The Cocktail of Doom

My father was ex-RAF and had spent much of his younger years pootling about the skies in a selection of very fast aircraft scaring the crap, sometimes quite literally, out of various cows, sheep and the inhabitants of a fair few towns with his low flying antics. Thus it was hardly surprising that when he left the forces it was for an exciting job in middle management in the DIY business much like many of his former colleagues.

Malcolm however, was different and had swapped his Biggles-like life of swooping about the skies shooting down ‘bandits’, strafing the natives in the various foreign conflicts of the 1950s and bellowing "Tally-ho chaps!" for the heady excitement of being a sales representative for a well known firm who purveyed dairy goods to the trade. The perks were good though and as Uncle Malc’ was a frequent visitor to our house being one of dads drinking mates we got a fair share of them. Thus it was that one Wednesday in the middle of August 1973 he turned up and unloaded from his van a quantity of a new brand of Yoghurt and what looked like a small oil drum of something. The something turned out to be prawn cocktail.

Now as anyone who grew up in the 70s knows, prawn cocktail was the sophisticated dish to serve at your gatherings. No intimate soiree was complete without a bottle of Blue Nun, prawn cocktail and throwing your car keys into a bowl at the end of the evening. Okay, round our way the whole key throwing thing had skipped people by, probably as most of the people who drove only owned a set of tractor keys and the rest had only just crawled from the 19th century and were still wondering what all the fuss was about the internal combustion engine but prawn cocktail was big and suddenly we had about two gallons of it. Naturally enough we got well stuck in and rather tasty it was too.

The following day we had prawn cocktail for breakfast, lunch, dinner and we did the same the next day. In fact I think mum even served up prawn cocktail sandwiches and prawn cocktail on toast at some point. By day three I wanted something other than prawn cocktail, even the 30 year old tin of Spam kept in the kitchen cupboard had started to look appetising but we still had a load of the sickly pink goo nestling in our old gas powered fridge.

Saturday came and with it came my older cousins Phil and Laura who lived just round the corner. My aunt had promised to take them and myself into town to buy various supplies for the new school term and they had come to collect me. Naturally enough as kids do, Phil started poking round in the fridge to see if he could find anything to eat and discovered the prawn cocktail. Having never had it before both he and Laura asked mum if they could and the answer was “Yes!”, anything to get rid of the stuff and make room for the Sunday joint so they both piled in and against my better judgement I did too, noting as I did that it tasted a bit ‘different’ than it had before but being seven I did not consider anything of it. After that we wandered up to my Aunts house and spent an hour or so mucking around in the back garden as she had a few chores to do before she took us into town. Time to go came and we climbed into the back of her Triumph Herald for the drive into town. Unfortunately for us, it being a summer Saturday, the traffic into town was backed up and in the car it began to get a bit warm. I started to realise that there were distinct rumblings in the Balkans and both Phil and Laura were awfully quiet. Arriving in town and being able to emerge from the car was a blessed relief.

Our first port of call that fateful afternoon was a large and well known gentlemen’s outfitters that also had a small section devoted to school uniform for the local schools. The shop itself was old fashioned with wooden counters, hats stored in hat boxes and various items of attire displayed on shelves. It was also cramped, dingy and on that August afternoon decidedly warm. Little did the assistant who emerged to serve us know of the apocalypse that was about to follow. He had just finished measuring Phil for a new blazer when everything erupted, well, when Phil erupted with a monumental “BOIYLLLK!” that covered the counter, a display of shirts and a rack of ties that happened to be in the way. The assistant, big manly man that he was screamed like a girl and leapt backwards just in time to avoid Phils stream of vomit but unfortunately straight into the path of Laura who with a massive and perfectly timed “HOOOORRRP!” sprayed him and an elderly gentleman who had up to that point been innocently trying on hats nearby not expecting to be puked on by a nine year old. In some ways it was good that he was trying the hats on as it meant that unlike my cousins who by now had covered half the shop in vomit I had something to throw up in, the hatbox, which I grabbed and added my own “BLLLEEERCH!” to the proceedings. It was only after that I realised I had grabbed the wrong box and had just brought my boots up over a brand new Homburg.

