Flight of the Rupert

D-Day, 6th of June 1944. In the hours preceding the seaborne landings thousands of allied paratroops dropped over Normandy to secure bridges, roads and harass the enemy. With them were dropped thousands of dummies known as ‘Ruperts’. These dummies, rigged with explosives to simulate gunfire were to confuse the enemy and make it appear that more paratroops were landing than there were.

Sanjeev, Stuart and I knew all this because we had watched ‘The Longest Day’. Sanjeev lived a few doors down from my grandparents in a similarly large five storey Georgian house along with his parents, grandfather and several brothers and sisters. His father was a lecturer at the local university, his mother a fashion designer like my own mother and his granddad had served with colonial forces in the far east and liked telling stories of how he faced the might of the Japanese army armed only with a Lee Enfield, a bayonet and his wits. It was only natural then that when I visited my grandparents that Sanjeev was one of the other kids I spent time with along with Stuart who lived over the back wall.

It was the tail end of the long summer holidays. In a few days I would be going home but we were hanging around bored. It was too warm to kick a ball around down on the green and there were not enough of us for a decent game of soldiers so we were wondering what to do. Somehow we started discussing the film ‘The Longest Day’ that had been shown on TV a few days earlier and in particular the explosive parachutists that had been dropped to sow confusion amongst the enemy. Wouldn’t it be great if we could make one of those? As usual at this point one or more of us should have said “Don’t be stupid!” and smacked the person suggesting it around the head until they suggested something a bit safer but being nine year old boys we all went “Yeah!”.

Stuart had a whole tin filled with bangers brought back from a holiday in France. In the 70s if you were a kid and you went to France you brought back as many as you could possibly conceal in your parents and siblings luggage without arousing the suspicions of the Customs people. We could use those to simulate the gunfire bit but what about the dummy. None of us wanted to sacrifice our ‘Action Men’ and anyhow I had only brought three uniforms with mine, none of which were suitable for falling from the sky. It was Sanjeev who came up with the second not so bright idea of the day. His mum had an old shop dummy up in the attic she had once used to display clothes she had designed. We could use that, attach a sheet to it and drop it from the attic window that was five storeys up. Brilliant! His parents were out and only his granddad was around and he was most likely to be asleep.

So it was that the three of us, Stuart clutching his biscuit tin full of bangers that he had nipped home to collect sneaked up into the attic. We were not really allowed to be there, his dad used to tell us off frequently but it was one of our favourite places. By climbing out of the window we could gain access to an area of flat roof between the houses from which we could snipe at passers by in the street with our spud guns and water pistols.

The dummy Sanjeev had mentioned was easily located as was a large dust sheet covering an old trunk which on exploration contained a whole load of Sanjeevs’ granddads old belongings including of all things a tin helmet. “Cool!” we all exclaimed, we could tie it to the dummy for added realism. Whilst Sanjeev and Stuart hung several garlands of bangers around the dummy which had a few more bumps and curves than the average allied parachutist I made the parachute by tying four lengths of hairy string to the corners of the dust sheet and securing them under the dummies arms. With a flourish Stuart put the tin helmet on the dummies head and produced a box of matches from his pocket we were ready to go.

With a bit of effort we got the dummy up onto the window ledge and pushed it out onto the ledge that ran beyond the window so that it rested precariously against the roof . Stuart lit the fuse of the bangers and we gave it a mighty heave.

It worked quite well…for the first ten or so feet. The dust sheet billowed out arresting its fall and it began to drift earthwards…and sideways, straight towards Sanjeevs granddads greenhouse. Like my own grandfather he was a keen gardener. Every year his allotment produced a veritable bounty of vegetables and his pride and joy were his tomatoes, cucumbers and various exotic specimens with unpronounceable names that he grew in his greenhouse. Now our ‘Rupert’ was headed straight for it.

For an agonising second or two it looked like it might miss but then the inevitable happened, one of the knots I had tied decided that now was the time to come un-knotted. It was hardly my fault I had dropped out of the Cub Scouts before we had done knotting. The dummy dropped like a stone and the hideous crash as it plummeted through the greenhouse roof was followed by the gunfire like sounds of the bangers detonating. This in turn was swiftly followed by Sanjeevs granddad bolting from the shed at the end of the garden where he had apparently been having a nap to stand in incredulous silence at the spectacle of a shop dummy wearing his old tin hat dangling by a few bits of string engaged in the nefarious activity of blowing up his prized cucumbers. The silence did not last for long as spotting us clinging to the roof, white faced at the enormity of what we had done he let fly with a thickly accented yell of

“You…you little…buggers!”

It was no good trying to run, by the time we had pelted downstairs he was waiting for us and in those pre-PC, pre-childrens rights days that meant that all three of us got the seats of our trousers well and truly dusted and Stuart and I were marched round to our respective parents and guardians. That night my grandfather called my parents and suggested it might be a wise move if they collected me a few days early lest Sanjeevs granddad carry through with his threat to introduce me to cold steel like he had done to a number of ‘the nipponese’ if he happened across me again. Unfortunately only being a few doors away that was more than likely. My parents heeded my grandfather’s advice and did so and I may have escaped a fate likely to end in death but for the next six months I seemed to do an awfully large number of chores for very little financial reward.

