Those magnificent men...

Computer games and films make kids violent. At least according to the media they do. It wasn’t like that in the good old days was it? Was it? No, we were far, far worse. In the absence of the first person shooter us horrible lot had to make do with running around the neighbourhood with an assortment of toy weaponry that would make Rambo green with envy and as for films well we had three channels of TV entertainment to choose from. That however, was plenty if you had our ability for landing ourselves in trouble, the kind of warped imaginations we had and ‘Colditz’ on TV.

My best mate Dave had a dad who was possibly a builder. He may have been a professor with a penchant for collecting bricks, I never quite found out what he did. Whatever he was he had a shed full of the kind of stuff that builders usually had. Nails, screws, planks of wood, power tools and a huge pile of bricks in the back garden. Apparently it was something to do with the garage he was going to build but we could not quite see the logic of that given that the back garden was actually about twelve feet higher than the back lane due to Dave living half way up a hill. However, it did give us one of our more spectacularly crazed ideas.

One of the channels had shown a programme about prisoners of war, it was probably the BBC series ‘Colditz’ but given that most of the channels filled their schedules with programmes about the war it could have been something else. Whatever it was it sparked our imagination and one slightly damp morning in the half term holiday Dave and I decided to build our own glider as the programme had been about prisoners trying to escape their camp using a homemade glider. Not for us months of meticulous planning and stealing sheets from the camp commandant to cover the carefully engineered fuselage. No, we headed straight for Dave's dads shed pausing only to dig an old pedal powered racing car that had belonged to Dave out of the overgrown hedge where it had been left when he grew out of it. This would be the body of our glider providing we could get all the wood lice and slugs out first.

For the next couple of hours we hammered, sawed, nailed, bolted, de-slugged and let fly with the occasional swear word when a plank fell on our feet and soon we had our magnificent flying machine. Magnificent that is if you could see it as a graceful and superbly engineered flying machine, not something that looked like a kids pedal car with a couple of planks nailed to it with six inch nails and then wrapped round with a length of old rope just to make sure they did not fall off. Now how could we get it to fly?

We were not that stupid, after all my granddad was a physicist and engineer who had worked in the aircraft industry and we knew that it would need a bit of a run up, just chucking it off the back wall would doom it to failure. What we needed was a ramp…a couple of planks would do the trick if we could haul the ‘glider’ up to the top of the shed, which by good fortune had a flat roof. Another twenty or so minutes of sweating saw the ‘glider’ perched precariously on the edge of the roof and three planks that had what looked suspiciously like woodworm holes in them leading from it to the garden wall. Now all we needed was a pilot. As I mentioned before, we were not stupid and neither of us were going to risk life and limb. Just at that moment, Rob, the youngest of Daves brothers wandered into the garden clutching several Dinky cars. Timing! He was small enough to fit into our contraption.

“Er! How would you like to play pilots ?” enquired Dave innocently.

“Playing with my cars!” answered Rob

“I’ll give you my Royal Limousine if you’ll be our pilot!” I piped in, ‘accidentally’ forgetting to tell Rob that my Royal Limousine, a much loathed birthday present had met with a spectacular end from the top landing of my house after being attacked by terrorists disguised as my mates Airfix Afrika Korps soldiers as I tried half heartedly to fight them off with my plucky British Commandos.

“Yeah, okay!” came the answer.

“Brill! Just climb up there then…”

The gods must have been smiling on Rob that day as just as he started climbing the ladder we had leant against the shed it started raining and Daves mum called us in for lunch. By the time the rain had stopped and we had stuffed ourselves with Spam sandwiches we had forgotten the glider and anyway, a bunch of our mates were out on the green playing cricket. However, as we returned home later that afternoon having visited the sweet shop we happened to walk down the back lane, there, in a crumpled heap was our glider. We paused, looked at it and shook our heads.

“Maybe we should have used lighter planks?”

Rob never knew how close he had come to being the first fatality of our aeronautical endeavours. In fact the only thing that had flown that day was time…oh and the slugs as we chucked them out of the shed window and even they were not designed for that purpose either.

