The war of the Phantom Woodworm

In my third form at school when I was 13 an incomprehensible dispute fiercely divided the class.  It started innocently enough.  Whenever a hole appeared in the classroom's woodwork, someone would write alongside it "The phantom woodworm strikes again."  It was very schoolboyish and began to be accompanied by a little picture of the worm, sideways on and made up of rounded segments and with a small hat on the top.  The worm was christened "Fanty" and became a sort of class mascot.

It was all very amicable until a few class members began to draw a small beetle instead, setting it up as a rival mascot.  So "Fanty, the phantom woodworm" now faced off against "Bilgie, the bilge-water beetle."  The class took sides and divided between those supporting the different mascots.  Insults were traded on the blackboards between lessons, and the two groups tried to outshout each other during break with the names of the rival mascots, Fanty and Bilgie.

No actual fights took place, but the rival groups began to play quite mean tricks on each other's supporters, and there were some fairly heated confrontations.  It went on for many days, but before it could break out into open warfare the school's authorities ascertained what was happening and intervened to shut it down.  No more drawings or slogans were permitted, under sanction of heavy-handed punishments.  The two sides made a sullen and resentful peace, and a week later it was all gone and no-one could remember what all the fuss had been about.

While it had lasted, though, it was intense.  Had it happened in an American inner city school, no doubt the two gangs would have been blasting away at each other in pitched battles with automatic weapons.  As it was, it was a civil war in a teapot, and there were no casualties.

The wet vodka melon on a dry campus

Hillsdale College in Michigan, where I was Professor of Philosophy, was a very conservative college.  Its President dabbled in Republican Party politics on the Conservative side, and much of the student body was centre-right.  The campus was 'dry,' meaning that alcohol was not allowed on college grounds or in college buildings. 

They may have been centre right, but they were still students, and they found ingenious ways to break the rules without penalty.  The student fraternity houses were all rambling old houses just off the edge of campus, so they were allowed alcohol and had regular parties.

Hillsdale had quite a good team in its American Football college league, and had the support at home matches of a good proportion of the student population.  Of course no alcohol was allowed at these games, so some of the students took in melons to slice up and share for refreshment as they watched.  Unknown to the college authorities they had previously injected large quantities of vodka into the melons and found them a good deal more refreshing than they seemed.

I was faculty mentor to the Ezra L Koon honors dormitory (hall of residence) and occasionally enjoyed an evening drink with the students.  My routine was to leave a brown bag on the doorstep containing a quart jug of wine.  When I went in to their lounge I'd tell them that someone had left a brown bag on their doorstep.  They would go out to bring it in, leaving me innocent of taking alcohol into college premises.

The one exception to the rule was that when distinguished visitors came to speak, wine would be served at the post-lecture reception in a room set aside for this purpose and exempted from the rules.  These lectures were very popular, partly because 15 or so students would be invited to the reception that followed.  They clamoured to be included.

Swindling the school chess championship

Chess, along with the Scientific Society, formed a significant part of my schooldays.  I joined the Chess Club in my first year, aged 11, and went to the after-school meetings on Tuesday evenings.  We played each other and gradually improved, as one does.  We learned the classic openings, the sacrifice plays, the gambits, and how to think ahead and anticipate our opponents' moves and plan counter-strategies. 

The school chess team played other schools.  On Saturdays, when the bus took our football and cricket team to play other schools, there would sometimes be a team of 5 or 6 of us to play against their chess team.

My friend David Osborne and I became seriously interested and started reading books on chess.  We subscribed to Chess Magazine which came monthly from Sutton Coldfield, and we devoured its games, replaying them in the library at lunchtime.  We recorded our own games and learned the theory and the names of the chess openings.  I developed a taste for what was called hypermodern chess, which sought to control the game from the wings instead of trying to occupy and dominate the centre.

More often than not I played the Reti Opening as white, and used Alekhine's defence as black against a king's pawn opening.  Part of the advantage these gave me was that these were relatively obscure openings, and most people did not learn how to deal with them as they did with the more conventional openings. 

