Flour Power

‘Home Economics’, two words that struck dread into the hearts of most of the first year boys at my school. Apart from one or two who preferred needlework and making light fluffy sponges and well, they were considered a bit on the strange side anyhow. The rest of us would have much rather been in metal work making the kind of sharp, pointy implement that would give Rambo wet dreams.

It wasn’t that we hated the lesson as such, at the end of it you got to sample the things everyone else had made and on the whole the recorded fatalities from Salmonella and Botulism were in the low double digits. No, it was simply that the double period on a Tuesday morning was stiflingly boring, made even more so by Mrs Cash, our Home Economics tutor being the most safety conscious person in the whole world and not letting us anywhere near anything vaguely sharp as well as insisting we wore the kind of outfits more at home in the chemistry labs where at least there were substances that could bring about horrible and agonising death. In Home Economics the worst that could happen would be a fellow pupil running amok with a potato masher.

Suffice it to say we tried desperately to banish the boredom but all our attempts seemed doomed to failure. The tabletop finger soccer match using dried peas came to an abrupt halt when an over enthusiastic corner kick ricocheted off the blackboard and into the batter mix Mrs Cash was showing us how to make resulting in a ban on dried peas. The Spaghetti catapult incident led to just about everything being banned apart from flour and what harm could flour do?

As it happens, quite a lot in the wrong hands! In the hands of a baker it can be made into succulent, crisp crusted loaves or indulgent cakes. In the hands of a bunch of schoolboys it becomes a near lethal weapon.

It was a dreary November day and we were supposed to be making rock cakes when Mrs Cash was called away to attend an incident in the gym in her other role as stand in school nurse when the real one was incapacitated due to her medicinal brandy habit or on ‘holiday’ due to the same. Now was the time for mischief but what could we do? We had no sharp implements so murder and torture were out of the question. All we had was flour, water, margarine and currants and barring covering the class swot in ‘Stork’ there wasn’t much else we could do. It was Gavin who suggested the ‘pillar of flame’, as he had seen it done by some lads in the council flats where his aunt lived. All we needed was a stairwell, a bag of flour and matches and we had all three. As a precaution, just in case someone got a bit too enthusiastic with the flambé the classroom had a fire exit that led to a concrete stairwell, we had bags of flour and given the smoking habits of half the boys in the school there was no shortage of matches and lighters either.

The method of making the ‘pillar of flame’ was easy, someone, in our case Gavin, stood at the top of the stairs and shook flour down through the stairwell, someone at the bottom, Andy, threw a match into the descending flour and the result was a pleasing pillar of flame. All very spectacular the first two times we did it but we had failed to notice that not all the flour burnt and the air was getting thick with dust. On the third attempt Gavin, perhaps trying to impress may have shaken a bit too much as when the match was hurled the result was not so much ‘pillar of flame’, more ‘wrath of God’. In fact it may be that the whole ten commandments and burning bush thing was less a religious experience than a couple of Israelites arsing about with wheat based products when Moses arrived on Mount Sinai.

Fortunately most of us were shielded by the stairs and only received a superficial scorching but Gavin who had been leaning over the edge of the top banister took the full force of the flaming column that ignited with an audible ‘WHOMPH’ that rattled the door at the base of the stairs. This was followed by noises that could only be described as a strangled “Argh!” and a slightly louder “SHIIIITE!” We raced to the top of the stairs to find Gavin standing in a state of total shock, his face red, missing his eyebrows and with wisps of smoke rising from his hair. Below us Andy was frantically stamping on his white coat that had gone a distinctly sooty colour. Quickly we bundled Gavin back into the classroom and stuck his head under the tap at one of the sinks…just as Mrs Cash arrived back from whatever emergency had occurred in the gym to find us apparently trying to drown one of our number whilst another stood gazing forlornly at a coat that appeared to have been put in the oven at gas mark four.

