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One of the more memorable adventures I had as a kid involved a pitfall and a pony. It happened in a hilly field above my house, where a large hole suddenly appeared on the side of the hill.
One day there wasn't anything but grass and the next day there was this hole about 6 feet deep and 6 feet wide. It was a pitfall caused by the pit shafts that ran beneath the ground.
At first we were a bit scared to go too close to it as we thought it might sink again. After a few days of rain though the hole filled in a bit from dirt falling from the sides and we could jump down into the hole and climb out again by kicking footholds into the sides.
We decided it would make us a great gang hangout so we got busy with shovels and sticks, carving seats and shaping the inside. We gathered branches and twigs from the trees in the nearby cemetery to lay across the top of the hole.
Then we piled grass and sods on top to make a roof for our new-found camp. We rounded up some old broken fence post and with bits of string made a ladder to climb in and out of the hole.
Our favourite pastime was reading comics in our new camp. We had to use candles in the hole to read by because not much light came through the roof.
This one particular late afternoon while we were sitting inside our dugout reading our comics we heard men's voices outside. Peeking out of the hole we saw it had got quite dark.
We heard one of them remark that he was sure he had seen a fire in the field from down below, so we quickly blew out the candles and waited until the men left. You never saw a bunch of kids scramble out of that hole so fast and bolt down the slope and off home.
The next day in the school yard we had a big laugh at each other remembering how each of us had tried to be the first one up the ladder and out of the hole.
That day, as we walked home from school, we were surprised to see a lot of bystanders looking up into the field where our camp was. Our hole in the ground could be easily seen now that the grass roof had been removed.
There was quite a commotion around our hole in the ground; a tractor and a group of shouting men were in the act of hoisting a pony out of our hole. Apparently the two men we had seen the night before outside our camp had been putting their pony into the field to graze for the night and the pony had walked onto our roof and fallen through.
Luckily it wasn't any worse for the fall but the local Bobby was anxious to find out whom the malicious person was who had set a trap for the pony to fall into. Needless to say, for the next few weeks we didn't talk much about our escapade and stayed away from that field.
Jim Dowson, USA, 2002
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