lighter was flicked on in front of me and a group of keen faces gathered in for a closer look.
That’s when I got all confused. Perhaps I got carried away seeing them all staring at me. It felt good. For once, I was the centre of attention. I was in with the crowd, not standing on the outskirts of it. They were right there, right then, my friends.
But I panicked and stupidly opened my mouth too soon. The gas ignited in a deep whooshing sound and, instead of blowing out, I sucked in. I felt the hot flame draw into my wind pipe and chest. My eyes widened, and I just stared, stunned, into space, unable to do anything,frozen to the spot, mouth wide open, as I exhaled the blue flame and it wafted up my face.
Every kid in front of me dropped to the floor and rolled around with paralysing laughter, holding their stomachs in pain, as they watched first my eyebrows then my fringe singe and melt into powder. I was the Twisted Firestarter – but not in a good way.
Another favourite stunt was ‘The Jump of Death’. Finding an abandoned motorbike and making it work again was the hard part. The easy part was finding some poor lemming with the brain density of a garden sieve willing to lay down his life for ‘The Jump of Death’. That would be me.
It was quite simple. ‘Evans, you’re in “The Jump of Death”.’
‘Oh, all right then.’
Our proper, perilous, death-defying leaps were much more dangerous than Evel Knievel’s – he had it easy! It was all done behind closed doors, so to speak. A discarded door was dragged over and hastily raised up at one end on a pile of breeze blocks. That formed the take-off ramp.
Then, the bone-rattling, wobbly bucket of bolts was driven full pelt by some mad hormonal fifteen-year-old across the back fields towards the rickety door ramp. He would launch himself and the heavy metal rust bucket into the air and hope to clear the line of petrified kids who had been volunteered for ‘The Jump of Death’ and were lying on their backs beneath. The object was to add another kid to the end of the line after each attempt, and try to beat the record for the number of lads cleared.
That was great in theory, but everyone knew that in practice, when the bike eventually clipped the final kid, the next chosen numb-nuts to lie down at the end of the line was going to get a motorbike full of sump oil right in the mush. That would, of course, be me, as I was always chosen as the last mug in the line.
So I would lie there, staring up at the sky, tensing up as the bike’s screaming engine got closer. Everyone was just waiting for me to get it, but it was still an almighty shock to be on the receiving end of a darn good thumping from a trailing back wheel. As it brushed past my head, it left a skid mark longer than Lewis Hamilton’s across my face, much to the amusement of all the other kids either lying next to me in the line or standing around watching.
I was the only kid who never got a turn on the bike. After it had hit me, I couldn’t really see much. But my souvenir of the day was to go home and explain to Dad why I had a faceful of tyre marks that made me look like a miniature Maori tribesman. I was always the butt of everyone’s bullying, but at least I was part of the gang and wasn’t being ignored. A lifetime of feeling like an outsider had made me pathetically grateful for the attention.
So that was life with the lads on the Lawrence Weston. As you can see, scientists in search of proof of the Chaos Theory needed to look no further than the everyday existence on that estate.
7. Nanny Norling
We kids never had any money. But that forced us to come up with ever more inventive ways of finding it. We had a first-class education in the fine art of fund-raising as we spent our days and nights roaming the streets of the Lawrence Weston.
Len and Faith’s paper shop was part of a parade of local shops on the estate. Next to the paper shop, there was a small supermarket, then a butcher’s,
That’s when I got all confused. Perhaps I got carried away seeing them all staring at me. It felt good. For once, I was the centre of attention. I was in with the crowd, not standing on the outskirts of it. They were right there, right then, my friends.
But I panicked and stupidly opened my mouth too soon. The gas ignited in a deep whooshing sound and, instead of blowing out, I sucked in. I felt the hot flame draw into my wind pipe and chest. My eyes widened, and I just stared, stunned, into space, unable to do anything,frozen to the spot, mouth wide open, as I exhaled the blue flame and it wafted up my face.
Every kid in front of me dropped to the floor and rolled around with paralysing laughter, holding their stomachs in pain, as they watched first my eyebrows then my fringe singe and melt into powder. I was the Twisted Firestarter – but not in a good way.
Another favourite stunt was ‘The Jump of Death’. Finding an abandoned motorbike and making it work again was the hard part. The easy part was finding some poor lemming with the brain density of a garden sieve willing to lay down his life for ‘The Jump of Death’. That would be me.
It was quite simple. ‘Evans, you’re in “The Jump of Death”.’
‘Oh, all right then.’
Our proper, perilous, death-defying leaps were much more dangerous than Evel Knievel’s – he had it easy! It was all done behind closed doors, so to speak. A discarded door was dragged over and hastily raised up at one end on a pile of breeze blocks. That formed the take-off ramp.
Then, the bone-rattling, wobbly bucket of bolts was driven full pelt by some mad hormonal fifteen-year-old across the back fields towards the rickety door ramp. He would launch himself and the heavy metal rust bucket into the air and hope to clear the line of petrified kids who had been volunteered for ‘The Jump of Death’ and were lying on their backs beneath. The object was to add another kid to the end of the line after each attempt, and try to beat the record for the number of lads cleared.
That was great in theory, but everyone knew that in practice, when the bike eventually clipped the final kid, the next chosen numb-nuts to lie down at the end of the line was going to get a motorbike full of sump oil right in the mush. That would, of course, be me, as I was always chosen as the last mug in the line.
So I would lie there, staring up at the sky, tensing up as the bike’s screaming engine got closer. Everyone was just waiting for me to get it, but it was still an almighty shock to be on the receiving end of a darn good thumping from a trailing back wheel. As it brushed past my head, it left a skid mark longer than Lewis Hamilton’s across my face, much to the amusement of all the other kids either lying next to me in the line or standing around watching.
I was the only kid who never got a turn on the bike. After it had hit me, I couldn’t really see much. But my souvenir of the day was to go home and explain to Dad why I had a faceful of tyre marks that made me look like a miniature Maori tribesman. I was always the butt of everyone’s bullying, but at least I was part of the gang and wasn’t being ignored. A lifetime of feeling like an outsider had made me pathetically grateful for the attention.
So that was life with the lads on the Lawrence Weston. As you can see, scientists in search of proof of the Chaos Theory needed to look no further than the everyday existence on that estate.
7. Nanny Norling
We kids never had any money. But that forced us to come up with ever more inventive ways of finding it. We had a first-class education in the fine art of fund-raising as we spent our days and nights roaming the streets of the Lawrence Weston.
Len and Faith’s paper shop was part of a parade of local shops on the estate. Next to the paper shop, there was a small supermarket, then a butcher’s,
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