As she stood staring in disbelief at the now soaking and eyebrow-less Gavin it was possible to see her struggling with how to phrase “What the fucking hell is going on here you little bastards?” in terms that could be delivered to a bunch of 11 and 12 year old children. It was left to Martin, always one to come up with a good answer to say

“It was the oven Miss, the gas must have been on and when he tried to light it there was an explosion. You really ought to get the caretaker to check it out, we might have been killed.”

That it was only the boys that had apparently come to close to death was probably what led to her being less convinced of this than she was that we had been mucking around with the ovens. As a result we got to spend the rest of the lesson copying out recipe books whilst frantically praying that she would have no need to go to the fire exit stairwell which was covered in flour and scorch marks and that we could blame the devastation on the 3rd form who had the lesson after ours.

Atomic Fireball II

You might have thought we had learnt our lesson. Messing around with things that go bang is not a good idea especially when it earns you a walloping from your friends grandfather for half destroying his greenhouse and most of his prize winning vegetables. However, the lesson had obviously not sunk in as a year after doing just that Stuart, Sanjeev and myself were once again dabbling in the dark arts of making things go ‘BOOM!’

My parents and I had moved earlier in the year and were living on the upper floors of my grandparents large Georgian House whilst our new house was being extensively redecorated to remove the kind of wallpaper that even by the middle of the 70s was considered hideous and brown, the like of which can only be seen nowadays in re-runs of ‘The Sweeney’ or ‘Life on Mars’, that the previous owners had so loved. This in turn meant that I was living close to Sanjeev and Stuart, my friends who lived close to my grandparents.

For some reason that summer the craze amongst the local boys was not bubblegum card collecting or something equally safe and not likely to end up in hideous death. It was making bangers from the metal tubes inside pens or small pieces of copper pipe. Naturally being the good, well-behaved lads we were we stayed away from such pursuits and played chess or read encyclopaedias in our spare time. Sorry, that would be a bare-faced lie. We blew stuff up by filling the tubes with scraped matches, crimping the ends and throwing them onto small fires we had built round the back of the derelict church hall just like everybody else.

They made quite impressive bangs and on the whole there were surprisingly few fatalities but then things started to get a bit competitive between us and a couple of the other gangs of neighbourhood kids who also hung round the back of the hall to blow stuff up. In fact it was not so much competitive as an arms race in miniature and we were determined to go nuclear first.

Now getting hold of the Plutonium and other stuff that goes into an atomic bomb was a bit beyond us as ten year olds even if Sanjeevs' dad did work at the local university so we improvised. As it would happen plumbers working on some new houses nearby had left several six inch lengths of one inch copper pipe lying around and these were duly purloined and after using my granddads tools to bend and seal one end, filled with a mixture of gunpowder from the bangers Stuart always seemed to have, all our available supplies of plastic caps, a Vesuvius fountain Sanjeev had saved from the previous years Guy Fawkes party and about three large boxes worth of scraped match heads. In fact, come that Autumn my mother could be constantly heard complaining that all the matches to light the fire seemed to have disappeared from the kitchen cupboard. I of course denied all knowledge. We soon had two ‘bangers’ that were in hindsight, not so much bangers as improvised weapons of mass destruction that nowadays would have the US marines storming our houses under cover of mass airstrikes and an artillery barrage to make sure they did not fall into the wrong hands.

Now, not wanting to seem like right lemons in front of the other kids if our handiwork failed to go boom in a satisfying way we decided that one of them should be sacrificed in a test run much like the Manhattan Project had tested the first atom bomb in the desert. We unfortunately did not have a desert or a test rig. What we did have was the back of Sanjeevs granddads shed and a largish plant pot. Looking back, spending our pocket money on a flight to the Mojave might have been a good idea. We filled the pot with paper, wood and anything else vaguely flammable and added a dash of methylated spirits just to make sure, rested the ‘banger’ with the least amount of our explosive mixture in it across the pot, flung in one of the few matches we had not turned into headless sticks and ran for cover.

We waited and waited a bit longer, none of us were about to go back and then suddenly:

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMM!