David and I even attended a chess festival at Whitby and took part in tournament play there.  We were about equal in standard.  In the school chess championships David did me a great favour by beating the school's champion, Roy Hill, who was one year ahead of us.  With him knocked out, David and I went on to become the two finalists.  Although David played better that day, I had a fluke victory by what chess-players call a 'swindle.'  That is when your opponent fails to notice that you have a checkmating move, and fails to defend against it.  I thus acquired a championship shield, and had my name engraved on the school cup.

I played chess at university, and was on the university team, but I've barely played since.  I realized that to be really good you have to devote your life to it, with hours of practice every day.  I thought there were more worthwhile things to spend my life doing.

Playing laserquest battles while at Pembroke, Cambridge

I did my Cambridge masters degree quite late in life, in my fifties.  Despite this I behaved like a fairly typical student, cycling everywhere, eating pizza and frequenting pubs with friends.  I did hardly any work until March, then worked night and day to get my 30,000 word thesis on property investment done in time

I was still running the Adam Smith Institute, which took up some of my time, but I always found time for laserquest.  I fell in with a group of student friends who played it regularly, sometimes three times a week.  We either played as a team, taking on other players who turned up, or we played against each other.  We became pretty good at it, and gave the geography of the battle zone our private names.  There was Zack's hidey-hole, from which Zack would engage in expert sniping.  There was the Madsen corner, named for my preference for its commanding firing lines.  There was Rick's tower and Matt's retreat.

We'd wait breathlessly afterwards to see the scores come up on screen and be handed our own score-sheets.  It was breathless, too, because it was physically demanding to be dodging about, jumping up and down and rushing to outflank the enemy.  Most of us emerged soaked in sweat and cooled off afterwards in the nearby pub.

On one occasion a group of five 16 year-old schoolboys turned up, so we challenged them to a fight.  We offered them one of our team so it would be six on each side.  They accepted the challenge but informed us confidently that no, they didn't need an extra player.  It was mayhem, but we thrashed them.  After all, we'd had more practice.

Despite time spent on laserquest, all of us graduated, my six undergraduate friends in June, and myself with my masters degree in October.  My six team-mates came back in October to see me graduate, and then as a lap of honour we all went off and played one last game together.

My best birthday ever

It was an unplanned incident that made my 45th birthday my best one, but it would have been very good even without that.  I had completed a speaking tour of Australia with a local think tank on the Friday, and was due to fly out from Sydney with my colleague on the Saturday night.  Asked how I wanted to spend it, I replied that a cruise around Sydney Harbour might be nice.

I'd expected something like a ferry boat ride, but they laid on a motor yacht owned by one of their donors.  Together with the young people from the think tank we sailed in splendid sunshine around the islands and promontories that make Sydney so beautiful.  It helped that a birthday cake and a case of champagne had been provided for us.

After we docked there was a farewell reception at the top of one of the high-rise buildings on the harbour, where we watched a spectacular view as the city lit up for the night as darkness fell.  After that we were whisked to the airport to catch the night flight to Hawaii for a two-day stop before flying home via mainland USA. 

It was halfway through the flight that I realized something – the unplanned incident.  In choosing to go round the world to go home rather than flying back from Australia, we had to cross the International Date Line.  All of the hours we had lost as we'd crossed different time zones were made up by going back a whole day as we crossed the dateline.  We did this in the middle of the night, so I had my birthday all over again on Waikiki Beach, Honolulu.  Both were spectacular.

My first winter in the Florida Keys

"Snow is lovely to look at, but awful to live in," I wrote, "It chills your bones and rots your shoes."  I wrote that I was going to spend the next winter on a tropical island.  Initially it had been a light-hearted joke, but I began to wonder if I could. 

I checked out tropical islands.  It had to be easy to reach, have mains electricity and telephones.  It would help if English was spoken and it had banks.  Eventually I settled on the Florida Keys, a chain of islands stretching into the Caribbean for 100 miles, and joined together by bridges and causeways so you can drive down them.

On January 6th 1987 I took flight, picked up a computer in Washington, and flew on to Key West, where I hired a car and drove out to Cudjoe Key, where I had rented a house for ten weeks.  On my first night I saw bizarre pictures on TV of the big freeze that had hit London, with deep snowdrifts in the Mall, and the hands of Big Ben frozen.  I had timed it perfectly.