Fortunately by the following year it had all been forgotten which was lucky given that that summer we almost burnt the shed down instead.

Ed

We were never quite sure where Ed came from or even when he attached himself to our group who on the whole had been friends since the first year of primary school. All we knew was that one day he was there and that put him anywhere near a pint of shandy and disaster was likely to follow. He was a nice enough chap, perhaps too nice who had obviously had a decent upbringing. His parents were both awfully middle class and he still lived with them in a large house in one of the up market areas of town.

Unfortunately Ed liked to think that he was a hardened drinker. Maybe he was providing that whatever they served wherever he was from was weaker than the watered down witches piss they served in some of the more tourist oriented bars in town. Having grown up honing our underage drinking talents in some of the more ‘interesting’ country pubs in the area the rest of us tended to gravitate towards the kind of cider that was still illegal under several European treaties and which could perform painless surgery to the knees after a couple of pints leading to many of its devotees waking up with a mouthful of cigarette butts and sawdust from the floor.

Ed was no exception. In fact on most occasions just walking him past the barrels of ‘Old poachers gumboot’, ‘Badgers Bollocks’ and other such quaintly named beverages would usually lead to him falling over in a stupor there and then. No matter how many times it happened he would not heed the warnings of those who had been there before him many times since the age of 14. On at least one occasion he had held a pint of cider aloft declaring “Looks like orange barley water!” before quaffing it in one go. Five minutes later he slid slowly off his seat and under the table. Of course, being the good mates that we were we allowed him to lie there for at least an hour collecting dog ends and crisp packets in his open and gently snoring mouth. Oddly enough many years later another friend used almost the same line in a different pub in a different town but the results were almost exactly the same.

Thus, when we set off on one of our legendary pub crawls from one end of town to the other we made Ed solemnly promise to pace himself and maybe stick to lemonade in four out of every five pubs. To be fair to him he did as he was told as the rest of us downed halves in every one of the twenty or so pubs we visited and got slightly tipsy. It was only when we reached the Red Lion that Ed forgot his promise and got stuck into some of the real ales on offer. Now if the country folk at one end of town liked their cider, the trawlermen at the other end liked their real ales and some of them were even pokier than the cider but lacking the bits of dead rat to add to the taste. Ed had at least four pints. Twenty minutes later he went a bit glassy-eyed and toppled from his chair much to the amusement of the assembled throng. Not that big a deal until we realised he was staring straight up the skirt of one of the trawlermens wives or girlfriends. Not only was he pissed as a fart but he was about to get himself and probably us too beaten to a pulp by some bloke who smelt of fish. Swiftly as two alcohol befuddled teenagers could Paul and Alex scooped him up and we fled the pub.

We had not travelled a hundred yards when Ed broke free, mumbling something about gymnastics and made a beeline for the railings that edged part of the harbour. Before any of us could scream “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” he had climbed onto them and in utter silence, vanished over the other side. We ran as fast as our own legs, numbed by alcohol, could carry us although we were sobering up rather quickly, waiting for the splash as Ed hit the murky waters…but there was no splash. As we reached the edge we discovered why. The tide was high and a new mooring pontoon had been installed. Ed was lying on his back on the pontoon, staring up at us, waving and giggling like a lunatic. Fortunately for him he had landed on a fishing net, the alcohol had relaxed him just enough and the pontoon was high enough that no damage was done. It was Paul, good, decent, Christian Paul who, mere months later went on to begin to carve out a future career in the priesthood who articulated all our thoughts at that moment…

“YOU COMPLETE AND UTTER FUCKING BASTARD!” was yelled at the top of his voice, causing windows and doors to be thrown open and at least one woman to yell out “You mind your language you fucking twat!” Ed continued to look up at us, still waving and grinning from the fish reeking net. It took us a good ten minutes to extract him from his predicament and set off for home.

Living closest to the harbour I was first to leave them so it was not until the next day when I met up with Paul and Alex for a greasy fry up prior to some hair of the dog that I discovered what they had done with Ed. Deciding that waking his folks who, judging by the lack of lights had already gone to bed, Paul and Alex had left Ed slumped over an ornamental lion in the garden figuring that he would soon sober up and find his own way in. It wasn’t until later that day that I found out what had happened after that when I received a phone call from Ed’s father, a rather pompous gentleman:

“Did my son go out drinking with you last night?”

“Errr! Yes!”

“Did you bring him home?”

“No.”

“Do you know who did?”

“Ummmm! Yes!”

“Good! Can you tell them that next time they do, can they not leave him on one of my ornamental lions. He woke up in the middle of the night and threw up in the pond. My Koi do not like it. What’s worse though is that he decided he needed to have a number two as well. My wife just happened to look out of the window after hearing the noise outside. I don’t think she will ever be quite the same after seeing her son shitting on the garden gnomes!”

Somehow as I desperately tried to quell the image of Ed squatting over a garden gnome I had the feeling that we might not be seeing him very much in the future.