This series of stories will be titled 'I'm surprised I turned out as well as I did, given my childhood ...' 23

What was it about the summer holidays that still makes me smile after all these years?

The endless sun, the freedom to do whatever we wanted because we may have to be home by dark, but dark didn’t happen until way after our usual ‘school-day’ bedtime. Or was it simply that we were kids and had no idea whatsoever what it was going to be like after we weren’t kids any more?

Oh, now don’t get me wrong, my adult life is awesome. I have my dream job – writing and reading. I have fabulous hobbies (Steemit, card-making and cars) and my family life is wonderful. But those days… never-ending adventure to be had.

I used to loath the phrase, “You’ll miss school when you’ve left.” I always disagreed, but the old lady saying it would invariably shake her head at my protest because she knew better.

Well… she didn’t. I hated school.

I much preferred the holidays and I remember clinging to the last threads of the summer holidays in sheer desperation, making the most of every day because the school year would start soon – very soon… TOO soon.

Getting up at stupid o’clock, before either parent was awake, but knowing there was nothing on television and no one to go to ‘call for’ to come out to play because they would be sleeping in until 10am.

Cold, dew-wet grass soaking through my trainers (tennis shoes) but I didn’t care. If I had breakfast, I would be off out – sometimes taking Bruce, our dog – and over the fields and far away.

In 1975 the summer was more exciting than any I remember before it. Not only did it mark the start of my last year in junior school, there were the residues of a murder-hunt in our county.

Lesley Whittle, an heiress had been kidnapped and found murdered in a sewer where she had been held captive. Here

Her murderer wasn’t captured for almost another year, so in the summer of 1975 we all knew about this horrific crime and the knowledge that the murderer was still at large was, to us kids, exciting.

It must have been a scary time for our parents, but it was exciting for us, because we were immortal then. Only old people died back in our world of summers that lasted for months.

As I’ve mentioned, my boundary was loosely based on the M1 motorway. I didn’t usually go past that road.

I visited ponies and some horses in fields bordered by the M1 motorway (freeway) and that’s really as far as I went.

Until that summer…

On the map it shows where I lived then – Charnwood Crescent – and looking down the map, right to the bottom of the page, there’s the M1 – that’s where we roamed to in the summer of 1975.

On the second map, the satellite image, it shows the terrain. Open fields mostly. Just at the bottom centre, above ‘Google’, there’s a little triangular piece of woodland. That wasn’t so overgrown back then.

In that triangular piece of scrubland, there was a drainage ditch. A large drainage pipe ran from one side of the M1 to the other. That drainage pipe, to us kids was the scariest place in our world.

That’s where The Black Panther (Donald Neilson) was hiding out. (No, he wasn’t really, but we made up enough stories to scare each other stupid that it was.)

He was captured only a few miles from where we lived, he was captured in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire in July 1976.

Word got around that we’d found something really exciting and we were keeping the information from the police. No, I have no idea how that rumour got so big… but they seem to, don’t they.

The adults asked questions but were satisfied that we weren’t really in danger, but to be on the safe-side, we were told expressly to NEVER go there again.

And they believed us…

The big lads on the street wanted in on the action and asked and then demanded we take them there.

Sometimes, being one of the big kids in a group of littler kids isn’t so great. They looked to me to be their guide.

I was part pleased that I was suddenly important enough to warrant attention of the bigger lads, but also, aware that there really was nothing there and they’d be disappointed and take that out on me.

Not to worry though, the rest of my group didn’t desert me, we all traipsed down to the ‘sewer’ to show what we’d found.

We scrumped some apples on the way in.

This garden, but the tree I remember is gone

The garden where we got apples was open to the road and the guy that owned the house was often in the garden. “Can we get some windfalls, please, Mister?” always got us the necessary permission to scramble across his beautiful lawn to pick up the fat, juicy apples.

That day though, was a different experience. The big lads didn’t go looking for permission. They were over the little wall and picking the apples from the tree, not the ground. We didn’t join in, we stood watching, none of us were happy, it seemed disrespectful and wrong.

The guy always said yes when we asked and were polite.

The lads ran away toward the drainage ditch and we followed, a more subdued little group than we had been before.

Someone had been at the ditch since we’d been there last.

A rag of some sort (may have been an old t-shirt) and a ‘mucky book’ lay discarded under the cover of the pipe.

The lads took the book and pocketed it. Then we stood at the end of the pipe and looked through to the little bright white dot at the end.

“Go on then,” one of the lads said. “Show us the way through.”

“You can see through it. That’s the end, there,” I said, but they weren’t having it.

No big deal? Nothing to lose?

Wrong. I had everything to lose.

The group of kids all looked at me, wondering what I was going to do.

None of them would have blamed me if I’d have said, “Nope! I’m not going in there!”

They wouldn’t have blamed me, but I’d lose something if I did that. I’d have lost their awe, their admiration (such as it was) and I’d have lost face.

I was always the one that went first. I wasn’t quite the biggest of our usual group. I wasn’t the oldest, but I was the most daring.

I looked down that pipe one last time, checking for rats (there were no rats) and off I went.

I was the first to go under the motorway through that pipe. I faced my fears, and the fears of everyone in that extended group and I went first.

On the other side of that pipe, there were more fields but, after that summer, I never went back there again.

In the picture, you can see the exit-end of the pipe (arrow)

Pictures from Google Images and Google Maps