Yes, it was warm.  The average winter temperature there is about 18ºC at night and 23ºC by day.  I worked a lot, completing the first draft of two books that were later published, but I also acquired a deep suntan and took time out to go deep sea fishing.  Several friends flew out to visit while I was there, so I wasn't lonely.

I decided to spend New Years there from then on, and for many years I did, flying out in December and returning in January.  I would spend New Year itself at an open air tiki bar, in shorts and sandals, watching on television the huddled crowds in New York City waiting for the ball to drop at midnight.  I never quite avoided the British winter, but the Keys sunshine always recharged my batteries and made me readier to face it.

A pre-French Revolution 1789 Madeira

Alex Liddell, the St Andrews philosophy professor who set me on course to start my own business in antique engravings, later wrote the definitive book on Madeira.  Called "Madeira – the mid-Atlantic Wine," it says everything there is to say about this amazing fortified wine.  He describes in the preface how at Oxford he bought 2 bottles of 1789 Cama de Lobos, a pre-French Revolution wine.  He wrote:

 "I shall never forget the ravishment of that first taste.  Its powerful and explosive attack, rich complexity of flavour, rapier-like dry finish, and long, intense aftertaste were quite beyond anything I had hitherto experienced.  I was hooked for life – and rapidly invested in three more bottles, one of which still remains in my cellar."

I read this on a transatlantic flight to Florida, and it took almost the whole flight to read it because it is a very dense and fact-filled book.  What he does not say in the preface is that I was there when he opened the second bottle.  It was in his room at Southgait Hall at St Andrews, where he was warden.  He had opened the bottle and decanted it, and invited me in to sample a glass.  It was a small glass, given the rarity of the wine, but for me like him, it began a lifelong affinity with the wine.

 The bottle had no label, just white paint reading its name and year.  We drank glasses from the decanter.  It was magic.  To gain an impression, think of a vintage port with a sharp, almost tart edge to it.  Part of the magic was that those grapes were trodden by a peasant who lived before the French Revolution, and there I was, drinking the wine those grapes produced.

I have since bought and drank the 'Waterloo' 1815.  And I bought the last four bottles in the UK of the 1824 Madeira, made while Thomas Jefferson was still alive.  I took one of those bottles over to Washington DC, allowed it to settle, decanted it, and enjoyed it with friends from a balcony in Alexandria, Virginia, looking out at the illuminated Capitol across the Potomac into the small hours of the morning.

Jumping the blocks

The route to Cleethorpes promenade was full of opportunities for challenge.  We crossed the railway bridge and walked at the edge of the beach where a fence of upright wooden railway sleepers divided it from the railway.  Over the years some had decayed and some were missing.  This meant that the walk along the tops of them featured occasional gaps that had to be jumped.  When three in a row were missing it meant quite a jump, too, onto a very small surface.

The real challenge was the row of concrete blocks that went up to the base of the promenade.  These were World War II anti tank defences, huge concrete cubes, a few feet square and high.  They faced each other diagonally so you could jump from a corner of one to the near corner of the next if they were close enough together.  Not all of them were.  There were over a dozen of them in a row that gradually got higher as it followed the rise of the beach up to the promenade at the end.

Of course we jumped them.  We couldn't clear all the gaps, so there were points when we had to drop down onto the sand and climb up the next one instead of jumping between them.  Another problem was that the sand under some of them had shifted, causing a few of them to lean at crazy angles.  As we grew, we were able to jump one or two of the more challenging ones and clear most of them along the tops.  A miss would have meant injury, maybe just a grazed knee, but maybe a broken ankle.  We gradually acquired the longer legs and the skills to jump all of them at speed on the way down, but there was always one of the leaning ones whose gap was too large to clear on the way up.

Making models with Castime

Castime was a modelling kit that you originally bought in a box.  It contained a cardboard cylinder full of white powder, a few red rubber moulds, a small stand and some paints and varnish.  You mixed the powder with water as instructed, then carefully poured it into one of the upturned moulds supported upside down on the stand.  After a few hours it had hardened, and the rubber mould would be carefully peeled off to reveal a small statuette, typically about 3 inches high.  It would then be painted in different colours and then varnished.

