Stalag

As the gates swung slowly shut behind them they dropped their packs on the hard dusty ground and surveyed their new surroundings. There were the barrack huts, the toilet block, the simple hall and last of all the electric fence that enclosed it all. So this was where the troublemakers finally got sent. They stood in numbed disbelief as the commandant strode onto the parade ground.

“Zere vill be no escape! Any attempts to do so und you vill be shot…und ze village shop is out of bounds unless you are accompanied by a teacher!”

Class 4S had arrived at school camp.

It was late September 1976, the long hot summer was a distant memory and we had been packed off to school camp. None of us were sure why. It could have been to foster a sense of camaraderie in our last year at primary school. It could have been to toughen us up for a future career in the Foreign Legion or it could have simply been because our parents wanted to get rid of us for a couple of weeks so they could head for the local Berni Inn to stuff their faces with Avocado and Prawn salad and steak all washed down with a bottle of Blue Nun in peace. Whatever it was, it meant we found ourselves sharing semi-derelict huts with 20 of our mates and a variety of wildlife all set in a place whose resemblance to one of the prison camps most of us had only seen in the ‘Wooden Horse’ was reinforced by the graffiti on the toilet walls…’Hauptman Willi Schmitt 1943’.

For the next two weeks every day would be the same. Wake up sharing the bed with an assortment of bugs and the odd Badger who had crawled into your sleeping bag overnight as it was warmer and drier than their usual hedge. Be driven out of the hut by our shouty gym master and forced to dive into the outdoor pool that was colder than a seals arse during an arctic winter, although to be fair to him he usually dived in soon after, such behaviour not arousing much suspicion in those more innocent days. This was followed by breakfast served by a group of dinner ladies whose sense of humour had been surgically removed at birth and then we would go on an ‘educational’ trip that usually consisted of a ten mile hike up a windswept hill. In the afternoon we would return to be allowed a few hours freedom which would invariably involve electrocuting the class swot on the electric fence that surrounded the camp unless they had fallen down a cliff or wandered off in a fog bank on the hike. Most of us would go foraging in the surrounding woods for nuts and Damsons to supplement our diet before being served with dinner by an even more humour-impaired bunch of staff.

Within a day of arrival classmates could be seen wandering around the scrubby football pitch with earth trickling from their trouser legs, there were rumours of a tunnel going out from under the ‘concert hall’ stage and most of the spoons had vanished from the canteen for digging purposes. At least two of our number went ‘over the wire’ but were recaptured after running into a couple of guar...teachers staggering back from the local pub. Suffice it to say school camp was not that enjoyable, at least not until the penultimate day.

We had been hounded out of our hut, leaving our warm sleeping bags and whatever creatures that had joined us behind and were headed for the pool. The front ranks however, had halted on the edge and were staring at the frigid water whilst jumping up and down to work some warmth back into their limbs. As we reached them we saw why but from behind us we heard a yell of

“Come on you lot, don’t be such a bunch of nancies! Get in the water!” as our shouty gym teacher pounded down the path.

“But sir!” began Dave…

“Don’t but me lad! I’ll show you how it’s done!” came the reply as Mr Shouty dived into the pool, surfacing almost exactly in the centre of what we had been looking at.

During the night the cows in the field had managed to break the fence and were now milling around the football pitch. One of them was probably the one who had decided that the pool was the ideal place to drop a rather large load of cow dung, cow dung that had formed a dungy slick that our gym teacher had just surfaced in the middle of. For a teacher who had just called us a bunch of ‘nancies’ he could certainly scream like a girl as he launched himself, flailing from the pool, a dollop of cow poo running down his face and ran back down the path towards the toilet block where he locked himself in a shower stall for several hours. The memory of him emerging screaming from the pool plastered in cow manure stayed with us for the rest of the year and did far more to bond us together than any educational trip up a hill ever did. Years later I heard that the nickname we had bestowed upon him stayed with him throughout his school career and for the next twenty years pupils would know him as ‘Mr Sh*thead’.

International Cuisine

We live in dangerous times. Terrorists want to blow us up on a regular basis, there’s a paedophile on every corner and as for going as far as the garden gate, forget it, you will be mugged by a gang of hoodies before you even leave the doorstep. It wasn’t like that back in the day was it? No, the danger came from elsewhere…the Russians, nuclear Armageddon and mothers who had embraced international cuisine just like mine had.