The detonation was far louder than any of us had expected and a not insubstantial mushroom cloud of smoke rose behind the shed. “Yes, it had worked, we could go down to the church hall and show the other kids…hang on, why was there still smoke pouring from behind the shed ?”

Did I forget to mention that this was 1976? The summer had been hot and dry, roads had melted, people were frying eggs on the bonnet of their Ford Capri and the vegetation behind the shed was tinder dry. The explosion had shattered the plant pot and scattered flaming debris amongst the weeds and now flames were licking up the side of the shed. In a moment of the kind of blind panic that only ten year old boys who have just committed an act of inadvertent arson can have we ran back into the house desperately searching for something to put the flames out, totally ignoring the fact that right next to the shed was the garden hose. Anyhow, we had all heeded the dire warnings about not wasting water under pain of horrible death and a stern telling off from the government minister for drought.

In full fire fighting mode we pelted back out clutching a soda siphon and a number of bottles of Panda Pop lemonade that anyone who grew up in the 70s will tell you, were pretty useless at quenching thirst let alone fighting fires due to their rather small size. Desperately we squirted and poured only to be surrounded by clouds of steam smelling vaguely of burnt sugar but the blaze continued. It was perhaps lucky that Sanjeevs dad chose that moment to come home and that he had the presence of mind to totally ignore the dire water wasting warnings and get stuck in with the garden hose whilst we stood guiltily back and tried to pretend that we were not really there.

Five minutes later the fire was well and truly out although the end of the shed looked worse for wear and a swathe of the garden was well and truly crisped. Sanjeevs dad, who was one of the politest and well spoken people I had ever encountered stood looking at us as if unable to say what he was really thinking until finally he managed to slowly and with precise pronunciation say

“What is the meaning of this……..bloody outrage?”

It was no use denying it, we were caught red handed, bang to rights and could not even claim it was caused by plummeting space junk as Stuart had a box of matches, albeit mainly headless, in his pocket. The remainder of that summer holiday was spent reading encyclopaedias and playing chess as we were not allowed outside without parental supervision. Oddly enough though, whilst lying in bed one night the air was rent by an almighty bang from a nearby street. Either our remaining ‘banger’ had found its way into enemy hands or one of the other gangs of kids had managed to up the ante a bit. Whatever it was, ten minutes later I heard sirens and could swear I could smell slightly burnt sugar.

Atomic Fireball

Back in the days before games consoles and PCs the closest you got to the Burnout or Need For Speed series involved Dinky or Matchbox cars and a lot of imagination. If you were really, really lucky your dad might have convinced your mum that a Scalextric or TCR set was what you wanted for Christmas so he could play too. An FPS usually involved running round a local bombsite, scrubland, park or the local churchyard firing at your mates with an assortment of cap guns and as for huge explosions, you only got those in war films…unless you were a ten year old with an unhealthy obsession in militaria and making things go ‘BOOM’. As mentioned before on here, my friend Dave and I both had that particular unhealthy obsession. I’m not sure what his excuse was but I still blame my granddad.

One bonfire night in the mid 70s Dave’s wheeler-dealer of a dad got hold of a quantity of Chinese fireworks from one of his contacts. In those days Chinese fireworks were a bit of a novelty sold in a rare few shops. Most of us made do with boxes of Astra, Brocks or Standard, nothing as exotic as these and tame stuff unless you count the time one nearly set fire to the conservatory. Usually it was only the rich kids down the road whose parents could afford them that got them on Bonfire Night, not that we did not reap the benefits too as we could see their display by standing on the garden wall and peering over the fence.

Unfortunately the provenance of these particular oriental fireworks could not quite be ascertained and to say that they were a little on the duff side would have been an understatement. About 70% of them failed to bang and sparkle as sensible fireworks are supposed to. These were thrown to one side and forgotten about as us kids stuffed our faces with the party food on offer.