My sister and I would spend hours on this.  We bought refills of the powder, not knowing enough at that age to work out that it was just plaster of Paris sold expensively.  We made Father Christmases first, painted in red and white, of course, and with a brown or black sack over his shoulder.  Then we made little Scottie dogs, usually painted grey.  Most difficult of all were the Cinderellas.  This was because when the rubber mould was peeled off, sometimes the head would snap off at the thin neck and remain in the mould.  The broken ones had to be thrown out.   

We sold them at pennies a time.  Some went to family members, but our best customer was Mrs Outhwaite.  She had been a childhood friend of my aunt, and was now a teacher at our primary school.  She bought a couple of them every time she came, allegedly to pass on to friends, but in retrospect, probably just to encourage us.  The pennies paid for the refills, and the activity brought months of pleasure.  It was not all that creative, given that we bought ready-made rubber moulds, but it was quite delicate, especially in the painting, and we found it immensely satisfying to turn white powder into colourful statuettes.

Braiding in the front room

After my mother died when I was 2 years old, my father married again and raised 2 more children.  My sister and I were somewhat surplus to requirements, and it was eventually agreed that my grandmother should raise us.  Having brought up 4 children herself, she now had to do it all over again with her youngest daughter's 2 children.

She supported her second family by making nets for fishing boats in the front room of our small house, a room only used otherwise for receiving visitors.  The activity was called braiding and involved using a wooden netting needle about 6 inches long by just over 1 inch wide onto which rough twine was threaded.  My grandmother would make a sort of knitting motion, working at speed to produce fishing nets with square holes about 2.5 inches wide.  She would work from a net hanging onto the wall.

It was a job quite common among young women at the time because we were right next to the fishing port of Grimsby with its trawler fleet.  Some worked from home like my grandmother, but others worked in braiding factories, sitting in a line working their nets while they chatted, joked and gossiped with each other.  My aunt worked in one of these and would show me off to her friends when I occasionally visited her there.

My grandmother was quite skilled.  The herring nets were easy because they were made in great sheets.  A cod net was made as a bag, however, and the "cod end" as it was called had to be rounded.  It commanded more money.  The house was always stocked with bales of twine and the wooden netting needles.

I would sometimes sit on a small stool alongside her as she worked, winding twine onto the needles for when she next needed them.  She was happy, singing in a clear voice as she worked, from a repertoire of sentimental songs of her youth.  Her hands were roughened by years of working with coarse twine, as were those of my aunt, but the work brought in enough money to bring up her late daughter's children.

The £50 challenge that opened up the world

I was challenged by Alex, a St Andrews philosophy lecturer, to put my intelligence to good effect.  I was puzzled by the challenge until he explained that he meant I should use it to make money.  Could I turn £50 into £250 within 3 months, he asked.  I said I thought I could.  Next day he turned up, handed me £50 and told me the clock was running.  This was over 50 years ago, and in modern values that might represent about £1,000 to be made into £5,000.

I thought I might do it by exploiting differential markets.  Scottish antique shops often had antique pistols and swords, and I thought they might fetch higher prices in London.  We looked round some antique shops, but it quickly became apparent that £50 would not buy very much, and that if one factored in the cost of actually getting to London, it would not be worth it.  Furthermore, there were signs that there were people already doing this on a professional scale. 

However, in touring antique shops I had noticed several of them had old engravings of St Andrews.  I thought these might sell for more in St Andrews itself, so I bought as many as I could.  Some had brown stains called foxing, so I taught myself to bleach them.  Some were untinted, so I taught myself how to tint them with a pale watercolour wash.  Alex himself was roped in to make cardboard mounts, while my friend Douglas Mason learned how to make picture frames.

I persuaded the local bookshop to mount an exhibition of them, and advertised a sale.  All of the prints sold within a day at a fairly good profit on the purchase price.  I visited more antique shops and bought more St Andrews prints and did it again.  I was still inside the 3 months when I reached £250. 