In the 70s food was still pretty unadventurous unless you were willing to risk the joys of a Vesta Chow Mein with its prawn crackers that resembled wood shavings and tasted pretty much like them as well. The local takeaway was most likely to be a chippy run by a couple in their mid fifties whose idea of international cuisine was a mushy pea fritter and whose overalls had last been laundered in 1958. Nipping out for a lamb bhuna was unheard of. If you wanted something exotic like French, Italian or Indian food it usually meant a plate of mince that had either been adulterated with enough garlic to see off a legion of vampires, had a can of chopped tomatoes and a bay leaf dumped in it or was filled with apples, raisins and some dodgy spices from the Co-op and passed off as a curry. In fact if mince could have been bleached white and called ‘Rice Pudding’ it probably would have.

However, back in the 1950s mum was quite the international traveller, journeying through what was left of Europe after the Wehrmacht World Tour of ’39 in the cause of mending international relations. In her case this seemed to involve some very dodgy bars in the Reeperbahn and some matadors who turned out to be Basque terrorists. Unfortunately a few strange culinary tastes she had picked up kind of stuck. Being young I knew nothing of this barring her tendency to serve up Pilchard Pizza on a fairly regular basis. She claimed it was because anchovies were too expensive but we had our suspicions involving the back of a Glenryck lorry and my slightly dodgy uncle. All of this was to change one summer Sunday in 1975…

It was a warm day but I was indoors watching television as my mate Ross who I would normally have been rampaging around the neighbourhood with had been dragged out to see his grandparents when I became aware of an emanation, something unpleasant wafting phantom-like across the living room. Dad had noticed it too as he was standing in the doorway sniffing the air. Slowly he crossed the room and paused in front of the fireplace.

“Something has died in the chimney!” he pronounced sagely, picked up a poker and stuck his head into the grate, peering upwards to see if he could spot the source of the smell. For a moment or two he poked and prodded until the poking and prodding was drowned by a muffled thump and the room filled with soot. Dad emerged from the chimney resembling a black and white minstrel. Luckily, given his vocal talents or lack thereof, he felt no need to break into a quick rendition of “Old Man River”. The fact that he was coughing his boots up probably saved my young ears from a less than tuneful medley from the deep south as well. However, apart from half a tonne of soot and a couple of urchins who had been stuck up the chimney since 1845 there was no sign of the source of the smell.

“It must be under the floorboards!” announced dad having now recovered his composure and trotted off to the shed as he was wont to do in times of crisis, returning moments later with a crowbar. Soon the carpet was rolled back and floorboards lifted, the living room looked like a scene from a prisoner of war film, piles of dirt and floorboards all over the place. All it needed was one of the neighbours to arrive dressed as a comedy nazi and announce “Zo! You zink you can escape! Vell zink again!” or for dad to order me to fill my pockets with dirt and wander around the flowerbeds shaking my leg “…and make sure the goons don’t spot you lad!” and the scene would have been complete.

Once again, dad poked and prodded under the floorboards but could find nothing yet all the time the smell grew stronger. In fact the closer I stood to the kitchen door to evade dads tunnelling exertions the stronger it got until with some trepidation I worked up the courage to poke my nose into the kitchen…and wished I hadn’t

“Dad! I think it might be the fridge!”

“Don’t be silly son, it can’t be the fridge…BLOODY HELL!!!!”

Slowly he opened the door and we both reeled back as the putrid stench rose in miasmic waves around us. Some foreign power had obviously unleashed chemical weapons in the vicinity of our kitchen appliances, all we could do was phone the police and pray they had the resources to contain the disaster or the whole country was doomed. Of course, this being 1975 they would have probably sent the local bobby round on his bicycle rather than a full biohazard team. Whatever the evil device was, it was cylindrical and apparently covered in a sheath of wood. Bravely, dad advanced and with only an oven glove to protect him began to carry the deadly object towards the back door. At which point mum arrived…

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” she demanded surveying what was left of the living room, “And where do you think you are going with my Camembert?”

“Camembert?” asked an incredulous dad “I thought someone had stuffed the fridge with dead rats! You realise we’ll have to get the house fumigated.”

“You are not fumigating my cheese!” said mum snatching the reeking mass from dads oven gloved hand and like a female version of Wallace announced, “I’m going to have that on some nice crackers!”

Dad and I suddenly went very, very green.

Eternal Damnation

It was fizzy pop that earned me eternal damnation. Well, not quite the fizzy pop but the bottles it came in although the pop played its part later in the sorry tale.

During the summer I spent a lot of time at my grandparents house so it was not surprising I became friends with a few of the local kids and one in particular. Dan lived just around the corner and summer days would often find us playing out in the streets. Mostly this involved running around playing war games, although sometimes we would go and explore the area. A favourite haunt was an area of waste ground at the end of the road Dan lived in. Surrounded by bushes and overgrown Buddleia it was an ideal hiding place and according to Dans mate Ben you could find magazines with pictures of men and women doing ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ was, left there by the tramps that sometimes used it as a place to doss down overnight. His brother had told him so. However, we didn’t entirely believe him as the most we had found up there were a dozen empty Colt .45 beer cans, a small mountain of fag ends and a well thumbed Readers Digest. It was obvious that the alky dosser that had been up there had only been interested in improving his word power rather than fumbling over a copy of Playboy. Still it didn’t stop us going to check the place out.