Aunt Anne, being the kind, caring and responsible adult she was, was by now trying to vacate the shop without drawing attention to herself, pretending that she did not know us and had not really brought three apparently demonically possessed children into the shop to let them abuse the customers and staff with foul demonic emanations. Unluckily for her she was spotted and we were ushered back into her care with the words “We’ll send you the bill!” ringing in our ears. It looked like our chances of getting any pocket money for the next twenty years were seriously screwed.

Swiftly we were ushered back to the car and in a style of driving that the ‘Sweeney’ would popularise the following year we sped out of town with us kids going a delicate shade of green in the back unsecured by seatbelts and subject to an un-merciless bouncing as Aunt Anne hurtled up the sea road.

Now those of you who come here from the Scaryduck blog will know of his frequent bouts of being “sick inna hedge”. It’s very possible we outdid him that day as no sooner had we reached countryside than the Sweeney-like speeding became a stop-start crawl as one of us bolted from the car every two hundred yards. We were sick in hedges, in fields, in a dustbin, in some poor sods Lupin patch, over several walls and in Phils case ‘onna dead badger’ which made him throw up again seconds later. Never have the words “Are we nearly there yet? I’m gonna be sick!” inspired so much terror. Finally though we reached home and as I pelted through the door heading for the bathroom and its merciful absence of shrubbery and dead wildlife I noticed mum and dad tucking in to bowls of prawn cocktail. Impending disaster was not far off.

After that the mere mention of it was taboo in our house after the days of family bonding over the toilet that followed and despite its popularity throughout the 70s I don’t think I, or my parents touched it again until I was well into my twenties.

Sports Day

As mentioned on here several times in the past, the school I attended valued sporting prowess as much if not more than academic ability so if you were rubbish at sports you were almost certainly doomed to seven years of being treated with contempt by the sadistic bastards who made up the PE department. Of course the flip side of this was that if you were any good at sports you ended up in one of the school teams which meant after hours training and matches against other schools that were invariably held on a Saturday, a sneaky way of getting extra school attendance out of you when you should have been watching ‘TISWAS’ and stuffing your face with Tartrazine loaded snacks.

Thus it became a battle to try to strike a balance between making sure that you did not lose your chance to laze around at the weekend and making sure that you were not labelled a bone idle waster by Messrs Jackson and Stephens and forced to do the kind of physical jerks that could fell most SAS men in the playground in order to toughen you up whilst everyone else played basketball in the nice warm gym. In my case being unutterably crap at football meant that at least once a week I got sent on laps of the field but the rest of the time I managed to just about do enough not to be marked down as a weakling yet avoid getting on any teams. Rugby and cricket I was average at, I could run the four hundred yards and not stagger in last gasping for breath and throwing up behind the biology labs and as for cross country, well most of us had sussed that if we dropped out of sight on the first lap of the school we could have a crafty smoke for twenty minutes, nip out of the side gate and then reappear for the last two hundred yards just behind the keen types who really had done the running and it would look like we had completed the race in an average enough time that would not see us ending up on the cross country team either. There was only one time when we were almost caught out and that was when Kev’ crossed the line with a Lambert & Butler glued to his lip having forgotten to spit it out before he resumed the race. Luckily for us Mr Jackson happened to be looking the other way as Kev’ charged past emitting clouds of smoke like a runaway steam engine.

The one fly in the ointment though was school sports day. We have all had to do it at some time in our youth. It’s the day when the PE teachers not content with being the evil, sadistic bastards they are and hounding you round a cold, wet playing field for two hours make you do the self same thing but with an audience of parents and peers to see you stagger in last or try to throw a lump of iron like an uncoordinated chimpanzee on Mogadon in the one sporting event you are absolutely rubbish at yet have been made to do by the PE teachers because they want a bit of a laugh. After all, the sight of Neil in his coke bottle glasses veering off at a tangent into the crowds and the second year kid with the withered arm trying to putt the shot obviously had great comedy value amongst the staff.

Apart from football the other event I wasn’t any good at was throwing the javelin or at least it appeared that way. I was in fact very good at it but to ensure that my leisure time was not dented by hurling pointy sticks on a weekend I made it look like I wasn’t that brilliant at it, not completely cack-handed like Pete who managed to spear himself through the foot the first time we were let loose with javelins but not good enough to be noticed and appointed school spear chucker either. Thus on the last sports day before we left school after our ‘O’ levels I found, by some twist of perverse logic in one of the PE masters mind, that I was representing my house in the javelin events.