I realized that prints of Edinburgh would sell for more there than elsewhere, and similarly for Perth, Glasgow and other Scottish towns and cities.  This became my livelihood for several years and enabled me to finance an undergraduate degree, then a PhD.  And all because of that £50 challenge.

The floods

 We were flooded on the last day of January 1953.  The combination of a Spring tide and a windstorm caused a North Sea surge that overwhelmed sea defences in the UK and the Netherlands.  Over 300 died in the UK, plus a further 230 deaths at sea as ships foundered, including several trawlers and the ferry MV Princess Victoria which went down with 133 lives.

In Cleethorpes people began to gather nervously in their front gardens as the water poured over from the sea to fill the street, rising steadily and ominously.  We went to the kitchen at the back of the house and saw the water coming up to the back door.  Then it burst under the door, pouring into the kitchen.  It reached a depth of about 10 inches, but fortunately the kitchen was a step down from the living room.  Similarly the front door step saved us because the water came up to it but not over it.  

The kitchen was flooded, and the outside lavatory.  I worked out a way to navigate across it using two small wooden stools.  I stood on one in the water and placed the other one in front of it.  Standing on that I moved the first stool to the front, and in this way crossed the kitchen to boil a kettle for much needed tea.  We could reach the outside lavatory and use it by this method.

We moved any valuables upstairs just in case, but the next day the waters receded leaving a muddy slime coating everything they had touched.  We exchanged stories with neighbours.  One of ours had heard a loud knocking at the back door, and opened it to be greeted by a dolly wash-tub floating in on the water. 

We thanked our good fortune when we read of the calamities suffered elsewhere, and we cleaned up.  We had thought the event would dominate the year, but it was massively eclipsed by the Coronation four months later, in the excitement of which the January floods seemed like a distant memory.

Exploring the Scunthorpe railway embankment

During holidays we often went to stay with my Aunt Jean at her house in Scunthorpe.  My own mother had died when I was 2 years old.  Aunt Jean had been my late mother's oldest sister, and had a child of her own, Pauline, somewhat younger than my sister and I were.  It was always a treat to stay with her, partly because the house in Church Lane was so much bigger than ours, and even had running hot water.  But one of the most exciting things was what we always called the embankment.

In the back garden of the house, just beyond my uncle's shed that still bore the proud plate "Air Raid Warden," was a fence we could climb through.  Beyond that fence was a steep slope covered in trees, bushes and thick ferns, leading down eventually to the main railway line.  It was left wild, covered with undergrowth between the trees and bushes, and provided a haven for birds, insects and small wildlife.  It was a child's paradise.

We were told not to cross the distant railway line in the valley below, but were otherwise left to roam free.  We played hide and seek games in the woods, picked brambles, and went on imaginary jungle treks through the wilds.  We tore our clothes on the thorns, and often came back with grazes and bruises, but always happy.  Sometimes there would be stools awaiting us on the patio behind the house, where we would sit and eat chocolate spread sandwiches while we planned our next expedition into the unknown wilderness.

Mixing chemical and conjuring magic

The school scientific society occupied a large part of my extra-curricular school activity.  It met on Saturday mornings, given that the school had ceased to hold classes then.  Under the tutelage of two inspirational teachers, Mr Gregory and Mr Siddle, we met in the school chemistry lab and performed experiments.  We made rockets, exploding glass beads and we welded metal with the thermite process using powdered aluminium and iron oxide.

The teachers encouraged us to appear in front of the class occasionally to make a presentation, no small thing for 14 year-olds.  I chose to deliver a display of chemical magic, selecting some showy reactions that produced dramatic results. I performed stunts like blowing lycopodium powder through a tube across a Bunsen burner, sending a sheet of flame shooting out.  It was part showmanship, part science.  I had liquids run through a range of colours, and had crystals growing in beakers like jungle undergrowth.

Most of the displays were chemical, but I was an amateur conjurer, so I mixed in some sleight of hand magic as well.  A volunteer held a playing card wrapped in a cloth over a flask of water to which a few drops of "my special ink" had been added.  He pushed the card into the water at my behest, and whipped the cloth away.  To his puzzlement and that of the watching class, the card had dissolved.  When I had given him the card wrapped in the cloth, I had secretly substituted a piece of light blue acetate paper cut to the size of a playing card, while palming the real card.  In the light blue water it could not be seen.  Hey presto, magic.