However, come the following day Dave and I were poking through the detritus of the previous night as bored kids are wont to do when we discovered the huge pile of dud fireworks that had been thrown aside. Back then bonfire nights were, on the whole not conducted in the pouring rain as global warming had not yet been invented so the explosive contents of the brightly coloured tubes was quite dry albeit slightly chilled. It appeared that the cause of non-detonation was quite simply rubbish blue touch paper that had failed to convey the fire to the powder. Of course, the next thought was obvious, “Why not make our own firework?”

So we did.

Nearby was a row of local shops, this being the days when such things existed and they had not all been turned into trendy wine bars and coffee shops. One of them was a haberdashers shop selling everything from buttons to huge rolls of material. A swift raid on the bins at the back procured us an empty cardboard tube left over from a roll of material and in the case of Dave, a pair of ripped jeans as we scrambled back over the wall. Back at his dads shed we bunged one end up with a cardboard disk and best part of a roll of masking tape, filled the tube with the gunpowder mix from all the other fireworks with no thought of what they had originally been supposed to do, rockets, fountains, Roman candles, they all went into the mix. The original fireworks were pretty chunky affairs and nowadays would probably have large warnings on them about retreating at least fifty metres if not several streets away or even the next county just to be really safe so there was a lot of gunpowder and ‘stuff’ (‘stuff’ being a technical term known only to ten year old boys and used to describe most chemical compounds and the green slime found in water butts). Once we had filled the tube up with the gunpowder mix and given it a bit of a tamp down we then trimmed the tube down, covered the other end with a circle of cardboard and a lot more masking tape and added a bit of blue touch paper adulterated with some scraped matches and a bit of leftover gunpowder.

The ‘Atomic Fireball’ as it was grandly named was ready. Now we had to find somewhere to let it off in peace and quiet. It was decided that the churchyard was the ideal place as we could hide behind the buttresses whilst setting it up. It was a quiet area and passing cars were a rarity back in those days.

Dave managed to steal some matches from the kitchen whilst I distracted his mum and we set off. A few minutes later we were in position and ready for go. After a bit of “You do it!”, “No! You do it!” the blue touch paper was lit and we retreated to a safe distance, about fifteen feet, expecting a few pops and a lot of sparks. We were not ready for the 10 foot high jet of flame and sparks accompanied by vast amounts of smoke that erupted from it.

Standing amidst swirling smoke reminiscent of London pea soupers of the 1950s our trousers went a little bit brown as the flame scorched a black mark up the side of the church. It looked like Beelzebub himself had farted up the side of the building. The look that passed between us said it all, “Oh…arse!”

If this obvious affront to God, that was bound to get us excommunicated from Sunday school should the vicar discover the culprits was not bad enough, at that moment the local policeman rounded the corner by the far end of the church. Now, this being a gentler time before international terrorism, crack cocaine and body armour we might have expected a Dixon of Dock Green style “Ello! Ello! What’s going on here then lads?” or some such gentle enquiry to ascertain the nature of our crime. Instead we got a slightly more earthy yell of

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

A yell that was a touch more ‘Sweeney’ than ‘Dixon’ and one that hinted at dire punishments to come. At this point our trousers went several shades browner than they had been before and we decided that discretion was the better part of valour. We ran, scaling the seven foot high spiked railings that surrounded the churchyard in seconds before fleeing for our lives. The rest of the day was spent hiding in an empty garage on a local estate, convinced that it was next stop Borstal and we would never be able to bend down in the showers again.

Porterhouse II

I’m sure that the liberal minded do-gooder who decided that it would be wise to educate us in the mysteries of human sexuality regretted it afterwards. If they did not they really should have given the mayhem their afternoon lecture caused the following day.

It wasn’t so much that the lecture, delivered to half of the sixth form, namely thirty or so seventeen year old boys, most of who were already engaging or at least trying to, in carnal ramblings with the other half of the sixth form that consisted of thirty or so seventeen year old girls that caused the mayhem. It was the packets of condoms that were handed out to us to promote safe sex and responsibility. No doubt the person who donated them presumed they would mummify in our wallets as most condoms handed out to teenage boys had tended to do in previous more sexually unenlightened times. How wrong they were!

