|
 | |  | |
Don McDouall was evacuated from London during World War II when he was five years old. He was sent to the small country village of East Hanney to live with Grans and Grampy at a house called Tamarisk. He now lives in Australia.
Mike Holland came to live with his Grandparents, the Painton's, in a thatched cottage more or less opposite Grans house. Mike was probably a year younger than me, but his sister Anne was a lot older. Mike arrived in East Hanney perhaps in 1941, after his home disappeared during the Blitz.
Mrs Paington was most likely well into her seventies at the time and it became very obvious at that time that she didn't take kindly to her Grandson playing with the likes of Roy or me.
Even at that tender age I knew they were all much better off than Roy or me. They always had toys and sweets and I never saw Mike without socks, except in the summertime. Mike even had gloves to wear when it was cold. Something I never had when I was young.
He would always share things and very often would give you his toys to keep. The fact that Grans always made us take them back didn't mean much at the time.
Looking back I guess Mike was a pretty gullible little boy. I use to trade with him. On really cold days I would catch a 'Stickleback' and leave it in a jam-jar of water outside all night. Next morning the water in the jar would be a block of ice with just a small amount of water right in the middle in which the tiny fish would be swimming around and around.
The water having froze would cause the jar to break. Then by carefully breaking the jar some more you ended up with a lump of ice with a live fish inside! Mike would trade his sweets for what we all called 'Iced fish'.
Mike wasn't allowed by his Gran to go very far away from home. Whereas Roy and I could go anywhere, nobody cared a damn about us two. I use to entice Mike into wanting to come with us by promising all manner of adventures.
One time we went rabbiting. It was up near the old canal. We didn't catch any rabbits but did find a hibernating hedgehog, it was the first hedgehog Mike had ever seen!
We feasted on the Sloes and ate a lot of the wild pears. My guts were like Roy's, we were very use to eating raw vegetables and very sour fruit. But the same could not be said for poor Mike. He very soon got the bellyache, then had a bad attack of 'the runs'. By the time we got him back home to his Grandma, he smelt awful and was covered in his own excreta. So Mike wasn't allowed out with us two after that, or a very long time!
In the summertime we would play on the village green. Grans always gave us a large bottle of Sherbert Lemonade to quench our thirst. We would always share this with other kids.
There was this other kid, a stranger to the rest of us, and he was always trying to muscle in on our games. The boy was a lot older and bigger than the rest of us. This big kid would bully the lemonade owner into giving the bottle of drink to him. On snatching the bottle he would quickly guzzle the bottles contents leaving none for its owner and worse still none for the rest of us.
This particular day we played a rather dirty trick on him. We first obtained a bottle that was the same type as the lemonade bottle, one of those bottles that had a wired hinge that was connected to a replaceable stopper.
All of us kids pee'd into the bottle until there was a good half a bottle of urine. We topped the pee up with real lemonade then one of us on cue strutted around making out to be drinking from the bottle. Time past then along came the swaggering bully. We pretended to fight him off to keep him away from the boy with the bottle.
We had all fought the bully for perhaps ten minutes then he finally wrested the bottle from our grasp. The bully stood puffing and panting, completely winded from the exertions of the fight.
He put the bottle to his mouth and guzzled about half the bottles contents down before he realised it tasted somehow different! The rest of us couldn't hide our mirth any longer and started to howl with laughter. Even then the stupid bully took another swig before he suddenly realised what he was drinking!
| |  | |  |
To add a comment you must first login or join for free, up in the top left corner.
|
|
