VE Day

I am sure that we were nice children.

We honoured our parents, respected our elders, looked after our younger family members, had good attendance at school and regularly went to church and sunday school.

However, all of the rules and good conduct were for nothing when we armed ourselves with home-fashioned bows, arrows, slingshots and big pointy sticks for we were at war with the kids on the neighbouring housing estate.

I am not sure, looking back after 40 or more years why there was such animosity between us and them. We attended the same schools, youth club, cub scout troop and saw each other every single day going about our own business but as soon as the weekends, the summer weekends I stress, came around we mobilised out forces and fought like banshees and wildcats.

It may have been a territorial thing.

The two housing estates, of roughly the same era of construction were in clear sight of each other but with long rows having back fences separated by a narrow watercourse running through a tree shaded, shallow cutting.

It was a place of some magical character.

In the spring the clear stream teemed with silvered stickleback fish, the surface was streaked by waterboatmen insects, a few voles and rats vyed for holes in the riverbank and best of all we could fill our jam jars and other receptacles with frogspawn when it was time for that particular life-cycle to take place.

We, on the eastern stretch of housing felt that it was our entitlement to own the rights to catch and nurture the spawn until it sprouted limbs and did the breast stroke.

Our peers in the western estate strongly contested the same.

War was inevitable over this natural resource on a par with nations scrambling about for water, gas and oil.

It may have been a form of entertainment passed down as sport by successive generations.

Before development as housing the land will have been just country meadows with a river running through it and ripe grounds for the juveniles in the older part of the town to drift out to and play. No doubt the occupants of the Georgian housing  took on those who lived in the Victorian terraced houses and before that, in history, dwellers in brick villas fighting those who still had wattle and daub over their heads.

We were just perpetuating the deep rooted instinct of kids to get into a bit of a scrap and usually over nothing tangible or material.

The first skirmishes in the warmer weather of early June were a bid to stockpile bits of sappy, springy boughs and branches which, when tightly strung with twine, made wicked longbows. The deforestation did not differentiate between old, dead wood and new growths and so the leafy glades along the course of the stream soon resembled an Amazonian logging camp.

Of course, the selection of other vegetation to be used as arrows was critical. This saw us venture out farther than the edge of the estates to the rough land which fringed the market gardens and allotments. Spiny-like clumps were pillaged, especially the straight and true ones which could be trimmed down with a pocket knife to make excellent projectiles. Any 'V' shaped bits of wood scavenged could be fashioned into a catapult when coupled with a length of knicker elastic stolen from mother's sewing basket.

We dared one another to commandeer bamboo canes from the neatly tended allotment gardens, usually taking out every other one in a teepee arrangement supporting runner beans or gooseberry bushes to avoid detection.

There was a certain ethical code that prevented the warring factions from just lobbing stones, bricks and just anything else lying around. We were, strangely, quite strict in enforcing that even though a sharpened arrow could as easily inflict an horrific and life-scaring injury on the poor sod in the way of an arching volley of fire.

Many an evening, until older siblings were sent to fetch us home for bath and bed, were spent in tactical battles, pincer movements, out-flanking and just digging in and swearing at each other across no-mans, or rather no-childs land.

The ebb and flow of advance and retreat was quite fluid and frightening particularly if you were left stranded in hostile territory. It was handy to have a few sticks of chewing gum in your pocket by which to negotiate your own release if captured. Hostages were regularly taken but never abused or ridiculed, even if the kid happened to be of ginger hair or freckled skin.

Some twenty years after the cessation of my involvement in the conflict I did get an opportunity to revisit the war zone.

What I had remembered as a broad expanse of water, steep banks and abundant tree line was in my grown up perception little more than a weedy and starved trickle strewn with litter and the odd bike frame and shopping trolley.

Where we had pillaged at the back of the houses was not a wide and flat plateau but a nettle covered single footpath.

I stood, as an adult and reminisced about the time of war.

It was only then that I comprehended the true motivation behind the warring parties.

The western properties were council houses and where I lived on the eastern bank was a private residential estate. We had obviously been flexing our social and economic clout against those who we regarded as being less privileged and advantaged than ourselves.

I was embarassed in the realisation that ours had not been innocent play or an attempt of victory on the estate but had the toxic undercurrent of a class war.