboards under the stairs and had with us a selection of booze that could have kept George Best, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton and most of the tramps that gathered in the local park unconscious for about a week. Pete, our resident punk rocker had even lugged a gallon jug of 'Old Rats Arse' or some equally potent scrumpy in, presumably provided by one of his older mates whom he frequently got drunk with on the local green. Perhaps wisely, lest the boys toilet become more like a smoke filled pub than it usually was, other teachers insisted we left our experimental materials in the science lab so it was thus that the fume cupboard came to resemble a well stocked hostelry instead as the various bottles liberated from parents boozes stashes were stacked within. In theory only a small amount would be needed for the experiment, the teachers were already eyeing up the rest.

Our chemistry lesson was the last two periods of the day, in the afternoon and it started innocuously enough…as most disasters do. It started with us distilling the Sherry Simon had stolen from his mum to produce neat alcohol. From there it went downhill. Bored with setting it, whatever and whoever we could pour it over on fire we wondered what else we could do with the positive cornucopia of alcoholic delights arrayed on the bench before us.

As fate would have it, about halfway through the lesson Mr Roberts was called away to deal with a problem and being the trusting soul he was left us on our own. It was then that Mark decided to see what his grandmothers’ Sanatogen tonic wine tasted like and before long bottles were being passed around like a wine and cheese evening where the host had forgotten the Gouda. I had ‘borrowed’ two bottles of my fathers homemade Orange wine, this, most of the participants in that Bacchanalian excess swear to this day was our undoing. Calling it wine was a bit of an understatement. If his Elderberry 1978 was a cheeky little number, his Orange wine was like being slapped in the face with a large and very alcoholic cricket bat. In fact I firmly believe that my father was in talks with NASA as they wanted it to fuel their space shuttles. In terms of alcohol content only certain hard to find vodka and the methylated spirits the corner hardware shop sold ranked above it. Generous amounts were sloshed into some of the cleaner beakers that may or may not have been used in experiments involving poisons and knocked back leaving participants gasping at what was described as ‘a bit of pokey old tackle’ by another mate in later years. In fact, if prohibition had been in force my father could have expected a visit from Elliot Ness and the boys with a selection of axes and a warrant that would send him to Alcatraz for life.

Either the problem that Mr Roberts was dealing with was a serious one or he had completely forgotten that he was supposed to be teaching and had wandered off somewhere as by now he had been gone for almost an hour and the effects of our rapid alcohol consumption had kicked in as unlike current teenagers who spend their time hanging around in bus shelters with a bottle of Bucky and of course Pete, the most any of us had consumed was a small white wine, some of Auntie Mabels Port or a lemonade shandy made with the weakest beer our parents could find on Christmas day. Mark began to look green round the gills, Karen and Rachel were slumped against the cupboards at the back of the labs, Chris had wandered off down the corridor in a daze humming the Wombles theme tune and apparently “Looking for some ice!” and Andy was face down amidst a sea of beakers. As for me, I was attempting to convince Martin that mixing all the booze that was left into one super cocktail was probably a bad thing to do. Unfortunately I was having little success, mainly down to my own advanced state of inebriation. Grans Advocaat had never had this sort of effect on me but then again I had never sunk an entire bottle of it washed down with a gin chaser and a bucket of meths.

We might have managed to get away with it if nobody had spotted us weaving our way out of the school gates at home time and providing none of the teachers turned up. It wasn’t to be and for us it could only get worse as the headmaster, alerted to what was happening by Chris stumbling into his study demanding “Ishe cubes”, arrived just as Andy woke up and went “BLLLEEERCH!” into one of the sinks. The head took one look at the semi-conscious bodies slumped around the lab, Pete hugging the remains of his gallon of cider and Martins super-cocktail that was bubbling away lethally on the front bench and asked what was probably the stupidest question of his life…

”What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

Looking back, Martins slurred answer of “Biology experiment sir, Effects of alcohol on human metabolishm. Been a bit too succeshful!” as he slowly toppled from his stool may have been the wrong one but it was absolutely inspired at the time.

Hurrah for Saint George!

In a moment of patriotic fervour that nowadays would have a mob of the towns politically correct, sandal munching, lentil wearing brigade writing letters to the local council and picketing the school gates Mrs Smith, my 3rd year junior teacher decided that it would be a good idea to put on a play about St George and the dragon for our long suffering parents instead of the usual Easter pageant. If she had known the pain and anguish the change from the usual fluffy bunnies and chicks would cause she would have stuck to something safer like the life and times of Jack the Ripper, the battle of Thermopylae or maybe a recreation of the Normandy landings with real guns.