Crawling through a gap in the fence that surrounded the area we emerged into the cool green undergrowth and almost immediately Dan fell over a sack that made clinking noise. Naturally we had to open it and tip out its contents. There before us lay about twenty Corona lemonade bottles looking suspiciously like someone had urinated in them. Our first reaction was “Aww! Yuck!” closely followed by “Hang on! We can get 10p each for these at the newsagents.” Our desire for filthy lucre won out over our natural disgust.

We were faced with a quandary, we wanted the money but to get it we would have to empty twenty piss filled bottles. Dan solved it by running back up the road and stealing a pair of Marigolds from his mums kitchen. Twenty minutes later we had a sack full of empty bottles and were headed for the newsagents like small versions of Steptoe and Son. Oddly the newsagent didn’t bat an eyelid. Either he was used to nine year old lads turning up with tatty old sacks full of wee smelling Corona bottles or he just didn’t give a damn as he knew what would happen next. Twenty bottles meant two pounds in refunded deposits. The newsagents had the biggest selection of sweets in town and two pounds in 1975 was a huge amount. We spent the lot on sweets, Panda pop, crisps and a copies of that weeks Victor and Hotspur comics. Two pounds bought enough E numbers, tartrazine and sugar to fell an elephant and the newsagent got his money straight back. An hour later all the sweets were gone, inside us as we read our comics.

What next? Simple. We grabbed a couple of toy guns from Dans room and headed down to the churchyard where we could hear some of the other kids playing war and for the next half hour or so we charged around screaming “Achtung!” and “Take that Fritz!” in time honoured British war comic tradition fuelled by E numbers and sugar. Meanwhile I could feel something bubbling inside me, something not quite right. Dan looked decidedly peaky and we both agreed that maybe we should sit out the next assault on the dastardly hun who were bunkered down under the Yew tree.

We had hardly slumped on the warm stone steps than the vicar arrived to find a couple of lads tooled up with toy Tommy guns and pistols whilst another eight or so raced round the building yelling “BANG!” and “Ratatatatatat!” at the top of their lungs.

“You really should not be playing war games here.” He admonished us “This is a place of worship and peace.”

“ERP!” said Dan.

“I beg your pardon, what was that you sai…”

“ERP!” I glanced at Dan, he had gone a strange grey pale colour…

HWWWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRPPPP! The remains of Dans sweets splattered the church step. I felt my own stomach give a volcanic lurch as the bubbling mix of pop, space dust, sweets and corn based snacks began to rise…

BLLLLLEEEEEUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRGGGGHHH!!

A mixture of foam prawns, blackjacks, fruit salads, dinosaur chews, sugar mice, sherbet fountain, space dust, cheesy puffs, limeade and the Spam sandwiches gran had made for my lunch sprayed the Vicar from the waist down as if I was auditioning for the next Exorcist film but without the demonic head spinniness. Come to think of it, if my head had been spinning it probably would not have provoked half the reaction it did. For a man of God the vicar certainly had a ripe turn of phrase. He used some words that neither Dan nor I had heard before and the next time I heard them was fifteen years later whilst out on a bender with some squaddie mates of mine. Dan and I looked at each other in horror. He was damned because he had puked on the house of God. Me? I was eternally damned as I had thrown up on Gods representative on Earth. Given the religious connections of the moment Dan and I thought the same thing “What would Jesus do?”

I didn’t know if space dust and foam prawns were that common in first century Galillee but I was sure that if he was nine years old and had just barfed half a pound of them mixed with corrosive green limeade over the temple priest he would have done what we did…ran and spent the rest of the day hiding in Josephs, or in our case Dans’ dads’ garden shed. At least his dad could smite anyone who gave him a clip round the ear with a plague of locusts. When mine found out due to the vicar unfortunately knowing my granddad I was grounded for a fortnight and the pocket money I had been saving for a box of Airfix 1/72^nd Afrika Korps soldiers went to pay for the vicars trousers to be dry cleaned. I still can’t look at a foam prawn without feeling queasy.