My first bow tie

I was 15 years old when I acquired my first grown up jacket.  I had previously worn the school blazer or hand-me-down jackets from older relatives.  Now I could choose one of my own.  I'd seen it in the shop window, a sports coat in a hound's tooth black and white check.  In retrospect it might have been somewhat garish, but I didn't think so at the time. 

In the window it was shown on the mannequin with a green and black bow tie.  Almost as an afterthought as the purchase of the jacket was completed, I told them I'd take the bow tie as well.  It was a clip-on tie, and when I tried it on at home with the jacket, it was the beginning of a lifetime love affair.  The bow tie seemed so natural for my face that I wore it regularly for smart occasions.

Soon afterwards I graduated to pre-tied bows that fastened at the back of the neck, but then came the day when I moved on to real bow ties that have to be properly tied with a real knot.  The conventional method can seem rather like tying a shoelace, in that everything has to come right at once with a final flourish.  Furthermore, I soon discovered that the knot was not always smart or symmetrical.  By trial and error I devised my own knot, a different way of tying a bow tie by building it up in layers, starting at the back.  My knot is more logical, easier to teach, and its chief advantage is that it is capable of infinite adjustment so that however sloppily it might be first tied, it can be made perfectly symmetrical. 

While I was secretary of Mensa, the high IQ society, its magazine editor challenged me to write up my knot in 120 words for the magazine.  It was partly a joke, because you don't describe a knot in words, but with diagrams.  I gave it a brave effort, and managed it in 150 words.  Many times people have come up to me and said, "We've never met, but you taught me how to tie a bow tie."

More recently I recorded a youtube video of me teaching the knot in just 2 minutes.  Most of those looking at it will be trying on a black tie for a formal event, but who knows, some others might fall in love with bow ties, as I did all those years ago.

Mornings with Col. Thomas

The headmaster of Humberstone Foundation School, my secondary (grammar) school, was a war hero of World War 1, having been awarded a DSO.  He was actually a Lt-Col, but was universally called Col. Thomas.  He took up the post in 1923, and retired while I was there in 1953.  He had a tall, imposing military bearing, finding it easy to command both authority and discipline.

The scene was the same every morning at assembly.  We all took our places in the hall, whispering quietly to each other – nothing louder was permitted.  The staff, all clad in black gowns, took their places side by side at the back of the stage. 

Just before time the deputy headmaster would command us to rise and stand to attention.  Always on the dot at the exact same time, the stage door would open and Col. Thomas, in gown and mortar board, would sweep into the room.  In total silence he would reach the lectern and remove his mortar board.  Only when it touched the lectern, upside down, was it the cue to sit, and the whole school sat down to await the day's announcements.

Under his 30-year spell as headteacher, the school acquired a great reputation for excellence and high standards, such that parents considered it an honour if their son could win admission.  After his departure the school slid down somewhat, but for all the time I was there, the ethos Col. Thomas had imparted to it outlasted him by several years.  That morning assembly set the mood for every school day.

St Aiden's vicar

The Rev. Arnold Herbert Hurt utterly transformed the standing of St Aiden’s, the local parish Church of England at Cleethorpes.  His predecessor, the Rev. Tuffin had seen congregations decline until there were sometimes only two or three people at the services.  He had been old and set in his (low church) ways.  His point of interest to children was that he apparently had a metal plate in his skull from a First World War injury, but he was old and tired. His successor, the Rev. Hurt was a man of great energy, and more comfortable with high church ways.  The church was spruced up, more candles were added, incense crept into the services and there were more processionals with the choir going round the inside of the church.  Attendances climbed steadily, and sermons livened up, with scattered and entertaining stories about the vicar's last parish at Shirebrook.

