The Mystery Mob

As a child whose parents both worked, a good proportion of the summer and other holidays were spent with my grandparents. As a result of this I made friends with a number of the kids who lived near them. My grandparents lived in a fairly quiet part of town where nothing much happened and the most exciting thing was the yearly street fair held a few streets away. Us kids however, were determined to make the place a bit more exciting.

Stuarts house backed onto my grandparents so a quick climb over the back wall meant that I could be into the old caravan belonging to his dad that we used as a gang hut in moments if I heard a yell from his garden. So it was on this particular day. Like most summer days seemed back then it was warm and sunny, too warm to be running around playing soldiers even with water pistols so we were slumped around the caravan, bored, slurping on a selection of Panda Pops liberated from Stuart’s mums kitchen, the stack of Beezer and Victor comics read through and the prospect of a long afternoon with nothing to do apart from go a bit hyper on the E numbers in the Panda Pops ahead of us. The trouble with being nine and bored is that it isn’t long before someone suggests doing something really, really stupid and the others instead of saying “That’s a really, really stupid idea!” all say “Cool!”

It was Elizabeth, one of the two female members of our gang who suggested that we explore the old church just around the corner. The church had probably been built in the late 18th or early 19th century when the area was not as large as it was and then as the area thrived and gained several more churches and many more houses it had become a back street chapel and then become run down and abandoned prior to WW2. It was grimy, boarded up, in disrepair and was reputed to be haunted by spirits disturbed when it was almost hit by a bomb in the early years of the war. Basically it was the place that our parents, grandparents and most of the adults in the neigbourhood warned us to keep well away from. Oh and then there were the Satanic sacrifices that a kid at Stuarts school reckoned he had found in there although according to Stuart the same kid reckoned he had been abducted by aliens, was part bionic and had discovered a secret bunker under the school playground full of guns and tanks. However, with nothing better to do we might as well check to see if the story was true. Having watched Scooby Doo we all fancied ourselves as the Mystery Mob although lacking any canine pets between us there was some argument as to who got to be the cowardly dog. The alternative was to borrow my grandmother’s pet budgerigar and put a collar on it and somehow I didn’t think that she would approve of that. So, arming ourselves with high power torches, well, okay two reasonable power torches and third that was a gift from a seaside vending machine and shaped like a fish we set off on our expedition.

Getting in to the old church was easy enough, it was a simple matter of climbing over the wall whilst avoiding the barbed wire and broken glass that someone had thoughtlessly arrayed across the top of it to keep small children and tramps out, picking our way across the small overgrown graveyard without breaking our legs, necks and other body parts tripping over fallen tombstones and slipping through a hole in the corner of the rusty and jagged corrugated iron sheet that covered one of the doors without getting tetanus.

If restless spirits were looking for a place to hang out and do the things that restless spirits are wont to do then this was it, a definite des-res for the dead and not quite shuffled off to the afterlife to get down and party. It was dark, spooky and filled with rubble and pigeon shit. Despite the warmth outside there was a noticeable chill in the air and there were strange rustlings in the corners that our frankly feeble torches could not penetrate. As we explored we heard a door banging, floorboards creaked as though someone was walking upon them and the wind sighed through gaps where the boards did not quite cover the windows.

By now four out of the five of us were thinking that maybe going into the old church was a really, really bad idea and that maybe instead of saying “Cool!” we should have pointed out how incredibly bad an idea it really was. Nervously we looked each other as dust illuminated by one of the few shafts of light that penetrated the boards swirled in strange vortices across the floor. Stuart’s brother, Nick laughed and forged ahead of us. Then came a ghastly creaking and a hideous scream of abject pant wetting terror...

...and that's when we found out that no self respecting Satanist would ever hold a black mass in there. Their health and safety executive would have had a fit if they had. The raising of demons would have been unlikely, the high priest and most of the coven plunging to their doom was a distinct probability. Nick vanished through the floorboards that had been somewhat weakened by time, hungry woodworm and a bad case of dry rot. Luckily for him it was not too big a drop, about six feet, into the void under the floor and he landed on an old and musty smelling tarpaulin.

Nervously in case he had been grabbed by ghouls or zombies lurking under the floor we crawled to the edge of the pit only to discover him lying on the tarpaulin surrounded by nothing more sinister than ancient mouse droppings and staring up at us. The distance was not that great but it took us ages to haul him out, getting ourselves covered in dust and desiccated mouse poo in the process. I'm not sure what was more terrifying, the moment Nick vanished or the telling off I got from my grandmother when I got home looking like I had just crawled from the grave myself. At least in Scooby Doo the kids always discovered that the phantom was really old Mr Brown the janitor, they did not get sent to an early bath and told to get themselves to bed and not to darken the house with their presence until the next day.

After that we gave the place a wide berth and decided that if anyone suggested an idea that sounded ‘cool’ we would pelt them with clods from the compost heap. Well, until someone suggested finding the secret bunker underneath the school but that’s another story.

