When I was about seven or eight years old, back in the mid-70s, kids had a lot more freedom than they do now. Most weekends involved disappearing for hours with your mates, getting filthy, climbing things you shouldn’t climb, and generally causing low-level chaos without adults knowing where you were. I did once set light to somebody’s garden! But they had cut down their long grass and left it to dry out in Summer. What were they thinking! Looking back, it’s amazing any of us survived childhood intact.
At the bottom of our road there was a row of old wooden garages, tucked between our school and the cemetery, with a field for horses on one side. One day we discovered that if you shifted some loose boarding around the back of one of them, you could squeeze inside. The garage looked abandoned to us ... honestly. There were car parts everywhere, old paint tins, bits of copper pipe, electrical cable, tools, and a couple of empty gas canisters. To a group of young lads, it looked like buried treasure.
So naturally, we decided to build a “bomb”.
Not a real one obviously. More the sort of ridiculous Heath Robinson contraption only children could invent. We threaded cables through car radiators, stuck pipes into paint tins, connected random bits of metal together, and made the whole thing look as dramatic as possible. We thought it was hilarious. None of us had the slightest idea how serious it might appear to somebody else, especially during a time when news about bombs and the troubles in Northern Ireland filled the television almost daily.
The next day, bomb disposal turned up.
I still remember the sinking feeling in my stomach when I saw them there. Even as a kid, I suddenly realised this wasn’t funny anymore. We’d actually convinced grown adults that something dangerous had been hidden in that garage. Thankfully, after a few tense hours, they packed up and left without blowing anything sky high. Our masterpiece of wires, pipes, and scrap metal had been exactly what it really was ... a pile of junk arranged by bored children with too much imagination.
It still makes me laugh now, but there’s also a strange little lesson buried in it somewhere. Kids often don’t understand the world they’re growing up inside. We were pretending to build something from an adventure film, while the adults around us were seeing something entirely different.
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