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.
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