Tales from the hippy house

World War 2 had seen a fair few changes brought about in the area my mates and I lived in. Most of these came courtesy of short sighted Luftwaffe bomb aimers trying to hit the more militarily strategic targets of the local chocolate factory and the corner sweet shop as revenge for being short changed on a bag of mint humbugs in 1938 and as a result there were several patches of ground that had become acquainted with large lumps of Krupps steel and high explosive. This being the mid 1970s meant that although hostilities had ceased some thirty or so years earlier no-one had quite got around to deciding what to do with the overgrown, bramble covered areas and derelict houses as they were all too busy going on strike or leering at the female form at the local flea-pit which was showing ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’ or some such classic British smut. As a result, us kids had a plethora of playgrounds provided for us by the local councils apathy, smut obsessed planners and a couple of Herman Goerings finest who had forgotten to visit the opticians in 1940.

The ‘Hippy House’ sat like a strange, grey concrete lump on one such patch of explosively redeveloped land. As kids we were warned to stay away from it, probably in case being in close proximity to it made us suddenly want to abandon our Raleigh Choppers and flared Jeans, discover purple loon pants and a buy ticket to Woodstock instead. Mixing with the gypsy kids who stabled their horses on a similarly bomb damaged area of land down the road and who apparently had no parents nor a need to attend any of the local schools was fine but hippies, dangerous creatures, we might be dancing with flowers in our hair before we knew it.

Then, one day, completely out of the blue, the hippies left, presumably in a moment of rebellion they had exchanged their lifestyle of tie-dyed shirts and free love for that of a suit, tie and a double entry ledger. Our parents could no longer ban us from having a look. Even better a few months earlier we had moved a few streets away so my parents wouldn’t know. The house and its environs became a magnet, even more so as my friends John and Dave and I, being the militarily obsessed kids we were had recognized that some of the windows were actually cockpit parts from a Lancaster bomber. Where the ‘hippies’ had found them we didn’t know although one of the older members of the community who was probably once called Squadron Leader Moonbeam Flowerchild instead of ‘Squiffy’ or ‘Battler’ might have forgotten to give the plane back after the war ended. Suffice it to say we became convinced the rest of the aircraft must be around there somewhere and its treasures would be ours. A couple of .303 machineguns would make short work of the school bully. Thus one sunny summer holiday morning in the absence of anything better to do what with games consoles having not yet arrived having seen the Flash Gordon serial about six times before, we set off to find the ‘lost bomber’ along with another friend, Mark.

Poking around the now abandoned house it became obvious there was nothing there apart from a rather moth eaten sofa and a very strange, almost organic smell that seemed to have infused itself into the walls so we decided to have an explore of the rest of the area. The houses next door were abandoned and awaiting demolition as they had been doing since the Luftwaffes last excursion and there might be treasure in there or the rest of the Lancaster or even better, a Mosquito. We might be famous and get in the papers when we found it.

Gaining entry to the nearest house was easy. We lowered Mark and a lamp from one of our bikes down the coal chute into the cellar. It didn’t look like a particularly long drop as the house was almost identical to the one I had lived in up the road and I had often slid down the chute when I got locked out. Anyway, Mark was expendable as at that time he wasn’t a regular member of the gang. Once he had confirmed the cellar was clear of zombies, vampires, winos or unexploded bombs the rest of us followed.

It soon became clear that the house contained neither the remains of a WW2 aircraft nor a hoard of treasure. In fact it contained nothing barring a dead pigeon, a whole lot of mouse droppings, a rather dodgy looking mattress and a small stack of late 60s magazines of the 'artistic' variety, probably stashed there by one of the hippies who wasn’t getting his fair share of free love. It also became horribly clear that we were not getting out of the house either. The doors and windows had been nailed shut and boarded over and we discovered that the coal chute was completely un-climbable after best part of an hour trying to shove Mark back up it being as he was the youngest and smallest. In fact, the only window that we could open was in the attic and these being big Georgian houses meant that it was some forty plus feet above the pavement so we only one choice. Mark burst into tears and the rest of us brave explorers turned into a bunch of big girls and screamed for help.

We certainly got into the papers, next day the local rag gave us half a column inch ‘Fire brigade rescues four boys who became trapped in a derelict building. Residents call for demolition to prevent tragedy’. Oh and to add insult to injury, we were hauled over the coals by the attending firemen, our parents and the local bobby who had been dragged out of the greasy spoon cafe around the corner in the middle of his elevenses to attend the scene.