For most of us our acting careers consisted of the school nativity play or if you were really lucky a part in the summer pageant. I fell into the latter and as part of the school summer fair I got to be in the presentation about historical happenings. In it I was a sailor, not just any sailor, no, one who was to die of plague. Buying water from an itinerant water seller we succumbed to the black death in seconds, possibly the fastest succumbing ever and three of us spent the rest of the presentation lying on the tarmac of the playground wondering if this would get us our equity cards. Instead it got us a polite round of applause and a chance to skive off early and get the best of the pickings on the homemade cake and bric-a-brac stalls. However, Mrs Smith had grander designs and as part of our patriotic presentation I got to be the arse end of the dragon complete with diving flipper feet and that’s where I think it started to go wrong.

The dragon costume was fashioned from an old blackout curtain covered with tin foil scales and finished with a papier mache head made by the ‘special’ kids in the form that looked less like a dragon and more like the mutant offspring of a coupling between a penguin and a rhino. Myself, Dave and another kid called Mike made up the human part that made it move around in a vaguely dragon like way although it has yet to be proved that dragons shuffled around at about 1/10th of a mile per hour emitting the occasional half hearted "GRRR!" as they did so.

Okay, nothing too bad about that apart from the fact that Mike was form 3Bs champion farter. We were all convinced his mum must feed him nothing but baked beans and Brussels sprouts for every meal of the week. As soon as he got the slightest bit nervous or excited he would begin to break wind uncontrollably so as a result as soon as he was asked a question by the teacher almost every lesson would be disrupted by FAAAAAAAAARRRRPPP and moments later the kind of smell banned by several international treaties would waft across the classroom sending pupils rushing for the windows with watering eyes. As the back end of the dragon my head was to be uncomfortably close to the source of those emanations and all I could do was pray that his nerves would hold and he could control himself for the ten minutes we were to be on stage.

After weeks of practice and mercifully for me, no problems from Mikes rear quarters, the big day arrived, parents assembled in the school hall and as an extra special treat the inmates of the old folks home across the road were wheeled out and took place in the front row and so the play began. It all went quite well. The girls were suitably terrified by our first appearance, the choir sung their song about dragons and St George heroically set off on his quest riding his horse made from an old cardboard box painted in a horsey sort of brown with a hobby horse head poking from it and on meeting us lot in our dragon costume set about us with his sword somewhat enthusiastically and that’s when it went horribly, horribly pear shaped.

Whether it was the enthusiastic beating or just sheer excitement that our big moment had arrived the terror began…

“Have at thee!” yelled St George.

PHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP replied the dragon closely followed by my anguished scream of “ARGH! Fucking Hell!” as Mike let rip with the ripest, juiciest fart he had ever let rip with and I tried to escape the noisome cloud in the confines of the blackout curtain. Unfortunately the fact I was wearing diving flippers meant that going anywhere fast was difficult and as it happened, fate stuck its fingers into the mix and one of the straps on my flippers broke. Coughing and gasping and fighting to get clear the inevitable happened, I tripped over the flipper and the momentum of my fall toppled us off the stage and into the elderly residents of the old folks home who had up to that point been enjoying themselves. We landed in an explosion of papier mache, chicken wire, tin foil, dentures, Zimmer frames and walking sticks, flattening at least six of the poor old folk. Parents stood aghast as the teachers rushed in to save the elderly guests from a hideous fate in the form of a blackout curtain that was emitting curious FARP, FARP, FARP noises and from which a hades-like stench arose whilst two of their pupils crawled away to be sick in the rubber plant that stood next to the stage. At least two of the pensioners had begun having flashbacks to the Somme and had started screaming “GAAAASSSS!” and a third was poking the curtain with her walking stick, which merely inflamed the situation as Mike, tangled in the material let fly with another fruity barrage. Parents, pensioners and teachers alike began to evacuate the hall holding handkerchiefs over their noses leaving Dave and I to drag Mike from the curtain before throwing up in the plant pot again.

The next day the school hall was placed out of bounds and the windows were left open. Nothing was ever mentioned about the play again but we did notice the headmaster carrying large baskets of fruit and several bottles of wine across to the old folks home a couple of days later. Oh and Mrs Smith mysteriously left the school at the end of the summer term never to return or be talked of again. Presumably haunted by the day she almost managed to do what ‘the hun’ had failed to do and finish off several WW1 veterans in an unprovoked attack with chemical weapons of mass destruction in the guise of a school play.