It was possibly because this was the last sports day we would ever have to attend as in the sixth form sport was optional that a certain spirit of rebellion came over me and when it was my turn to throw I thought “Sod it!” and hurled the javelin with all my might which given that I had just hit sixteen was pretty mighty indeed. As it happened the annual spectacle of the teachers versus first year pupils egg and spoon two hundred metres race had just begun and as usual the teachers were about fifty yards ahead of the first year participants who seemed to consist of all the asthmatics and kids who liked their chips too much chosen in order to make the teachers, who apart from Miss Hancock were hardly the fittest of beings, look good.

Now, in most normal and sensible athletics stadiums the javelin triangle is marked so that stray missiles pose no threat to spectators and other athletes. At my school it had been decided that as it was obvious no pupil would ever hurl one more than about ten yards, probably because generations of pupils wanting an easy life had never really tried that hard, that the javelin triangle would be marked out straight across the field instead of down it. As I stood and watched the sharp pointy metal thing I had just thrown descend in a graceful arc my thought of “Sod it!” became one of “Ooooo! Shit!”

With a thud the javelin fell to earth… slap bang in the middle of the running track about six feet in front of Mr Tate, one of the geography masters, who, unable to stop or react in time went flat on his face over it closely followed by two of the French Masters a history teacher and the head of Biology. The fat and asthmatic kids meanwhile jogged serenely past the teachers lying in a heap on the track, or at least as serenely as it possibly is for someone who is gasping for breath and going a funny shade of blue to jog past and on to the finish line, the first time the teachers had been beaten in about a hundred years. Behind me I could hear the sounds of apoplectic rage and turned to face Mr Jackson who, red faced glared at me for long seconds. Next moment the whole audience of parents, teachers and fellow pupils heard his bellow of “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE BOY…A…A FUCKING ZULU????” echo across the playing field.

An hour later, as if to rub it in I was presented with the rosette for first place and over the polite applause of the parents and teachers another sound could be heard, that of three hundred or so of my fellow pupils stamping their feet in a rough approximation of the moment the natives are heard in a certain 1960s film starring Michael Caine and Stanley Baker. Perhaps not surprisingly when the athletics area was marked out the following year the javelin range pointed down the track, not across it.

Death Game 1980

“Ridicule is nothing to be scared of!” So sang Adam and the Ants in the early 80s and it was a refrain that went through the heads of the dozen or so of us who had chosen ice skating as our sport of choice when we were allowed to choose whatever sports we wanted to do from the age of 14 at school. Little did our fellow pupils who had called us a “Bunch of wets!” know as they continued to be hounded around wet and muddy pitches that we had discovered the most monumental skive ever.

As a child I had done a bit of skating and won a few awards. The school skating lessons merely went over old ground with the possibility of earning a few certificates that I had skipped having taken the highest level when I was five years old and missed the rest as I could do more than skate forwards and backwards. The instructors put me through my paces and realising that I could actually skate to almost professional standards more or less told me to stop wasting their time and bugger off and do what I wanted whilst they got on with teaching the rest of the class how to stand up and not get a wet arse. In my case doing what I wanted meant honing my talents on the video games and pinball tables and drinking vast amounts of Cola in the rink café as the master in charge of our school was an exceedingly deaf chap called Mr Jennings who was rapidly approaching retirement and who invariably fell asleep on one of the rink side seats.

Most weeks were the same. Turn up, put on skates, skate a few circuits, try for a high score whilst waiting for my mates to finish their fifteen minute lesson, play pinball and drink caffeinated beverages then all scarper long before Mr Jennings woke up. All in all it was a total and utter skive. However, one small object was to make things decidedly different.

It was Kev’ who decided to liven things up one week by dropping one of those high powered bouncy rubber balls onto the ice. Within minutes a game of ice football had begun and that is where things began to go a bit awry. We shared the rink with a number of other local schools, some of which were our rivals and some of which were the rivals of other schools. Despite its so called ‘Poof’ status skating was always an interestingly edgy affair and violence simmered just below the surface. The game of ice football gradually sucked in more pupils from other schools and began to get a bit more ‘competitive’. It began to resemble less of a school skating session and more an extra brutal real life version of the Action comic strip 'Death Game 1999' of a few years earlier. In fact it is very possible that the writers of the Amiga game ‘Speedball 2’ may have been at that very rink, witnesses to the carnage that was about to break out. There were 500 teenagers on the ice rink; most of them hyped up on cola and sweets from the vending machines and someone had dropped a ball in the midst of them. Blood was going to be spilt. All it needed was for someone to yell “Ice Cream! Ice Cream!”

