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.