Le Dejeuner

Like many grand criminal master plans before it my foray into forgery and deception was doomed to failure.

The school I attended, a grammar that was only a short step away from being a public school judging by the number of sound thrashings and buggerings meted out behind the bike sheds had an interesting method of dispensing exercise books. When a book was running out of pages either through being filled with material of educational worth or games of hangman and speed knobs the subject teacher would sign the back page and off you would run to the school bursar, show him the signature and be issued with a new, pristine book to cover with rampant male body parts and maybe a bit of learning as well. Thus it was that having gained the signature of Mr Wilton our French master I learned with a few weeks practice to turn out a reasonable facsimile of said scribble. Just being able to do this was, on its own a pretty pointless exercise unless I fancied landing the teacher in it by scribbling ‘Mr Jones is gay’ signed Mr Wilton on the back of the staff toilet doors. However, it did have one very useful purpose…

Like many schools we had staggered lunches so that pupils on games that afternoon got in first then the other years in turn. Presumably this was to ensure that those on games had time to digest their lunch so that the games lesson did not descend into a hundred or so boys throwing up in the bushes after our sadistic gym master sent the participants on the customary five warm up laps of the playing fields. The ground staff frowned on mass puking as it made the Rhododendrons wilt. The only other people who could get onto first lunch were teachers and those who were receiving extra tuition over the lunch break. Thus if you were not one of those you faced the likelihood of soggy chips, burnt pizza and congealed gravy…or it might have been custard, it all looked and tasted the same. Anyhow, having discovered a talent for forging the French masters signature I used this to sign the back of dinner tickets, for a small fee of course, which enabled fellow pupils to get into first lunch by claiming they were having extra tuition. The profits were not too bad, averaging between £5 and £10 a week which was a good sum back then and certainly kept me in Panini stickers and Mars bars. The only problem was that like most of these things it got a bit out of hand as more pupils discovered my talent.

I suppose I should have noticed but I was too busy separating my fellow pupils from their pocket money for the privilege of avoiding the leftovers that nobody else wanted. The jingle of filthy lucre brought to me by my skilled forging had blinded me to the fact that this particular week I had spent most of the morning breaks and the periods moving between classes signing dinner tickets. At one point a queue had even built up outside the boys toilets where in competition to Adam and his porn empire I had set up shop in one of the stalls and was banging out strips of tickets at the rate of two a minute. In fact it did not dawn on me right up until the moment Mr Wilton stormed across the playground, grabbed me by the collar and hauled me up to the headmasters office.

My criminal master plan had come undone the moment almost the entire third and fourth years had turned up in the dining hall demanding to be fed because they had extra French tuition, not that the school had a classroom that could hold some two hundred pupils all wanting to chant “Jean-Paul est dans le jardin de Marie-Anne”. The school cooks faced with having to try to shift an industrial amount of chips and pizza over the counter had immediately closed the hatches and refused to budge and as a result trouble was brewing. The head cook, a truly scary woman whose resemblance to Giant Haystacks was uncanny had gone in search of Mr Wilton, the apparent cause of the chaos clutching a steak tenderiser and on finding him had threatened to do something unspeakable to his nut clusters. Thus alerted that it was something to do with him he set about finding the culprit and someone, pissed off at being denied their pizza and chips had ‘dobbed me in’. Now I found myself up in front of the headmaster with an apoplectic French teacher virtually demanding that I be summarily executed in front of the whole school for daring to forge his signature. Luckily for me the head had obviously just received the bill for the last firing squad and decided that 2000 lines and confiscation of profits was a more just punishment. The only problem was that confiscation of profits meant an increased likelihood of a swift buggering or worse behind the bike sheds when I could not reimburse the irate lynch mob that was forming in the playground.

It was lucky then that I had also learned how to forge the Geography masters signature as well and was able to fob most of my fellow pupils off with that in a strictly controlled manner of course. So apart from the 2000 lines which I had bribed Nicko to do with a promise of a months worth of News of the World stolen from next doors dustbin that he could cut the glamour adverts out of it all ended quite well. I avoided severe pain and a sore arse and I even managed to recoup my profits from forging the Geography masters signature and increasing my used tennis ball business, the latter of which, oddly ended in pain and disaster as well but that’s another story.

Funnily enough, shortly after that I was suddenly demoted from Mr Wiltons top French set to what would now be known as the ‘remedial’ set. Not that I minded at all as it was taught by the far more pleasant and definitely more pneumatic Miss Lessing.

I never did find out who grassed on me though.