The first casualties were a party from a local Catholic girls school. Whilst their mates tried to cop off with the lads from the local Catholic boys school a few of the ‘wallflowers’ had elected to stay on the ice and skate round holding hands and talking about ponies or something only to be violently cut down by Kev’ who was trying to get the ball from one of the pupils from our rival school by barging him into the side barriers. They went down like ninepins and this was followed seconds later by a St Trinians like scream as the rest of the girls leapt the barrier and went after Kev’. The ball rebounded off the barriers and smacked another lad in the forehead with a resounding ‘CLUNK’. He too went down like a sack of spuds dropped from a great height and at least four other kids went arse over tit over the top of him. The ball meanwhile rolled into the throng and with a few kicks gathered momentum as most of the skaters oblivious to the bodies littering the ice continued to circle menacingly. By now Kev’ was skating for his life pursued by several vengeful girls. Perhaps unluckily the ball chose its moment to return to him and hit his ice skate with some force. The impact caused him to wobble and slip, the resulting tumble propelled him into half a dozen young ladies from one of the more exclusive girls schools in the area…who hated the Catholic girls with a vengeance and thought they had pushed Kev’ into them. Within seconds a full on catfight had broken out and it did not take long for about fifty other kids all bearing grudges or just up for a scrap to pile into the fray. Soon it was like ‘Fight Club’ on ice.

Meanwhile, myself and two classmates had grabbed Kev’ from the midst of the brawl and dragged him back to the changing rooms as the rink security and skating instructors joined the battle. As Mr Jennings woke up, disturbed from his nap by the sound of combatants screaming, yelling and trying to batter each other we were standing behind him beaming angelically and pointing out that “We left the ice because some of the other schools were misbehaving and getting rather rough sir!”

A few weeks later I was called up on stage during assembly to be presented with a handful of skating certificates by the headmaster. Apparently I had done the school proud by winning so many and in a school that valued sporting achievement that was a high honour indeed. I didn’t have the nerve to tell the headmaster that they had really been earned for drinking cola, getting a high score at ‘Galaxians’ and being part of a near riot that had resulted in most of the local schools being banned from the ice rink for an indefinite period. Luckily we were not one of them and our skiving continued unabated.

Raiders of the lost...AARGH!

Nowadays the government and various health professionals relentlessly badger us about getting five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. It did not used to be like that. In fact the quickest way to get a kid to eat fruit was to put it behind a 10’ high wall with a big sign saying ‘Keep Out’ on the gate. If you did that you could guarantee that within an hour of doing so half the neighbourhood kids would have forgotten their ‘Dinosaur chews’, Blackjacks and other treats loaded with enough E numbers to make a Sloth hyperactive and be over the wall and helping themselves to your fruit.

Mrs Carters house was one such example. It had originally been a farm on the outskirts of town but time and progress had resulted in it being just another house in the suburbs where my grandparents lived. To the rear of it was an orchard surrounded by a high wall. The only way of getting to it was through a locked door set in the wall, a door with the dire warning ‘DANGER – KEEP OUT’ written on it in six inch high letters. From the lane that ran alongside it we could see the juicy crop of apples, pears, plums and elderberries that grew behind it. We also knew that Mrs Carter, being about eighty would never pick the fruit and resolved to liberate it for ourselves.

Thus it was that our gang, hyped up on adrenaline and Corona Limeade gathered in the lane that ran alongside the wall all cunningly disguised in the military camouflage outfits that our parents had purchased from the green shield stamps catalogue. That is all apart from Rachel who turned up in jeans and a Bay City Rollers top so we sent her to the corner to keep a look out whilst the rest of us put the master plan we had cooked up over Jaffa Cakes in Stuarts bedroom into action. We would hoist Elizabeth, her being the lightest up onto the wall with a length of rope from granddads shed. She would drop down the other side, tie it to the nearest tree, toss the rope back over the wall and we would use it to shin up to get at the treasures beyond. Dead easy and utterly foolproof.

