Happy Chappy

In my childhood days well before the X-box, child welfare issues and the stranger-danger campaign I used to range about widely through my home area because that was my territory and I knew it well. My world was as far as I could travel on foot or by bike but still be within sight and sound of home or familiar landmarks.
I was fortunate in living in a small town and on the very edge of it so that I could just take a few steps from the garden into endless acres which were a ready made playground. Our house was the last of Phase 1 of an estate and for many years stood at the terminus of the tarmac road with just a rough bulldozed bank onto the headland of the adjacent agricultural field. Me and my mates, usually quite a large crowd of locals, would regularly use the raised mound as a ramp for bikes or home made karts. During one scheduled Evil Knievel reshaping we were delighted to hit water. We had tapped into the course of an otherwise concealed underground spring. This provide hours of muddy entertainment until our replica of the Hoover Dam burst and flooded out the street. Just beyond the built up extent of the estate of neo-Georgian houses was a very steep sided pit. This became our planet Mars or the topical Sea of Tranquility and we were intergalactic explorers with the smaller, weak kids being hapless aliens to be captured and vaporised. When Phase 2 of the residential estate forged ahead some years later the builders simply filled in the hole and built houses on top. We had a small wager on which property would sink first into the made up ground. Our parents were upset not by the encroachment of other houses but because they had lost their dumping ground for garden waste and now had to labour off to the Council Tip with cars or trailers laden with cuttings and branches. The subsequent building site was a great source of materials for dens and inventions. I soon assembled a very large collection of stainless steel, butterfly shaped objects with a wire twist in the middle. These were either lying on the ground or could be prised out of the emerging walls of the houses. With hindsight I understand these wall ties did serve some structural  purpose. Perhaps I should have started a wager on which property would collapse first. The farmers fields were flanked by drainage ditches and although these did not seem to flow or go anywhere they were teeming with life. We extracted, with our seaside holiday shrimping nets, sticklebacks, tadpoles and the occasional frog or newt. These were carefully transported home in buckets or jam jars to be exhibited proudly to the grown ups before we lost interest. I like to think my parents returned the creatures to their watercourse after my bedtime. The public footpath which led to the fishing grounds was the gateway to another area for exploration. Carrying on eastwards away from the housing estate the path ran paralell to a busy railway line which carried freight and a few passenger trains from Grimsby Docks. There was a deep cutting and from the top of the embankment we could look down on the shiny tracks but we had no viscious or malicious thoughts on trying to derail or bombard the trains. The attraction of the clay bank was the discovery of fossils and many large examples were prized out and lugged home. We looked them up in my parents extensive collection of Readers Digest reference books and our finds were regular 'show and tell' exhibits at school. At a spur in the footpath a northward turn would take us towards a stone building which stood isolated in the very middle of a large often cultivated field. This was strictly out of bounds on a self imposed basis. One night, from my bedroom window, I had seen car lights in the field illuminating the building. I was sure I saw two figures emerge and drag something heavy through the doorway into the structure and then hastily leave. This event became our urban myth to add to many others which kept us frightened and alert to danger, more so than any TV campaign could from the increasing level of intrusion by do-gooders and child welfare workers. We also kept away from Pingley Camp. This had been a Prisoner of War camp and the single storey and grim buildings had survived largely intact. At face value an ideal playground but there had been a murder there in the early 1970's and that was enough to offset our natural curiosity for all things military. The town had a river running through it and we would often bike along the bank or near by tracks. It was on one such excursion that I saw the bloated body of a small white dog all pumped up with the gas of decomposition. I was not sure if it had fallen in the river and, unable to climb the bank, had drowned, or had been thrown in deliberately. Surprisingly this did not upset me too much. I think this was because the football shaped thing was not intstantly recognisable as someones pet. I was a keen runner and often did many laps around the estate. I was open to allcomers in a timed lap but managed to keep the record until we moved out of the area. During one jogging session with my mother around the edge of the just harvested field at the back of our house we were approached by the irate farmer who really launched into a tirade against townies using his land as a recreation ground. He later apologised when he realised that my father was his Bank Manager. I attributed his outburst to the fact that through his married daughter he had someone called Enoch Powell as an in-law. It sounded quite a logical explanation to me at the time as my parents would often mention that name in an agitated tone as though they knew him and his ways as well. Inevitably I slowly left behind my childhood ways and new groups of children on the estate would take over the playground. There was a disturbing trend with this new generation with the builders, who were still active on Phase 3 and beyond, reporting acts of vandalism and unsettling, albeit mispelt graffitti on the part erected shells of the houses. I recently passed through the old and now a bit tacky looking 40 year old estate on my way back from some tiresome business meeting. I was disappointed that no one at all was playing out or ranging about. It was a lovely evening but the streets and by-ways were deserted. The only signs of life were the flicker of TV's behind net curtains and the faint thump, thump of the soundtrack of a video-game in collective unison.