I was in the choir, even though I was not by any means a good singer, and used to attend choir practice on two evenings a week, and of course Sung Eucharist and Evensong on Sundays.  After choir practice the vicar and his wife would sometimes invite us into the vicarage to give us lemonade and biscuits and let us loll around on cushions on his floor reading from the great piles of comics he kept.  His own child would sometimes be there to play with us.  That child went on to become the famous award-winning actor, John Hurt.  I never met him as an adult, but I greatly admired his talent, and was proud to have had the childhood connection.

Sunset and meat pies

St Andrews was full of bakeries and bakers' shops selling pastries, sticky buns and meat pies, which in Scotland have minced lamb rather than beef.  The bakers' shops all had huge ovens behind them, where staff would work through the night to produce the morrow's delicacies.   

Sometimes as students we'd stay up talking into the early hours of the morning and would finish the night by calling in at the bakeries before going home.  At about 4.00 am the first meat pies would emerge hot and fresh from the ovens, and we would wheedle the staff into selling us some at below the day's asking price in the shops for the cold ones.  We had to eat them carefully because they were so hot inside that they could burn your mouth. 

One June evening a group of us sat at the end of the stone pier that juts out into St Andrews bay.  We had some drink and good company.  We watched the sun go down at about 11 pm, sinking blood red into the waves.  Then we sat and talked about everything, philosophy, politics, religion and economics, for several hours.  At about 4 am we watched the sun rise again from the waves, orange yellow this time.  Then on the way home we visited a bakery and bought hot meat pies to eat in streets lit by the dawn light as we made our various ways home to bed.

Making our own railway

Between the beaches of Cleethorpes and the docks of Grimsby was a no-man’s land littered with abandoned industrial sites.  It featured a collection of huge concrete slabs once used for wartime beach defences, and now piled up crazily and making a good fort to defend in our cowboy fights.

Beyond it there were unused and rusting rails that had once formed a narrow gauge industrial railway, plus the abandoned chassis of a railcar, now just a metal skeleton, but with intact wheels.  A group of us from diverse backgrounds came together.  It took 6 or 8 of us to lift the rails one at a time and position them in a parallel line going downhill to a ditch at the far end, but then we had a track.

It was hard work heaving the wagon chassis up to the top, but we managed it, and then we had an improvised railway.  We wedged the wagon at the top of the track, then clambered aboard, clinging onto the sides as best we could.  The wedge was kicked away, and the wagon trundled down the hill, gathering speed as it did.  The trick was to jump off before it careered off the end of the track and into the ditch.  We always made it safely, albeit with occasional scrapes and bruises as we jumped clear to land on the rough grass at the sides.  The bravest of us, who tended to be the older boys, stayed on until just before it crashed.  Then we manhandled the wagon back up the track for another go, which took a great deal of pushing and heaving.

For weeks it was a regular feature of Saturday afternoons.  We would meet each other there, and when there were enough of us to move the wagon, the game would begin again.  We'd manage maybe half a dozen runs in an afternoon.  There was no formal ending to it, just as there had been a fairly random get-together at the onset.  Gradually one or two of us dropped out over the weeks, until there were not enough of us to shift it.  Then we played other games instead. 

The game was so dangerous that it was inconceivable that any parent or guardian would have allowed it had they known about it, and it is highly unlikely that children today would be allowed the freedom to do it.  But it was immense fun, and the danger was part of that fun.

Due to and owing to

Mr Sleigh was the senior English master at my school.  A tall, bald, imposing figure, he was a strict disciplinarian and was universally known as "Killer," in reference to the homophone 'slay.'  

"The difference between 'due to' and 'owing to,'" he told us, "is that 'due to' always follows the verb to be."  Thus "my train was late owing to a signal failure, but the lateness of my train was due to a signal failure." 

At this point my friend David Middleton raised his hand, with the pocket Oxford English dictionary that we all kept for English lessons open on his desk.

"Please sir, in the Oxford English Dictionary when you look up 'due to' it says 'owing to,' and when you look up 'owing to' it says 'due to,'" he informed the teacher.

Mr Sleigh stared impassively.

"There is a very simple explanation for that, Middleton," he replied.  "It is because the Oxford English Dictionary is WRONG."  The last word was delivered with such great force that the whole class flinched.

I suppose that was one of my early lessons in learning never to accept authority unquestioningly.