So, there we were, thirty or so seventeen year olds, most of whom already had wallets stuffed to bursting with prophylactics stolen from older siblings bedside cabinets, from the local barbers having endured the gazes and knowing nods of the older gents when Mr Ginelli asked “Something for the weekend sir?” and in the case of Pete whose parents ran the local chemist, from the stockroom out at the back and all of a sudden we each had an extra packet of three. If we tried to cram any more in our wallets there was a serious risk of condom overload and resulting eruption that would cover the school playground from end to end with things that were ribbed, bobbled, nubbled and tentacled for his and her pleasure. So what could we do with them?

The answer was simple, why not inflate them and fill the sixth form year masters broom cupboard-like office with them. Brilliant idea! Mr Dart the previous incumbent had just retired and his successor was to be named the next day. An office filled with inflated condoms would be a jolly jape to welcome him or her into the post. Er…maybe not. Unfortunately, being seventeen our reading matter tended to consist of 2000AD and lurid books about SS Panzer battalions from the cheap bookshop in town. It did not stretch to ‘Porterhouse Blue’ and its potential warning about inflated condoms. What’s more we should never have trusted Pete with the inflation of said condoms as he had never read the book either.

The following morning we all arrived bright and early which in itself was unusual given that most of us rolled in sometime after morning assembly just in time for mid morning break and a game of poker before the first lesson of the day. Pete had obviously been in since the crack of dawn as the year masters office was filled with inflated johnnies that resembled oversized maggots. The 90 or so that we had all contributed had been supplemented by a fair few more stolen from Petes parents chemists shop and the room was stuffed as full as it possibly could be. Now all we had to do was attend assembly and discover who the lucky recipient of our splendid wheeze was.

Standing at the back we endured the usual badly sung hymns, the congratulations to the first 11 who had managed to escape with a 25-0 mauling against another local school and how the study garden was not to be used to play cricket in. Finally the revelation of who the new sixth form master was came…Mr Bowles, probably the single most humourless individual in the school. Over the years his reputation had grown worse with each passing term. Here was a man who would give a pupil a weeks detention for just standing in the wrong way. We had arranged for his office to be filled with contraceptives. In the back row the entire sixth form went a very pale shade of their usual colour and one thought passed silently through all our minds…”Oooooh fuck!” We were doomed to a lifetime of detention, in fact we would probably be old and grey before we would be let out.

Perhaps fortunately for us, at the back of the hall was a cupboard that connected with the PE department changing rooms. Hurriedly, three of us, Nigel, Andy and myself shielded by the rest of the sixth form crawled through this and fled the building, running across to the sixth form common rooms as fast as we could. We had only a short time to get rid of the contraceptives before Mr Bowles turned up as was tradition after the assembly in which he had been named but how could we do it. There were so many in the tiny room we could only just get the door open a crack. There was only one way, burst them with something. But what could we use? Darts! There was a dartboard in the common room, we all used it, we could poke the condoms with darts. There was only one problem with the plan, there were not any darts in the board, most of the players brought their own and kept them in their rucksacks. What about something sharp from the woodwork block next door suggested Nigel so he and I scurried off leaving Andy behind.

We had only just reached the door of the woodwork block when behind us we heard what sounded like a series of muffled car backfires, a slightly louder bang and the sound of breaking glass. Running back we crashed back into the common room to find Andy standing by the office door looking somewhat traumatised with a cigarette lighter in hand. Beyond him the sixth form masters office resembled an explosion in a contraceptive factory, which, as we found out later was not far off the mark. We had just enough time to bundle him out of the fire door and run round the building as the rest of the sixth form arrived with Mr Bowles. We had joined the tail end and were witnesses to the look of utter astonishment on his face as he surveyed what was supposed to have been his office but which was now an area of devastation, missing a window pane and littered with singed paper and bits of pink latex. Suffice it to say he was not a happy chap.