Now regular readers will know that as soon as the phrase “dead easy and utterly foolproof” is mentioned around here then everything is about to go the same shape as some of the fruit we were trying to ‘liberate’ and this time was no exception. Elizabeth was duly hoisted to the top of the wall and we had no sooner stepped back to check her progress when we heard a most un-nine year old girl like “Oh fuck!” and she vanished from view as the part of the wall she was sitting on crumbled away like the hundred or so year old un-tended wall it was. From beyond we heard the sound of a body and stonework plummeting through undergrowth. As fast as we could, Stuart, Nick and I scrambled up the wall and peered over expecting the worst. Luckily for Elizabeth an Elderberry bush had broken her fall. The bad news was that it was in the middle of a bramble patch.

The dire warning of ‘DANGER – KEEP OUT’ probably referred to the fact that Mrs Carter was obviously a mad scientist in disguise and was experimenting in hideous genetic mutations of the carnivorous kind. The orchard was completely overgrown with the kind of brambles not seen outside of the magic forest in ‘Sleeping Beauty’, the kind that thrived on human blood. We could not see Elizabeth but we could certainly hear her. A nearby bush had apparently developed a bad case of sweariness and from it came a stream of “OW! FUCK! OW! OWW! FUCK! SHIT! OW!”

If the ‘Ringing Singing Tree’ ever developed Tourettes this would be how it sounded and it may have been this that alerted Mrs Carter to our presence as despite her advanced years she was obviously not deaf and suddenly a window that overlooked the orchard opened. In our haste to get to the fruit we had overlooked one tiny little thing, well, small, four-legged thing. Mrs Carters Jack Russell and it came flying out of the window like a furry missile heading for the extremely sweary bush.

It was the thought of being viciously savaged by the dog as well as being torn apart by the brambles o' doom that galvanized Elizabeth into action and suddenly she was free of the brambles and scrambling up the wall. As we dropped down the other side Stuart muttered those famous last words “Phew! Safe!” at the exact moment the dog came hurdling over the wall half way up the lane. How were we to know that there was a pile of rubble at the top end of the orchard that allowed it to reach the top of the wall? What ensued was something out of farce as the neighbourhood was treated to five kids who, with the addition of Rachel looked like refugees from the paramilitary arm of the Bay City Rollers fan club and one of whom looking like they had been dragged through a hedge backwards and indeed had, being chased through the streets by a small but very yappy dog. All that was needed was the music from Benny Hill and the scene would be complete.

We must have run around the area for around half an hour and the terrier only gave up when we finally reached Stuarts garden and began pelting it with dirt from the flowerbeds. By the time we got back to our gang ‘hut’ all thoughts of healthy fruit had vanished from our minds. The only fruit we wanted was the ‘Fruit Salads’ and ‘Rhubarb and Custard’ chews we had bought earlier that day.

Fate though had other ideas. That weekend my grandmother suddenly announced that she had volunteered my services to someone she knew through her women’s guild. The elderly lady had an orchard full of fruit she needed picking but could not do it by her self and she had already had kids trying to steal the fruit so could I round up some of my friends to do the job for her. Perhaps fortunately for us Mrs Carter’s eyesight was not as good as her hearing as she did not recognize us when we were herded round to her house by my grandmother. The dog was a different matter and his growling and barking made the old lady remark “It’s most odd, he’s not usually like that with children!” We did not dare tell her that it probably had not chased most ‘children’ around the streets for best part of half an hour before having those same ‘children’ proceed to hurl large clods of earth at it. Wisely we kept our mouths shut but the presence of the dog certainly made the afternoon of fruit picking that little bit edgier than it should have been.

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.

Kaboom

As regular readers will know, as a child I was fairly obsessed with making loud bangs with homemade explosives, napalm and the like. Back then it was the sort of thing any ordinary child whose grandfather was a scientist and of Irish extraction did and unless we blew up the old folks home or burnt down the school nobody really took that much notice unlike now when just striking a match gets you a quick ticket on an unmarked aircraft heading for the Caribbean and a nice orange jumpsuit.

