When I was three years old, my parents bought a house in Maidstone which had a reasonably large garden. The top half of the garden was my Dad’s vegetable patch, but the bottom end held the lawn, and an apple tree which not only bore delicious apples every year but was eminently climbable. During the summer months, we would spend hours each day playing in the garden. On this occasion, I believe we were re-enacting the latest England vs. Australia test series.
We couldn’t always field our strongest team, of course. On this occasion Mum was wicket-keeper and Nan had to field at silly-mid-off. Unfortunately Nan had not played cricket professionally for some time . . . well actually, she had never played cricket professionally . . . so I shouldn’t really have been surprised when she dropped a relatively easy catch when Philip tried to sweep my perfectly-executed full-length delivery for four. You can see from his reaction that he knew it was a very close call!
Of course, we were happy enough to play in the garden alone most of time. I mean, we had a swing, a very climbable tree, and even an old air-raid shelter that we used as an underground den! Sometimes I used to climb the apple tree and swing from a branch (I think I was going through a “Tarzan of the Jungle” phase at the time). This worked well until I got stung under the arm by a wasp whilst hanging from the tree. I have hated the stripey little buggers from that day onward.
This is me and Philip practicing our new circus act. Somewhat surprisingly, Billy Smart never did bother to contact us. Maybe he thought we would raise the bar for his other performers to an unattainable level. I mean, look at the picture – do you see a safety net???
This picture was actually taken over the road in my friend Adrian’s garden. I met Adrian for the first time when we were both three years old. We both ran out into the road from opposite directions and collided head on, somewhat painfully. From then on we were fast friends, until his family moved away to Croydon.
Adrian sort of took over from Philip as the “test pilot” for some of my more ambitious projects. On one occasion, we took all of the gunpowder out of several fireworks and made a small pile on the concrete floor of the garage. I instructed Adrian to light the pile with a match – after, of course, removing myself to a safe distance. He was OK in the end, though. Just a blackened face and singed eyebrows. Well, scientific research sometimes involves a bit of risk-taking, doesn’t it . . . ?