At the risk of sounding like an old fart, wandering off at a tangent and starting on about remembering when all this was fields, penny chews cost a ha’penny and “I fought at Wipers y’know!” there was a time when kids did not have to rely on a box of electronics beneath the television for their entertainment. Don’t get me wrong, games consoles are great but to save us from becoming fat bastards back in the 70s we had the great outdoors to run around in, bombsites to play on and …er…Dean to scare us witless.
Dean was the local hard nut and if you were unfortunate enough to attend the same school as him then he was the school bully as well. Unfortunately several of us did. About a year older and twice the size of most of us he made Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Kenneth Williams. Despite his Flashman tendencies however, there was no way he could be described as the sharpest tool in the tool box but what he lacked in brains he certainly made up for in brawn. When you saw him coming you not only ran but spent what was left of your pocket money on a ticket for the first plane out of the country too. Most of us had felt his fists at some point and more than a few had contributed to what he called his ‘Grub fund’ with their dinner money. Suffice it to say most of us did not count Dean amongst our circle of best mates.
One day John, Mark and myself decided to take our airguns up to the waste ground at the back of the print works. As mentioned in a previous post it was a great place to hang out being a mixture of abandoned allotment, bombed out buildings and industrial refuse tip used by the printers and back in those days three lads with airguns did little to excite any interest whatsoever. Nowadays we could expect four vans of the local finest and an MP5 stuck in our ears by a black clad member of SO19 just in case we were Al-Qaeda (under 12s division).
For an hour or so we were happy plinking away at rusty tins set up on a piece of wall then growing bored we began to scout around for better targets. Our searching led us to the printers rubbish pile and we discovered a whole load of empty aerosol glue cans. Now, having already almost been blown up by what we found on the printers refuse heap in the past you might have thought we had learned our lesson but no! The glue cans were duly set up on the wall and we retreated to a safe distance to begin our marksmanship again. John had a decent .22 calibre rifle as his parents were pretty well off and he had stolen it from his older brother. Using this we were rewarded with a few decent pops and fizzes as the cans punctured under our concentrated barrage. Then we got more adventurous when Mark found some spray paint cans on the tip and we remembered the scene from Kellys Heroes when Oddball and his tank crew fire paint rounds “because they make beautiful pictures”. Time to make some art we thought.
This time though the cans were made of stronger stuff and stubbornly refused to burst and in our attempts to create ‘art’ we failed to notice the arrival of Dean until we were interrupted with “Whatchoo doin’ then?” from behind us. This was followed by “You poofs ain’t doin’ it right!” as he pushed past us and snatched Johns air rifle out of his hands. Perhaps unfortunately for Dean the rifle was loaded as if it had not been his life might have carried on as normal from that point. Without a pause he marched up to the row of cans on the wall and at point blank range he took aim and fired. Time seemed to stand still and the resulting ‘POP’ and “FWOOOOOOSH!” seemed to take bullet time proportions as the half filled, pressurised can of blue paint ruptured covering Dean from head to toe.
The three of us were in something of a quandary, openly laughing at Dean in his presence could see us beaten to a pulp but to see him standing there resembling a Smurf just cracked us up. In the end we solved the dilemma by delivering him home, as straight-faced as possible, knocking on the door and leaving him on the doorstep for his mum to find whilst we legged it down the road as fast as we could, which wasn’t very fast as we were laughing too much. A kid who lived next door to him later told us that Dean had been escorted into the back yard by his father and scrubbed with turpentine to get the paint off. Deans yelling and screaming had apparently lasted almost two hours but in spite of his fathers’ best efforts, for the next few weeks whenever we saw him he had a faintly blue tinge about him that soon earned him the reputation destroying nickname ‘Papa’.
Dean was the local hard nut and if you were unfortunate enough to attend the same school as him then he was the school bully as well. Unfortunately several of us did. About a year older and twice the size of most of us he made Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Kenneth Williams. Despite his Flashman tendencies however, there was no way he could be described as the sharpest tool in the tool box but what he lacked in brains he certainly made up for in brawn. When you saw him coming you not only ran but spent what was left of your pocket money on a ticket for the first plane out of the country too. Most of us had felt his fists at some point and more than a few had contributed to what he called his ‘Grub fund’ with their dinner money. Suffice it to say most of us did not count Dean amongst our circle of best mates.
One day John, Mark and myself decided to take our airguns up to the waste ground at the back of the print works. As mentioned in a previous post it was a great place to hang out being a mixture of abandoned allotment, bombed out buildings and industrial refuse tip used by the printers and back in those days three lads with airguns did little to excite any interest whatsoever. Nowadays we could expect four vans of the local finest and an MP5 stuck in our ears by a black clad member of SO19 just in case we were Al-Qaeda (under 12s division).
For an hour or so we were happy plinking away at rusty tins set up on a piece of wall then growing bored we began to scout around for better targets. Our searching led us to the printers rubbish pile and we discovered a whole load of empty aerosol glue cans. Now, having already almost been blown up by what we found on the printers refuse heap in the past you might have thought we had learned our lesson but no! The glue cans were duly set up on the wall and we retreated to a safe distance to begin our marksmanship again. John had a decent .22 calibre rifle as his parents were pretty well off and he had stolen it from his older brother. Using this we were rewarded with a few decent pops and fizzes as the cans punctured under our concentrated barrage. Then we got more adventurous when Mark found some spray paint cans on the tip and we remembered the scene from Kellys Heroes when Oddball and his tank crew fire paint rounds “because they make beautiful pictures”. Time to make some art we thought.
This time though the cans were made of stronger stuff and stubbornly refused to burst and in our attempts to create ‘art’ we failed to notice the arrival of Dean until we were interrupted with “Whatchoo doin’ then?” from behind us. This was followed by “You poofs ain’t doin’ it right!” as he pushed past us and snatched Johns air rifle out of his hands. Perhaps unfortunately for Dean the rifle was loaded as if it had not been his life might have carried on as normal from that point. Without a pause he marched up to the row of cans on the wall and at point blank range he took aim and fired. Time seemed to stand still and the resulting ‘POP’ and “FWOOOOOOSH!” seemed to take bullet time proportions as the half filled, pressurised can of blue paint ruptured covering Dean from head to toe.
The three of us were in something of a quandary, openly laughing at Dean in his presence could see us beaten to a pulp but to see him standing there resembling a Smurf just cracked us up. In the end we solved the dilemma by delivering him home, as straight-faced as possible, knocking on the door and leaving him on the doorstep for his mum to find whilst we legged it down the road as fast as we could, which wasn’t very fast as we were laughing too much. A kid who lived next door to him later told us that Dean had been escorted into the back yard by his father and scrubbed with turpentine to get the paint off. Deans yelling and screaming had apparently lasted almost two hours but in spite of his fathers’ best efforts, for the next few weeks whenever we saw him he had a faintly blue tinge about him that soon earned him the reputation destroying nickname ‘Papa’.
This tale previously published in condensed form in Retro Fusion #1. Retro Fusion (c) Pendragon Media
3 comments:
Dean was lucky, this is what exploding aerosol cans did here in Crewe on Monday! If you go to image 17 you can see them all over the ground.
I think he would have needed to use a 105mm howitzer rather than an air rifle to have that sort of effect round the back of the print works. Not that we had not already tried to get that sort of effect a few months earlier.
Excellent histoire, Kaptain. My only complaint is your lack of regular posts on this site. A girl needs some amusement in her lunchbreak now the builders with the builder bum tanline have gone from next door.
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