It was only later we pieced together the whole sorry tale. Pete had indeed arrived early that morning and faced with inflating almost a hundred condoms had cheated a bit and using the gas hose from the oven in the common room kitchen, had filled them with good old North Sea gas. Andy had not really expected them to be inflated with anything but air when, desperate to get rid of the Zeppelin like prophylactics, he had applied his lighter after managing to open the door a crack. At first there had been a brief chain reaction but this, as chain reactions have a tendency to do had turned into something bigger. The resulting gas explosion had blown out one of the window panes and shot a sheet of flame past Andy who had been lucky to have been shielded by the door.

The entire sixth form had their privileges revoked for two months, no darts, no cards and were expected to spend their free breaks and lunchtimes studying in the library. We were sternly reminded that condoms were meant for other purposes than blowing up the school, something that may also have been regretted when the head boy was discovered in bed with Miss Wilder, the new gym mistress at an end of term party that year.

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’.

Papa

At the risk of sounding like an old fart, wandering off at a tangent and starting on about remembering when all this was fields, penny chews cost a ha’penny and “I fought at Wipers y’know!” there was a time when kids did not have to rely on a box of electronics beneath the television for their entertainment. Don’t get me wrong, games consoles are great but to save us from becoming fat bastards back in the 70s we had the great outdoors to run around in, bombsites to play on and …er…Dean to scare us witless.

Dean was the local hard nut and if you were unfortunate enough to attend the same school as him then he was the school bully as well. Unfortunately several of us did. About a year older and twice the size of most of us he made Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Kenneth Williams. Despite his Flashman tendencies however, there was no way he could be described as the sharpest tool in the tool box but what he lacked in brains he certainly made up for in brawn. When you saw him coming you not only ran but spent what was left of your pocket money on a ticket for the first plane out of the country too. Most of us had felt his fists at some point and more than a few had contributed to what he called his ‘Grub fund’ with their dinner money. Suffice it to say most of us did not count Dean amongst our circle of best mates.

One day John, Mark and myself decided to take our airguns up to the waste ground at the back of the print works. As mentioned in a previous post it was a great place to hang out being a mixture of abandoned allotment, bombed out buildings and industrial refuse tip used by the printers and back in those days three lads with airguns did little to excite any interest whatsoever. Nowadays we could expect four vans of the local finest and an MP5 stuck in our ears by a black clad member of SO19 just in case we were Al-Qaeda (under 12s division).

For an hour or so we were happy plinking away at rusty tins set up on a piece of wall then growing bored we began to scout around for better targets. Our searching led us to the printers rubbish pile and we discovered a whole load of empty aerosol glue cans. Now, having already almost been blown up by what we found on the printers refuse heap in the past you might have thought we had learned our lesson but no! The glue cans were duly set up on the wall and we retreated to a safe distance to begin our marksmanship again. John had a decent .22 calibre rifle as his parents were pretty well off and he had stolen it from his older brother. Using this we were rewarded with a few decent pops and fizzes as the cans punctured under our concentrated barrage. Then we got more adventurous when Mark found some spray paint cans on the tip and we remembered the scene from Kellys Heroes when Oddball and his tank crew fire paint rounds “because they make beautiful pictures”. Time to make some art we thought.

This time though the cans were made of stronger stuff and stubbornly refused to burst and in our attempts to create ‘art’ we failed to notice the arrival of Dean until we were interrupted with “Whatchoo doin’ then?” from behind us. This was followed by “You poofs ain’t doin’ it right!” as he pushed past us and snatched Johns air rifle out of his hands. Perhaps unfortunately for Dean the rifle was loaded as if it had not been his life might have carried on as normal from that point. Without a pause he marched up to the row of cans on the wall and at point blank range he took aim and fired. Time seemed to stand still and the resulting ‘POP’ and “FWOOOOOOSH!” seemed to take bullet time proportions as the half filled, pressurised can of blue paint ruptured covering Dean from head to toe.