How not to build a jet fighter

Personally I blame World War 2 for landing me in a whole load of trouble as a child. If it had not been for a succession of grandparents, aunts and uncles rattling on about how they fought Jerry in the desert armed only with a toothpick and British pluck or the night the Luftwaffe came to visit and blew up Mr Browns prize marrow I probably would not have grown into the military obsessed child I did. Of course, Sunday afternoon war films and having a father who had served in the RAF probably did not help either. It was watching one such film that ended up with my mate John and I being hauled over the coals for what was probably the first and last aerial bombing raid over our town since the war had ended.

John was as obsessed as I was with all things military and all things air force in particular and like me had been glued to the television during a screening of ‘The Sound Barrier’, a black and white film about how British aerospace engineers overcame the problems of supersonic flight. Meeting up at school the next day it was a major topic of conversation and we decided to have a go at jet-powered flight ourselves. Not literally of course, building a Gloster Meteor in the garage would have been plain silly and an experiment in unpowered flight a few years earlier had come close to costing my mate Dave a brother.

As a hobby Johns father made and flew model gliders and his garden shed was full of them including a fair few that he had built and then put to one side as not being good enough in some way. One of these was to be the basis for our experiments in jet-propelled flight. However, we were not going to use anything as mundane as a couple of Rolls Royce engines. No, we had other plans that involved a number of firework rockets left over from bonfire night and hidden behind my wardrobe should such an occasion arise.

A glider was purloined and in my fathers’ shed we set to the tricky engineering task of securing several of the rockets, each of which was a fair size to each wing. This was scientifically achieved using string, rubber bands and a roll of masking tape. Next, using an old coat hanger we created a device for ensuring all the blue touch papers were lit simultaneously as we knew that if they were not the rockets would not fire at the same time.

We were now ready for the maiden flight of the ‘Phoenix’ named after the plane in another of our favourite films so as stealthily as we could possibly be lugging a balsa and tissue paper glider with a wingspan of about six feet and having a number of fireworks attached to it we sneaked it over the back wall, round the corner and down to the local park which was ideal for plane launches as from the top wall it sloped steeply down to the rusty climbing frames.

Standing up by the wall John held the glider ready whilst I applied our Mk1 booster ignition system™. At my shout John hurled the glider as hard as he could. Looking back, this was the moment it all went very wrong indeed. We had overlooked a few minor details and despite a good launch these minor ‘details’ were about to make things go somewhat awry.

Firstly despite our Mk1 booster ignition system™ the rockets all fired at slightly different times. The first two went off at about the same time and the glider shot forward for about half a second until the second overlooked factor kicked in…rubber bands, string and some ropey old masking tape found in a bin don’t hold rocket propulsion systems to aircraft very well. It’s why real engineers use big bolts and welding kits otherwise aircraft would be left standing on runways whilst the engines zoomed gracefully over the horizon to blow up old folks homes or something. The two fireworks streaked off into the distance over the climbing frames to hit the allotments beyond the park fence.

Things probably wouldn’t have been too bad had Johns English teacher had not been out walking her dog that day. Her dog, a Yorkshire terrier, was known throughout the school for being a vicious, yappy thing that would have your ankles as soon as look at you and was universally hated by everyone including a few of the other teachers. Just as disaster struck and as fate would have it she rounded the corner of some bushes about halfway down the park only to have two projectiles whoosh over her head on their way to blow up some poor gardeners prize brassicas. Seconds later the rest of the rockets parted company from the glider which had now not only gone slightly out of control but had caught on fire as balsa wood and tissue paper is wont to do when placed in close proximity to eight fire farting cardboard tubes. Two of the rockets shot into the air, one bounced off the roof of the park toilets and the other three headed straight towards Johns teacher who stood aghast as they screamed in her direction.

John and I could only look on in abject terror muttering “Ohshittingfuckingarseinghell!!” as the missiles closed in. Fortunately for us though gravity had a few plans of its own and the trajectory of two of the rockets brought them down to earth where they exploded relatively harmlessly, if of course you call two rather loud bangs and a shower of sparks in one of the park keepers carefully tended rose beds that scattered petals to the wind and gave all worms in a two yard radius a headache ‘relatively harmless’. The third had its own agenda and kept going until it hit a pine tree just behind the unfortunate teacher except this time there were no sparks, just a very loud bang which brought a good dozen pine cones, a shower of small branches and a birds nest, the latter being fortunately empty, down around her. The last thing John and I heard and saw before we fled the scene was her scream of mortal horror as her dog, scared witless by the first bombing raid since 1943 leapt into her arms and added insult to being almost blown up by one of her pupils and his mate by losing control of its bowels as it did so.

Suffice it to say, our parents were not happy with our forays into powered flight and we were grounded for a month. In school however, John was a hero. The physics master was even heard to mutter “Next time, get your aim right!” as he passed by in the corridor. Me? I was just glad I did not attend the same school as John seemed to get an awful lot of extra English homework over the next few months.