When I was 12 a woman and her daughter moved in next door. I soon discovered that she was the type to complain about anything and everything, especially anything that disturbed her wet blanket of a daughter who was something of a sensitive soul despite being about 18 at the time. For three years I suffered being complained about if a football sailed within ten feet of her house or if I was spotted with a cricket ball, tennis ball or even a bag of marbles anywhere in the neighbourhood. Such items could be lethal if they came in contact with her daughter. That is if her daughter ever left the safety of the house, which was something of a rarity. It was possible she could not actually get out as her mother had taped the windows shut in case any insects got in and caused her daughter to be frightened. In fact, my mere existence and the existence of any child in the neighbourhood was a cause for immediate complaint. Little did I know as I was hauled before my parents over some minor incident on a roughly twenty times a week basis that in my fifteenth year revenge would be spectacular…

It was bonfire night 1981 and I had a couple of my mates around for a bonfire party and to fill our faces with my mothers top quality cheese and bacon scone. Between us we had acquired an industrial quantity of top quality Chinese fireworks from the local joke shop instead of the more usual and somewhat tamer ‘Standard’, ‘Astra’ and ‘Brocks’ varieties. For so called ‘Garden Fireworks’ they made some pretty fearsome bangs, roars, pretty lights and the occasional crater in dads flowerbeds. Nowadays they would probably be banned or if not banned, they would only be sold to responsible adults who had letters from the police, the vicar and at least three magistrates to prove their utter responsibility to be let anywhere near high explosives. They certainly would not have been in the hands of three fifteen year old pyromaniacs with a box of matches. In the case of some of the rockets even we were not sure whether to send them skywards or keep them in case the cold war Communist threat saw Warsaw pact tanks rolling down our leafy suburban streets. These things would take out an armoured column, no problems.

After several hours worth of screeches, thuds, a near miss that almost removed our other neighbours television aerial and only two complaints from the local airport about anti-aircraft fire downing the 8.15 mail plane, we had just finished making the neighbourhood sound much like downtown Baghdad does nowadays when who should appear but the neighbour to complain that the noise of our fireworks had "made my daughter wet her knickers in terror!"

Now what total spoon says to a bunch of fifteen year olds with particularly hyperactive imaginations and three years of complaining to gain revenge for that they had made a 21 year old woman wee herself and not expect something to be triggered in said fifteen year olds minds? Especially as over the years her complaints about us playing football, cricket and even just lounging around the back lawn of my house had curtailed our leisure activities most severely. In the annals of stupid things to say that one sentence has to rate pretty highly. In fact it probably rates up there with “That Mr Hitler is a very nice man, he’ll never invade Poland”

Naturally this little fact fermented in our minds until a month or so later when the chance for spectacular revenge presented itself not so much on a plate as on a silver salver carried by a retinue of liveried footmen. Despite her utter wet blanket-ness the daughter owned a moped. Presumably she was unaware that mopeds might be even slightly dangerous. This was kept at the back of the house and to get there she had to wheel it down an alleyway between my house and hers. At one end of the alleyway was a flight of steps with a surrounding wall leading up to her garden that she had to pass. Every day at 5.30 on the dot she would arrive home and her mother would come out to help her push the moped down the alley to the back of the house as it was way too dangerous for her to do it by herself.

As it happened, on the day in question I had discovered a large banger left over from bonfire night that I had sort of increased the power of a bit, possibly to take out a tank or two that the rockets had missed. My two mates and I just happened to be outside at 5.30pm wondering what we could blow up. It was after all far better than doing maths homework. We saw mother and daughter arrive at the end of the alley with the moped and under the cover of darkness the banger was lit and lobbed behind the wall that surrounded the steps as we ducked behind my fathers shed.

The detonation could not have been better timed if we had tried. Just as they were about six feet from the wall it went off behind the brickwork...

BLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMM!!!!

It was closely followed by dual screams of "AAAAAIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!!!!" and "YAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGGHHHH!!!" and seconds later a whimper of "Muuuummm! I've pooed and wet myself!"

Meanwhile the three of us were hiding behind the garden shed trying not to wet ourselves either. Not through terror but because we were in absolute hysterics as the moped was forgotten and the daughter waddled inside like a cowboy who had forgotten his horse.

Unfortunately a few hours later the neighbour turned up on our doorstep to regale my parents of how their son had made her daughter...well, you already know that. I was hauled out and given a right royal bollocking for it and the fact that my IED might have blown up the moped with apocalyptic consequences. I was made to apologise profusely but when the door was shut and she had gone my dad nearly bust a gut laughing. From what I could gather he and mum were fed up with this woman and her daughters constant moaning about everything as well and considered it justice well done. Oddly I got a pocket money rise soon after. Nowadays it would have got me an ASBO.