The three of us were in something of a quandary, openly laughing at Dean in his presence could see us beaten to a pulp but to see him standing there resembling a Smurf just cracked us up. In the end we solved the dilemma by delivering him home, as straight-faced as possible, knocking on the door and leaving him on the doorstep for his mum to find whilst we legged it down the road as fast as we could, which wasn’t very fast as we were laughing too much. A kid who lived next door to him later told us that Dean had been escorted into the back yard by his father and scrubbed with turpentine to get the paint off. Deans yelling and screaming had apparently lasted almost two hours but in spite of his fathers’ best efforts, for the next few weeks whenever we saw him he had a faintly blue tinge about him that soon earned him the reputation destroying nickname ‘Papa’.

This tale previously published in condensed form in Retro Fusion #1. Retro Fusion (c) Pendragon Media

Apocalypse Then!

Being eleven years old I suppose we should have known better but like most lads of that age my mates and I had a healthy disregard for life and limb and this being the middle years of the 1970s we still had plenty of places to go to endanger both our lives and our limbs. WWII was thirty odd years past but through a mixture of local council apathy and local resident protestation there were a number of areas that had been bombed back then but not yet redeveloped. The back of the print works was one such place, an area of run to seed allotments, gardens and ruined buildings that held a magnetic attraction for myself and my mates as it was quiet, secluded and we could go there and be away from prying adult eyes with our air guns. That the print works used a corner of it for dumping the kind of hazardous waste that turned wildlife into the sort of hideous mutant beasties that were popular in the 50s films shown on a Wednesday evening just after Nationwide made it all the more attractive.

If we got bored with plinking away at cans with our air guns or trying to find giant mosquitoes we would build bonfires, nothing destructive, we just lit the kind of fire that would make Baden-Powell proud. Thus it was not at all surprising that on this particular day we were doing just that. Bored with setting fire to bits of wood and the middle of paper rolls we scouted around for something a bit more exciting and it was John, rummaging through the toxic waste from the printers who found the ‘Camping Gaz’ cylinder with its dire warnings about exposing to heat. Now, being eleven the only bit we heeded was the bit about explosions. Cool! Bet it would make a big bang if we chucked it on the bonfire then. So, Mark, never one to do things by halves did just that.

Realising the enormity of what he had done and unable to find anything to hook it out of the flames as we had already burnt most of the long sticks, we ran for the nearest cover which happened to be a concrete lined ‘trench’ under the print works fire escape containing a foetid pool of water and a dead cat. Crouched in the mire we waited…and waited…but none of us wanted to risk life and limb so we waited a bit more and Mark, the underage smoker amongst us dug out a packet of Embassy No. 1s.

“Anyone want a ciggy ?” he asked.

“No thanks, mum would kill…”

WWWWWWWWWWHHHHHHHHRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAMMM!!!!!!!!!

The world went silent, time slowed, clods of earth and stunned worms showered down on us and something clanged against the fire escape. I realised John was saying something. I think it was “Fucking hell!” but it sounded more like someone saying “Fuuunell” at the bottom of a water tank. Mark had fallen over and now had most of the dead cat smeared all over his jeans. Nervously we peered over the edge of the concrete and saw that where our bonfire had been there was now a three foot wide crater and no sign of the bonfire apart from an ominous cloud of smoke rising into the sky and a burning plank stuck in the branches of the apple tree that grew on one side of the area. There was only one thing to do. Pausing only to knock the plank from the branches of the tree as we valued the apples we could ‘scrump’ in the summer we legged it, hurdling the wall and fleeing down the street past the old lady who had emerged from her house yelling something about “The Jerries ‘ave come over to bomb us again!”

The following day at school one of our classmates who happened to live in the next street was full of the story. Apparently his dad reckoned it was the IRA or Black September and they were starting a new bombing campaign. Quite what a terrorist organisation would be doing trying to blow up some derelict houses and a patch of weed covered allotment escaped us. It was hardly striking a blow against the oppressors of the people. It was also pretty doubtful that such terrorist organisations consisted of three young lads, two of whom had reached home and locked themselves in their bedrooms and a third who had been yelled at by his mum for having bits of decomposed feline stuck to his arse. After that we treated the stuff we found at the back of the print works with a bit more respect. At least we did until we found the paint cans…