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.

Booze Club

Our Chemistry master, Mr Roberts, was an extremely trusting soul, perhaps a little too trusting of our sixth form chemistry group given that in the eighteen months he had been teaching us we had managed to almost gas the school, leave a large smoking crater in a demonstration bench after a thermite reaction went a bit wrong and nearly kill the headmaster as well. Perhaps these incidents had slipped his mind on the day he asked us to bring some alcohol in to the next weeks lesson for an experiment in distillation.

I’m sure he only meant for us to bring a small amount of alcohol in to school but when the fateful day arrived it came with the sound of clinking bottles from various rucksacks and shoulder bags. Taking his request a bit too literally we had all raided our parents wine cellars, sideboards and cupboards under the stairs and had with us a selection of booze that could have kept George Best, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton and most of the tramps that gathered in the local park unconscious for about a week. Pete, our resident punk rocker had even lugged a gallon jug of 'Old Rats Arse' or some equally potent scrumpy in, presumably provided by one of his older mates whom he frequently got drunk with on the local green. Perhaps wisely, lest the boys toilet become more like a smoke filled pub than it usually was, other teachers insisted we left our experimental materials in the science lab so it was thus that the fume cupboard came to resemble a well stocked hostelry instead as the various bottles liberated from parents boozes stashes were stacked within. In theory only a small amount would be needed for the experiment, the teachers were already eyeing up the rest.

Our chemistry lesson was the last two periods of the day, in the afternoon and it started innocuously enough…as most disasters do. It started with us distilling the Sherry Simon had stolen from his mum to produce neat alcohol. From there it went downhill. Bored with setting it, whatever and whoever we could pour it over on fire we wondered what else we could do with the positive cornucopia of alcoholic delights arrayed on the bench before us.

As fate would have it, about halfway through the lesson Mr Roberts was called away to deal with a problem and being the trusting soul he was left us on our own. It was then that Mark decided to see what his grandmothers’ Sanatogen tonic wine tasted like and before long bottles were being passed around like a wine and cheese evening where the host had forgotten the Gouda. I had ‘borrowed’ two bottles of my fathers homemade Orange wine, this, most of the participants in that Bacchanalian excess swear to this day was our undoing. Calling it wine was a bit of an understatement. If his Elderberry 1978 was a cheeky little number, his Orange wine was like being slapped in the face with a large and very alcoholic cricket bat. In fact I firmly believe that my father was in talks with NASA as they wanted it to fuel their space shuttles. In terms of alcohol content only certain hard to find vodka and the methylated spirits the corner hardware shop sold ranked above it. Generous amounts were sloshed into some of the cleaner beakers that may or may not have been used in experiments involving poisons and knocked back leaving participants gasping at what was described as ‘a bit of pokey old tackle’ by another mate in later years. In fact, if prohibition had been in force my father could have expected a visit from Elliot Ness and the boys with a selection of axes and a warrant that would send him to Alcatraz for life.

Either the problem that Mr Roberts was dealing with was a serious one or he had completely forgotten that he was supposed to be teaching and had wandered off somewhere as by now he had been gone for almost an hour and the effects of our rapid alcohol consumption had kicked in as unlike current teenagers who spend their time hanging around in bus shelters with a bottle of Bucky and of course Pete, the most any of us had consumed was a small white wine, some of Auntie Mabels Port or a lemonade shandy made with the weakest beer our parents could find on Christmas day. Mark began to look green round the gills, Karen and Rachel were slumped against the cupboards at the back of the labs, Chris had wandered off down the corridor in a daze humming the Wombles theme tune and apparently “Looking for some ice!” and Andy was face down amidst a sea of beakers. As for me, I was attempting to convince Martin that mixing all the booze that was left into one super cocktail was probably a bad thing to do. Unfortunately I was having little success, mainly down to my own advanced state of inebriation. Grans Advocaat had never had this sort of effect on me but then again I had never sunk an entire bottle of it washed down with a gin chaser and a bucket of meths.

We might have managed to get away with it if nobody had spotted us weaving our way out of the school gates at home time and providing none of the teachers turned up. It wasn’t to be and for us it could only get worse as the headmaster, alerted to what was happening by Chris stumbling into his study demanding “Ishe cubes”, arrived just as Andy woke up and went “BLLLEEERCH!” into one of the sinks. The head took one look at the semi-conscious bodies slumped around the lab, Pete hugging the remains of his gallon of cider and Martins super-cocktail that was bubbling away lethally on the front bench and asked what was probably the stupidest question of his life…

”What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

Looking back, Martins slurred answer of “Biology experiment sir, Effects of alcohol on human metabolishm. Been a bit too succeshful!” as he slowly toppled from his stool may have been the wrong one but it was absolutely inspired at the time.