The next day a solitary pair of Bridget Jones pants appeared on the washing line next door as if to signal our victory to the entire neighbourhood and for several years to come every kid in the neighbourhood referred to the daughter as ‘John Wayne’.

Football Crazy

Unlike my uncle Ernest who had played professional football in the 1930s and several other members of my family who could be found kicking a ball around the local park pitches as part of the Sunday League my own football skills left a lot to be desired. To tell the truth, an uncoordinated Gibbon on tranquillisers could have probably played the beautiful game better than I could. I loved football but put a ball anywhere near me and I immediately developed two left feet and a terminal loss of direction. Naturally this led to me being relegated to the side that included the asthmatics, the academics and the blind kid with the gimpy leg when it came to school games lessons and in a school that valued sporting prowess as much as and possibly more than academic achievement this was a bad thing indeed. Even though I was not too bad at cricket and could hurl javelins with the best of them my total inability to send a football in the right direction marked me as a useless loser in the eyes of certain masters.

One such master happened to be our games master who was an ex-paratrooper by the name of Jackson and who it was rumoured had been kicked out of the regiment for brutality. He loathed any sign of weakness and being useless at football was a sign of weakness in his book so he took it on himself to toughen us up by any means possible. This usually took the form of ten laps of the school field and an hour and a half of trying to kick a heavy leather ball that had been manufactured circa 1863 around the flooded bottom pitch that was rumoured to harbour a breeding colony of crocodiles and a couple of hippos in its swampy environs. By the end of the session most of us would be tottering around on leaden limbs and doing passable impersonations of a Glastonbury reveller on a particularly muddy day. Broken legs were not uncommon and the local ambulance service kept one of its vans permanently parked outside the gates that led to the fields. The lesson would normally be overseen by Jackson and the slightly effeminate maths teacher Mr Davies, to whom Jackson had been heard referring to in an unguarded moment in the PE masters staff cupboard as “That Welsh poof!”. That Mr Jackson himself had been relegated to teaching the uncoordinated and the sporting inept amongst us said a lot about what the head of PE thought of him as he was never let anywhere near the star pupils who could actually kick a ball. We hated the man with a vengeance but revenge was to be at hand albeit unintentionally.

The games lesson had begun normally enough with its lung bursting run around the periphery of the field that had left several of our group throwing up behind the pavilion and Neil whose bottle bottom glasses had steamed up getting severely lost and vanishing at a tangent behind the biology labs. Despite the losses Mr Jackson then produced the ‘Cannonball’ as we called it and those of us who were left were divided into two teams. For about an hour the game progressed without incident. Occasionally one of us even managed to coordinate our limbs for long enough to get a shot somewhere within fifty feet of a goal, which was lucky as both the goalies were asthmatic and any further exertion would have probably killed them. Then it happened. The ball suddenly landed at my feet and I heard Jackson’s bellow of “Run with it laddie!” from nearby. Mortal terror kicked in and I froze. I knew that if I tried to run with the ball I would inevitably end up on my arse in the mud, such was my lack of coordination in the vicinity of spherical objects on football pitches. I could hardly pick the ball up as we were not playing rugby that term. Thus I did the only thing possible and gave the sodden leather ball as mighty a kick as I could possibly manage.

True to form, the ball, instead of sailing gracefully up the field to where team mates stood waiting in hopeful expectation, or possibly waiting to see which of them the ball was headed for so that they could run away from it, shot off my boot at an angle and at high speed like a navigationally challenged Cruise missile. With a loud and sickening thump it thudded into Mr Jackson or more precisely an area slightly south of his waistline. The sound brought play to a halt not only on our pitch but the top pitch as well as even the head of PE winced. Only I was close enough to hear the strangled “Meep!” as Mr Jackson folded to his knees and curled into a foetal position in the soggiest, muddiest part of the pitch. His whistle slipped from his lips and tears rolled down his ashen cheeks as he lay there for several moments before rising unsteadily to his feet and as he staggered back to the changing rooms clutching his injured groin, Mr Davies was heard to add insult to injury with the polite enquiry of “So, do you need some liniment rubbing into that?”

Luckily the football term ended that week but we were treated to the sight of Mr Jackson wearing an uncharacteristically baggy pair of trousers and never once sitting down for several days afterwards and all those present at the time agreed that the ball could not have been better targeted than if George Best himself had kicked it.