Smut from above

By the age of about thirteen most of the lads in school had a stash of at least one copy of the periodical for gentlemen more commonly known as ‘Razzle’ hidden under their bed or behind the bookcase. That is most except for Nicko who had a school exercise book filled with adverts featuring badly drawn women in lingerie cut from the back pages of the Sunday People and News of the World but we always considered him a bit odd anyhow. Then there was Adam, my mate Colin’s older by a year brother. Through sheer diligence and perseverance Adam had the porn stash to beat all porn stashes and was the undisputed smut baron of the fourth year. Name your perversion and he probably owned it, from hardcore Danish publications through to the extremely dodgy contact magazines of the day where ‘Doris, 53, blonde, 48-52-54, from Milton Keynes’ sought ‘younger man with GSOH and an appreciation of rubberwear’ accompanied by the kind of photograph that makes you want to scrub your eyeballs with Vim and scour your brain with Brillo pads to remove the memory. If you wanted filth Adam was your man and of course his parents knew nothing of this and were completely oblivious to the fact that there seemed to be a constant stream of lads asking for him because they could not wait for the once a week when he set up shop in the last stall of the boys toilets at school where he would dispense ‘requests’ for cash donations.

It’s very possible that if fate had not intervened in the way it did, Adam would now be running an international porn business and doing very nicely indeed. However, fate being the fickle thing it is did intervene and did so spectacularly.

Colin’s parents had decided they were going to convert the large loft areas of the house into another set of rooms as Colin’s mum had recently learnt that she was expecting what turned out to be Colin’s and Adam’s sister. Adam kept his stash in an old suitcase hidden in part of the loft that could be accessed via a hatch from his room. As the day the loft was due to be cleared approached he grew more worried about just how he was going to move it all as it was a large stash indeed and getting it out of the house without arousing suspicion might have been a bit difficult. Worry turned to indecision and indecision meant that come clearing day he still had a suitcase full of smut in the loft.

As fate would have it I was around helping Colin paint some of his extensive collection of war gaming miniatures when Adam appeared in something of a panic.

“You’ve got to help me!” he said “I need to get my magazines out, I can’t let them find them, there’s a lot of investment in those!”

Given that he was renting them out at 50p a night we could see his point so only semi unwillingly and having been promised the pick of the collection we decided to give him a hand. There was no way we could get them down the stairs without being spotted as his dad and grandfather were milling around in the hallway and shifting stuff from one of the other parts of the loft out of the front door to a skip so there was only one thing for it. Lower the case out of the window with a length of strong string where I would wait for it, wheel it round the corner to my house on my skateboard and hide it in the shed until Adam could find somewhere else to hide it. As nonchalantly as I could I ambled out of the house and took up position under Adams window that was on the third floor of the house. A moment later the case was shoved out of the window and began to descend at the end of a length of hairy string.

Now I know what you are thinking, the string breaks, I get flattened, ambulance is called and a discovery of a suitcase of fine quality smut is made. You would be wrong. The string did not break…but the lock on the suitcase did. Being old and not up to the strain being put on it by about fifty pounds of dirty magazines it just went ‘PING’ and next second a torrent of jazz mags was headed my way, fluttering in the breeze and covering the drive, hedge and next doors lawn with a fine selection of tits and arse. Above me Adam appeared at the window, aghast at the scene of pornographic devastation that had appeared below and the fact that his mother had also just appeared to see what the noise was to find a copy of Color Climax hanging on the washing line and me surrounded by more nudity than an Amsterdam brothel owner as pages, picked up by the breeze began to distribute themselves over several more gardens much to the surprise of the elderly neighbour who had been weeding her borders next door only to be confronted by ‘Doris from Milton Keynes’ staring up at her from amongst the Marigolds.

Explaining its presence was difficult to say the least although I did have a good attempt. However, his mum did not quite believe my assertions that I had merely been standing out in the garden when a veritable avalanche of top quality hardcore had just fallen out of the sky and that maybe a cargo plane had accidentally jettisoned its load destined for the top shelves of Soho.

After that Adam kept his collection to the minimum, enough to fill a briefcase that he kept hidden under his bed and certainly not enough to cover an entire neighbourhood. Oh and the elderly neighbour was never quite the same after her encounter with ‘Doris’ and could often be found staggering around the area screaming “My eyes! My eyes!”

