As a child living in the 70s I had rather a lot of weapons. In the days before political correctness if you were a boy you were pretty much likely to have a toy cupboard filled with Action Men, Airfix soldiers, toy cars and an assortment of weapons. I probably had more than my fair share. In fact I could have probably armed a small country had the toy guns I owned been real. Just about every scenario in the games we played was covered. Cowboys: set of cap firing six shooters and a Winchester. Knights: Three swords and a very useful battle axe that came pretty tight if you swung it just right. Foreign Legion: Replica Enfield .303. Soldiers: Couple of Thompsons, a Colt .45 Automatic, an MP40 and if there was a shortage of evil Nazi officers I could even provide a Luger and march around saying “Zo Englander pigdog, you sought you could ezcape! Vell zink again!”, just like they did in the comics. Even if we were playing James Bond I had a Walther PPK as well.
Many of the weapons could as my mother was fond of saying “put someone’s eye out!” Some fired ping pong balls, others plastic pellets and one of the Thompsons and an Airfix FN SLR even fired pretty chunky replica bullets…or bits of sawn down pencil if you really wanted to bring realistic pain and suffering to the games of war.
However, the sight of a gang of lads and in some cases girls as well, charging round the streets, fields or through gardens caused no reaction whatsoever. We could run about playing soldiers, toting in some cases quite realistic weaponry without an eyebrow being raised or a couple of vanloads of firearms officers arriving to arrest us, fingerprint us and deport us to Guantanamo Bay. A ten year old with a ‘Tommy gun’ was a fairly common sight and certainly did not mean that a drive by shooting was about to go down or a drug deal done behind the allotment sheds. In fact the only interaction with the police was if the local bobby happened to be passing and asked us to keep the noise down a bit if we got a little too boisterous in our machine gun and grenade imitations or as happened on one occasion he saw my replica FN and commented that he had used one just like it when he was in the army.
The one thing I did not have was a bow and arrow. At least not until my grandmother decided to bring one back from a holiday jaunt during the summer of 1973 to complement the ‘Red Indian’ outfit with it’s tomahawk and rubber scalping knife she had bought the previous Christmas. Naturally the first thing my mother said on seeing it and it’s sucker tipped arrows was “Be careful, you could have someone’s eye out with that!”
So, the first thing I did was head out into the garden and find my friend Ross who was playing out in his garden that backed onto ours. Now, in our garden there grew a plant that when it died back left tough, woody stalks. These stalks made perfect arrows and it was not long before they were utilised as such, being fired around with not much care as to what they hit. It was not long either before mum, seeing that we were stalking each other through the shrubbery with arrows now tipped with sharp bits of slate from an old tile, came rushing out and confiscated our lethal weapons. However, on seeing our glum faces she relented and said we could have the bow back as long as we used it properly and in a safe manner. Properly and safe meant indoors with the plastic sheet target it had come with stuck to the back of the kitchen door.
The bow was quite powerful, probably in order to make the sucker tipped arrows stick to the target and we soon found that if you pulled it to full stretch a really satisfying, door rattling thud was the result and it was all quite safe. Or would have been if dad had not been in the habit of using the gate at the end of the garden to come via when he returned from work instead of having to walk an extra hundred or so yards around the end of the houses up to the main road and use the front door.
I had just stretched the bow to it’s fullest extent and let fly with the arrow from a kneeling position like I had seen in a recent swashbuckling Robin Hood film shown one Sunday afternoon when the kitchen door swung open and dad, half reading the evening paper wandered into sight only to take an incredibly well aimed arrow travelling at some speed in the groin. Any pain might have ended there had our cat, Sally not also wandered in to the kitchen at that point only to have dad stagger backwards and stand on her tail as she stopped to stuff her face with cat food on the way to her favourite spot on the back of the sofa.
Sally was quite a calm, placid cat but being trodden on unleashed the psycho-kitty within and from outside the door we watched as she raced around the kitchen in a clawing, biting, spitting fury as dad clutched his groin with one hand and tried to fend the demon possessed feline off with the other. It was a little like watching a live action version of Tom and Jerry as Sally hurtled around knocking cooking implements, spice jars, crockery and condiments flying as dad tried to batter her away with the newspaper. It lasted perhaps ten seconds at most before she fled through the cat flap and streaked up the garden leaving dad standing in a kitchen that appeared to have been the scene of a small war.