Eternal Damnation

It was fizzy pop that earned me eternal damnation. Well, not quite the fizzy pop but the bottles it came in although the pop played its part later in the sorry tale.

During the summer I spent a lot of time at my grandparents house so it was not surprising I became friends with a few of the local kids and one in particular. Dan lived just around the corner and summer days would often find us playing out in the streets. Mostly this involved running around playing war games, although sometimes we would go and explore the area. A favourite haunt was an area of waste ground at the end of the road Dan lived in. Surrounded by bushes and overgrown Buddleia it was an ideal hiding place and according to Dans mate Ben you could find magazines with pictures of men and women doing ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ was, left there by the tramps that sometimes used it as a place to doss down overnight. His brother had told him so. However, we didn’t entirely believe him as the most we had found up there were a dozen empty Colt .45 beer cans, a small mountain of fag ends and a well thumbed Readers Digest. It was obvious that the alky dosser that had been up there had only been interested in improving his word power rather than fumbling over a copy of Playboy. Still it didn’t stop us going to check the place out.

Crawling through a gap in the fence that surrounded the area we emerged into the cool green undergrowth and almost immediately Dan fell over a sack that made clinking noise. Naturally we had to open it and tip out its contents. There before us lay about twenty Corona lemonade bottles looking suspiciously like someone had urinated in them. Our first reaction was “Aww! Yuck!” closely followed by “Hang on! We can get 10p each for these at the newsagents.” Our desire for filthy lucre won out over our natural disgust.

We were faced with a quandary, we wanted the money but to get it we would have to empty twenty piss filled bottles. Dan solved it by running back up the road and stealing a pair of Marigolds from his mums kitchen. Twenty minutes later we had a sack full of empty bottles and were headed for the newsagents like small versions of Steptoe and Son. Oddly the newsagent didn’t bat an eyelid. Either he was used to nine year old lads turning up with tatty old sacks full of wee smelling Corona bottles or he just didn’t give a damn as he knew what would happen next. Twenty bottles meant two pounds in refunded deposits. The newsagents had the biggest selection of sweets in town and two pounds in 1975 was a huge amount. We spent the lot on sweets, Panda pop, crisps and a copies of that weeks Victor and Hotspur comics. Two pounds bought enough E numbers, tartrazine and sugar to fell an elephant and the newsagent got his money straight back. An hour later all the sweets were gone, inside us as we read our comics.

What next? Simple. We grabbed a couple of toy guns from Dans room and headed down to the churchyard where we could hear some of the other kids playing war and for the next half hour or so we charged around screaming “Achtung!” and “Take that Fritz!” in time honoured British war comic tradition fuelled by E numbers and sugar. Meanwhile I could feel something bubbling inside me, something not quite right. Dan looked decidedly peaky and we both agreed that maybe we should sit out the next assault on the dastardly hun who were bunkered down under the Yew tree.

We had hardly slumped on the warm stone steps than the vicar arrived to find a couple of lads tooled up with toy Tommy guns and pistols whilst another eight or so raced round the building yelling “BANG!” and “Ratatatatatat!” at the top of their lungs.

“You really should not be playing war games here.” He admonished us “This is a place of worship and peace.”

“ERP!” said Dan.

“I beg your pardon, what was that you sai…”

“ERP!” I glanced at Dan, he had gone a strange grey pale colour…

HWWWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRPPPP! The remains of Dans sweets splattered the church step. I felt my own stomach give a volcanic lurch as the bubbling mix of pop, space dust, sweets and corn based snacks began to rise…

BLLLLLEEEEEUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRGGGGHHH!!

A mixture of foam prawns, blackjacks, fruit salads, dinosaur chews, sugar mice, sherbet fountain, space dust, cheesy puffs, limeade and the Spam sandwiches gran had made for my lunch sprayed the Vicar from the waist down as if I was auditioning for the next Exorcist film but without the demonic head spinniness. Come to think of it, if my head had been spinning it probably would not have provoked half the reaction it did. For a man of God the vicar certainly had a ripe turn of phrase. He used some words that neither Dan nor I had heard before and the next time I heard them was fifteen years later whilst out on a bender with some squaddie mates of mine. Dan and I looked at each other in horror. He was damned because he had puked on the house of God. Me? I was eternally damned as I had thrown up on Gods representative on Earth. Given the religious connections of the moment Dan and I thought the same thing “What would Jesus do?”

I didn’t know if space dust and foam prawns were that common in first century Galillee but I was sure that if he was nine years old and had just barfed half a pound of them mixed with corrosive green limeade over the temple priest he would have done what we did…ran and spent the rest of the day hiding in Josephs, or in our case Dans’ dads’ garden shed. At least his dad could smite anyone who gave him a clip round the ear with a plague of locusts. When mine found out due to the vicar unfortunately knowing my granddad I was grounded for a fortnight and the pocket money I had been saving for a box of Airfix 1/72^nd Afrika Korps soldiers went to pay for the vicars trousers to be dry cleaned. I still can’t look at a foam prawn without feeling queasy.