However, next term at school we were the heroes of the hour, not because our exploits got us into the paper, more to do with the fact that John had the presence of mind to stuff half a dozen of the vintage jazz mags up his jumper just before the firemen had kicked the door in and now we were renting them out at 10p a night to the other kids. Fortune and glory may not have been ours for the taking but we were doing very nicely as purveyors of the finest filth to most of the school.

Chopper

Say the words ‘design classic’ and most people will think of the London tube map, the Rolex Oyster Perpetual or perhaps the classic Coca Cola bottle. The Raleigh Chopper bicycle is not necessarily the first thing that springs to mind and the reason for that may be that a lot more people than are letting on had bad experiences with it or more precisely the gear lever that appeared to have been designed by a disciple of the Marquis de Sade. It was however, undoubtedly the coolest looking bike around, like something Evel Knievel might ride so every kid wanted one.

My parents had decided from an early age that I would have a nice safe, sensible bicycle in a nice safe, sensible shade of blue. Daves’ parents on the other hand had given in and bought his brother Alex a Raleigh a few years earlier and by default this passed to Dave when Alex got a new bicycle. My opinion of Dave was that he was a jammy sod as my parents were stubbornly resisting my pleas for a shiny new Raleigh which was probably down to the fact that they knew I would do something silly with it that would involve a trip to casualty. They knew me all too well.

Dave got his Chopper soon after Christmas and no sooner had he got his hands on it than I was round at his house to try it out. For an hour or so we took turns riding it up and down the road outside his house, occasionally zooming round the block via the back lane. So far so good but then a couple of our mates from school appeared and we decided, as you do that it would be cool to emulate Mr Knievel by using a piece of wood as a ramp to jump over people lying on the ground. So we did and miraculously without casualties. That’s when we got cocky, how about jumping over people two to a bike? Excellent idea! How do we get enough speed? How about doing it on the “Hill o’ certain doom!”, the steepest hill in the area ? Ace! How about setting the ramp on fire? Er…no!

Now this is where things started to go downhill fast. Literally! We convinced our school mates to lie in the road about a third of the way down the hill as it wasn’t a busy road and set the ramp up. Dave and I pushed the bike to the top of the hill, climbed aboard and set off with him pedalling as fast as he could. We hit the ramp perfectly and sailed over our mates imagining the crowd going wild at this Knievel-esque bravery. All we had to do was stop and this is the point at which Dave made an alarming discovery. Alex had not cared for the bike quite as well as he could have or to put it simply, the brakes were knackered and us racing around the block for two hours had knackered them even more. The bike lived up to its reputation for developing a wobble at speed. We screamed like girls. Dave pumped the brakes. Nothing happened. We screamed like even bigger girls. Dave hauled on the brakes and the bike came to a sudden halt.

Now remember that gear lever that I was talking about? It’s why they called the bike ‘The Chopper’. Perfectly positioned to catch Dave in the bollocks as he shot forward off the saddle. He didn’t scream initially, his only noise was a muffled “Eeep!” I did not get time to scream as he rebounded and the back of his head hit me in the face. Seconds later we were lying in the middle of the road, him rolled into a ball clutching his battered testicles and saying things that a ten year old really should not say and me wondering where all the blood was coming from that was covering the jumper that mum had threatened to slaughter me if I got it dirty. It really was lucky the hill was not busy as it was a good five minutes before we could pick ourselves up. Our mates simply stood by trying to suppress sniggers, the bastards!. Fortunately for us Daves gran, an ex-hospital matron lived in a side road off the hill and had become used to us suddenly appearing with cuts and bruises so we staggered round there, him walking like a cowboy that has just been kicked in the nuts and me with my jumper stuffed up my nose to stem the flow of blood.

Daves gran was remarkably calm when presented with her grandson clutching his groin, supported by two lads trying not to laugh and his best mate bleeding all over her carpet and set to patching us up which seemed to involve copious amounts of ice cubes applied to the afflicted parts. Whether it was the accident or frostbite Dave walked a bit oddly for weeks afterwards. As for the Chopper ? That got passed on to Daves younger brother who managed to break his arm after riding it into a 2CV a couple of months later and after that we all agreed that a nice sensible bike in a nice sensible colour was by far the best option even if it did not make us look like Evel Knievel.