It was at that moment that mum chose to arrive home having gone to visit the corner shop at the end of the road only to find her kitchen a scene of total devastation, apparently caused by dad having gone utterly mental with a folded newspaper. Ross and I meanwhile decided to beat a tactical retreat and headed over to the fields where some more of our friends were playing ‘Knights of the Round Table’. A much safer game…at least until we turned up with my bow and a handful of plant stalks and suggested it became Robin Hood.
Many of the weapons could as my mother was fond of saying “put someone’s eye out!” Some fired ping pong balls, others plastic pellets and one of the Thompsons and an Airfix FN SLR even fired pretty chunky replica bullets…or bits of sawn down pencil if you really wanted to bring realistic pain and suffering to the games of war.
However, the sight of a gang of lads and in some cases girls as well, charging round the streets, fields or through gardens caused no reaction whatsoever. We could run about playing soldiers, toting in some cases quite realistic weaponry without an eyebrow being raised or a couple of vanloads of firearms officers arriving to arrest us, fingerprint us and deport us to Guantanamo Bay. A ten year old with a ‘Tommy gun’ was a fairly common sight and certainly did not mean that a drive by shooting was about to go down or a drug deal done behind the allotment sheds. In fact the only interaction with the police was if the local bobby happened to be passing and asked us to keep the noise down a bit if we got a little too boisterous in our machine gun and grenade imitations or as happened on one occasion he saw my replica FN and commented that he had used one just like it when he was in the army.
The one thing I did not have was a bow and arrow. At least not until my grandmother decided to bring one back from a holiday jaunt during the summer of 1973 to complement the ‘Red Indian’ outfit with it’s tomahawk and rubber scalping knife she had bought the previous Christmas. Naturally the first thing my mother said on seeing it and it’s sucker tipped arrows was “Be careful, you could have someone’s eye out with that!”
So, the first thing I did was head out into the garden and find my friend Ross who was playing out in his garden that backed onto ours. Now, in our garden there grew a plant that when it died back left tough, woody stalks. These stalks made perfect arrows and it was not long before they were utilised as such, being fired around with not much care as to what they hit. It was not long either before mum, seeing that we were stalking each other through the shrubbery with arrows now tipped with sharp bits of slate from an old tile, came rushing out and confiscated our lethal weapons. However, on seeing our glum faces she relented and said we could have the bow back as long as we used it properly and in a safe manner. Properly and safe meant indoors with the plastic sheet target it had come with stuck to the back of the kitchen door.
The bow was quite powerful, probably in order to make the sucker tipped arrows stick to the target and we soon found that if you pulled it to full stretch a really satisfying, door rattling thud was the result and it was all quite safe. Or would have been if dad had not been in the habit of using the gate at the end of the garden to come via when he returned from work instead of having to walk an extra hundred or so yards around the end of the houses up to the main road and use the front door.
I had just stretched the bow to it’s fullest extent and let fly with the arrow from a kneeling position like I had seen in a recent swashbuckling Robin Hood film shown one Sunday afternoon when the kitchen door swung open and dad, half reading the evening paper wandered into sight only to take an incredibly well aimed arrow travelling at some speed in the groin. Any pain might have ended there had our cat, Sally not also wandered in to the kitchen at that point only to have dad stagger backwards and stand on her tail as she stopped to stuff her face with cat food on the way to her favourite spot on the back of the sofa.
Sally was quite a calm, placid cat but being trodden on unleashed the psycho-kitty within and from outside the door we watched as she raced around the kitchen in a clawing, biting, spitting fury as dad clutched his groin with one hand and tried to fend the demon possessed feline off with the other. It was a little like watching a live action version of Tom and Jerry as Sally hurtled around knocking cooking implements, spice jars, crockery and condiments flying as dad tried to batter her away with the newspaper. It lasted perhaps ten seconds at most before she fled through the cat flap and streaked up the garden leaving dad standing in a kitchen that appeared to have been the scene of a small war.
It was at that moment that mum chose to arrive home having gone to visit the corner shop at the end of the road only to find her kitchen a scene of total devastation, apparently caused by dad having gone utterly mental with a folded newspaper. Ross and I meanwhile decided to beat a tactical retreat and headed over to the fields where some more of our friends were playing ‘Knights of the Round Table’. A much safer game…at least until we turned up with my bow and a handful of plant stalks and suggested it became Robin Hood.
