It was 1974 and the summer holidays were drawing to a close when Toby moved into the next street. As if that wasn’t bad enough when my friends and I returned to school we discovered that he was in the same class as us. It wasn’t that he was the fat kid who smelled of wee or the school bully. Neither was he as dangerously deranged as Clive who tried to set fire to the temporary classroom block and who had entered a glittering career as the local arsonist by the time he reached his teens. No, Toby was “mummies little precious” that could do no wrong and looked down on us lesser mortals from the pedestal upon which his family and a few deluded teachers had placed him. Oh and he was a snitch that made the Metropolitan Police supergrasses look like rank amateurs. Out of the sight of his parents and our teachers he made our lives a misery and was not averse to helping himself to the stock in the local corner shop that was run by the exceedingly deaf and partially sighted Mr and Mrs Graves. In short, in the opinion of us eight year olds he was someone that can only be described in words that are unprintable here lest he now be a high-flying lawyer whose favourite words are “I intend to sue”.
It wasn’t as if we didn’t try to tarnish his reputation but he seemed Teflon coated. Blackmail attempts were doomed to failure after he bought fellow classmates off with more Spangles and space dust than the rest of us could ever hope to amass and the one time we had tried to push him into a muddy ditch on the way home from school had ended up with most of us receiving a bollocking from our parents after he snitched to his mum and Dave who had done the pushing being grounded for a month after he ended up in the ditch instead of our intended target. Even worse, he soon had a posse of sycophantic hangers on due to his generosity with sweets purloined from the corner shop. All that was to change though and it happened that winter.
Due to the climatic vagaries of where we lived snow was not a regular occurrence so a decently heavy snowfall brought us out ready to bombard anyone we could with snowballs so compacted they were little more than very large ice cubes and the best place to do that was “up the field”. The ‘field’ was just that, a field that ran up to the edge of a steep hill and which was the scene of many scary bike rides down said hill providing the owner, a local farmer was not grazing his cows and a great place for us to go tobogganing in the winter if snow happened to grace us with its presence. This day however, Toby and a couple of his followers had beaten us to it and had already built a sizeable snow ‘fort’ right in the middle of our planned toboggan run. This was just not cricket as we considered the field ours and ours alone. What was worse, they had ruined our chances of any decent toboggan action that day and we told them so…and were met with a barrage of snowballs and derision. Stung by words and chunks of ice we slunk off up the hill plotting our revenge.
We tried throwing snowballs from the top of the hill for a while but could not get the distance, at least not without cutting down a few trees and making a trebuchet which was a bit beyond our engineering capabilities and anyhow none of us had brought a saw with us. Hoots of laughter met our every attempt until Paul, suggested a scheme worthy of the great Wile. E. Coyote himself. Why not make a giant snowball and push it down the hill. Quality idea!
Hidden from view at the top of the hill we put our plan into action and after a bit of a struggle had soon fashioned a snowball about three feet across. Pushing it to the lip of the hill we gave it a final shove and sent it on its way to wreak bloody revenge on the class snitch and his chums. It was about a second after we pushed it that we realised the consequences of our actions. A lump of snow that size rolling down the hill and picking up more snow as it went could actually do some serious damage if it hit someone. Filled with remorse we began shouting and Toby’s two friends took notice and fled. Toby himself simply stood and stared at the oncoming ball of snow with mortal terror.
Like a bomb, albeit a very snowy one the ball smashed into the snow fort. Luckily for Toby and our chances of escaping a murder charge it had been quite well constructed but as the fort and snowball disintegrated our view of him was obliterated by a cloud of snowy shrapnel. In a panic we scrambled down the hill and when we reached him he was still standing in the same place, white as the snow about him as we demanded to know if he was okay. It was then we noticed the faint whiff of something reminiscent of the school toilets that hung around his vicinity. It might have been a cow pat given the usual occupants of the field but the true answer came as Toby whimpered,
“I think I’ve pooed in my trousers!”
With a massed “EWWWWW!” we hurriedly backed off until Paul, yes he who had suggested the snowball idea in the first place, perhaps showing the charity and compassion that would later see him take up a career in the priesthood took pity on him and took him back to his house to get him cleaned up…but not before we had blackmailed him into never snitching on us again lest every pupil in our school, his sisters school and every school between us and John O’ Groats got to know of his ‘little accident’ that day.
It wasn’t as if we didn’t try to tarnish his reputation but he seemed Teflon coated. Blackmail attempts were doomed to failure after he bought fellow classmates off with more Spangles and space dust than the rest of us could ever hope to amass and the one time we had tried to push him into a muddy ditch on the way home from school had ended up with most of us receiving a bollocking from our parents after he snitched to his mum and Dave who had done the pushing being grounded for a month after he ended up in the ditch instead of our intended target. Even worse, he soon had a posse of sycophantic hangers on due to his generosity with sweets purloined from the corner shop. All that was to change though and it happened that winter.
Due to the climatic vagaries of where we lived snow was not a regular occurrence so a decently heavy snowfall brought us out ready to bombard anyone we could with snowballs so compacted they were little more than very large ice cubes and the best place to do that was “up the field”. The ‘field’ was just that, a field that ran up to the edge of a steep hill and which was the scene of many scary bike rides down said hill providing the owner, a local farmer was not grazing his cows and a great place for us to go tobogganing in the winter if snow happened to grace us with its presence. This day however, Toby and a couple of his followers had beaten us to it and had already built a sizeable snow ‘fort’ right in the middle of our planned toboggan run. This was just not cricket as we considered the field ours and ours alone. What was worse, they had ruined our chances of any decent toboggan action that day and we told them so…and were met with a barrage of snowballs and derision. Stung by words and chunks of ice we slunk off up the hill plotting our revenge.
We tried throwing snowballs from the top of the hill for a while but could not get the distance, at least not without cutting down a few trees and making a trebuchet which was a bit beyond our engineering capabilities and anyhow none of us had brought a saw with us. Hoots of laughter met our every attempt until Paul, suggested a scheme worthy of the great Wile. E. Coyote himself. Why not make a giant snowball and push it down the hill. Quality idea!
Hidden from view at the top of the hill we put our plan into action and after a bit of a struggle had soon fashioned a snowball about three feet across. Pushing it to the lip of the hill we gave it a final shove and sent it on its way to wreak bloody revenge on the class snitch and his chums. It was about a second after we pushed it that we realised the consequences of our actions. A lump of snow that size rolling down the hill and picking up more snow as it went could actually do some serious damage if it hit someone. Filled with remorse we began shouting and Toby’s two friends took notice and fled. Toby himself simply stood and stared at the oncoming ball of snow with mortal terror.
Like a bomb, albeit a very snowy one the ball smashed into the snow fort. Luckily for Toby and our chances of escaping a murder charge it had been quite well constructed but as the fort and snowball disintegrated our view of him was obliterated by a cloud of snowy shrapnel. In a panic we scrambled down the hill and when we reached him he was still standing in the same place, white as the snow about him as we demanded to know if he was okay. It was then we noticed the faint whiff of something reminiscent of the school toilets that hung around his vicinity. It might have been a cow pat given the usual occupants of the field but the true answer came as Toby whimpered,
“I think I’ve pooed in my trousers!”
With a massed “EWWWWW!” we hurriedly backed off until Paul, yes he who had suggested the snowball idea in the first place, perhaps showing the charity and compassion that would later see him take up a career in the priesthood took pity on him and took him back to his house to get him cleaned up…but not before we had blackmailed him into never snitching on us again lest every pupil in our school, his sisters school and every school between us and John O’ Groats got to know of his ‘little accident’ that day.
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