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.
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.
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