Those magnificent men...

Computer games and films make kids violent. At least according to the media they do. It wasn’t like that in the good old days was it? Was it? No, we were far, far worse. In the absence of the first person shooter us horrible lot had to make do with running around the neighbourhood with an assortment of toy weaponry that would make Rambo green with envy and as for films well we had three channels of TV entertainment to choose from. That however, was plenty if you had our ability for landing ourselves in trouble, the kind of warped imaginations we had and ‘Colditz’ on TV.

My best mate Dave had a dad who was possibly a builder. He may have been a professor with a penchant for collecting bricks, I never quite found out what he did. Whatever he was he had a shed full of the kind of stuff that builders usually had. Nails, screws, planks of wood, power tools and a huge pile of bricks in the back garden. Apparently it was something to do with the garage he was going to build but we could not quite see the logic of that given that the back garden was actually about twelve feet higher than the back lane due to Dave living half way up a hill. However, it did give us one of our more spectacularly crazed ideas.

One of the channels had shown a programme about prisoners of war, it was probably the BBC series ‘Colditz’ but given that most of the channels filled their schedules with programmes about the war it could have been something else. Whatever it was it sparked our imagination and one slightly damp morning in the half term holiday Dave and I decided to build our own glider as the programme had been about prisoners trying to escape their camp using a homemade glider. Not for us months of meticulous planning and stealing sheets from the camp commandant to cover the carefully engineered fuselage. No, we headed straight for Dave's dads shed pausing only to dig an old pedal powered racing car that had belonged to Dave out of the overgrown hedge where it had been left when he grew out of it. This would be the body of our glider providing we could get all the wood lice and slugs out first.

For the next couple of hours we hammered, sawed, nailed, bolted, de-slugged and let fly with the occasional swear word when a plank fell on our feet and soon we had our magnificent flying machine. Magnificent that is if you could see it as a graceful and superbly engineered flying machine, not something that looked like a kids pedal car with a couple of planks nailed to it with six inch nails and then wrapped round with a length of old rope just to make sure they did not fall off. Now how could we get it to fly?

We were not that stupid, after all my granddad was a physicist and engineer who had worked in the aircraft industry and we knew that it would need a bit of a run up, just chucking it off the back wall would doom it to failure. What we needed was a ramp…a couple of planks would do the trick if we could haul the ‘glider’ up to the top of the shed, which by good fortune had a flat roof. Another twenty or so minutes of sweating saw the ‘glider’ perched precariously on the edge of the roof and three planks that had what looked suspiciously like woodworm holes in them leading from it to the garden wall. Now all we needed was a pilot. As I mentioned before, we were not stupid and neither of us were going to risk life and limb. Just at that moment, Rob, the youngest of Daves brothers wandered into the garden clutching several Dinky cars. Timing! He was small enough to fit into our contraption.

“Er! How would you like to play pilots ?” enquired Dave innocently.

“Playing with my cars!” answered Rob

“I’ll give you my Royal Limousine if you’ll be our pilot!” I piped in, ‘accidentally’ forgetting to tell Rob that my Royal Limousine, a much loathed birthday present had met with a spectacular end from the top landing of my house after being attacked by terrorists disguised as my mates Airfix Afrika Korps soldiers as I tried half heartedly to fight them off with my plucky British Commandos.

“Yeah, okay!” came the answer.

“Brill! Just climb up there then…”

The gods must have been smiling on Rob that day as just as he started climbing the ladder we had leant against the shed it started raining and Daves mum called us in for lunch. By the time the rain had stopped and we had stuffed ourselves with Spam sandwiches we had forgotten the glider and anyway, a bunch of our mates were out on the green playing cricket. However, as we returned home later that afternoon having visited the sweet shop we happened to walk down the back lane, there, in a crumpled heap was our glider. We paused, looked at it and shook our heads.

“Maybe we should have used lighter planks?”

Rob never knew how close he had come to being the first fatality of our aeronautical endeavours. In fact the only thing that had flown that day was time…oh and the slugs as we chucked them out of the shed window and even they were not designed for that purpose either.