When I were a lad...

[Wordbender]

Here's a piece I did for a magazine last year. Hope you like it - and yes, it's true.

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STRETCHING A POINT

 

When I was a kid, if I didn’t have a gun in my hand I’d run out of pellets or .410 cartridges. At such times the catapult took over as my sporting implement of choice and the hunting would continue with hardly a blip in the action.

 

Modesty aside, I’m pleased to report that my prowess with a catapult gained me many a respectful nod from the village elders, often backed by comments along the lines of ‘See ‘ee? That boy kin shoot a cattypowt better’n most kin shoot a gun. ‘At ‘ee kin.’ As unassuming then as I am now, I naturally refused to let such idolisation go to my head, and remained my natural, non-arrogant self. Or possibly not.

 

Thus it was that, when approached for catapult-shooting lessons by Ernie, the roadsweeper, I did all I could to help. Now, Ernie wasn’t over-sharp in the mental gymnastics department. At 40-something, his CV would have read ‘I’m not very clever but I can lift heavy fings.’ Rumour had it that Ernie had to be re-trained after every lunch break.

 

Anyway, I was carrying home a freshly-brained rabbit one day, when Ernie intercepted me at the roadside and asked me to show him how to shoot a catapult. So, I did just that. Except, and I can only blame the devil for this…I told him he should use his thumb as a sight.

 

In Ernie’s calloused paw, my junior catty all but disappeared. I could just see the top of the prongs, with each length of elastic held in its split by a criss-crossed, red rubber band from a screw-in bottle top. At the other end of the elastic, an elongated leather oval held a large steel nut that I’d filched from the ‘bits’ box in my father’s shed.

 

When fired from the catty, these nuts whistled in a most pleasing fashion and I’d save them for special shots at rabbits or pigeons, rather than waste them on sparrows or rats. Ernie’s lesson definitely qualified as ‘special’, I thought.

 

With his fingers wrapped securely around the handle of the catapult, Ernie’s thumb was cocked high and proud between the prongs as, tongue protruding from corner of mouth, he drew back the quarter-inch square elastic. Back, back it came, until the nut-bearing pouch was brushing Ernie’s sun-scabbed ear. He paused for just a split-second while he aligned his sighting thumb with a small puddle, then released the shot.

 

‘Ssssnockk!!’ is the closest I can get to the sound of a large, imperial nut impacting a live thumb at extreme speed. Ernie’s immediate reaction is far easier to relate. “Whaaaaaaaaaa!”, he roared as the nut slammed into the joint of his thumb. Then he began cursing in an unbroken stream, before clamping the already throbbing digit between his thighs and doing mini jumping-jacks, to the eventual accompaniment of “Ow! Ow! Ow! Owww! Ernie’s first comprehensible phrase was a full two minutes in the forming, as he wailed a repeated, “I bin ‘a broke me fum! I bin a broke me fum!”

 

He had, too. Ernie was off roadsweeping duties for a full month, during which I kept my head well and truly down. Upon Ernie’s return and our first meeting, I hid my catapult and waited for him to make the first move. After exchanging ‘Ow do?’ greetings, I asked Ernie how his thumb was. “Never be right, they reckons”, he said, flexing his single-use catty sight and grimacing. “Yor the cattypowt expert. What’d’yer fink I done wrong, then?”

 

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[Alan Stubbs]

Thats the sort of thing that I would have done...

I have my 'Ernie' moments too!

[Guest sslatter]

"..Ernie’s sun-scabbed ear.."

 

Good stuff.

[spangles]

I enjoyed that, got any more? Dave

[Wordbender]

Here's one, Dave - every word of it true, mate. And I have the scars to prove it.

 

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I’M SORRY – FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY…

 

When I was a mercury-limbed sporting teenager I built a fine high seat in the branches of a huge elm tree (so you can already tell how long ago that was, then). This scrap timber construction gave me aerial access to a rabbit warren and I made full use of it, courtesy of my BSA Airsporter and gathering sniping skills. Climbing the elm was made easier by the totally non-tree-friendly tactic of hammering a carefully spaced ‘ladder’ of six-inch nails into the trunk on the blind side of the warren.

 

With my ‘sporter slung about my teenage shoulders, I could swarm up that tree in seconds, and down again pretty sharpish whenever rabbit retrieval was required. It was a credible hunting system and I spent countless hours sitting in my home-made high seat thinking rural teenage thoughts between pumps of rabbit-inspired adrenaline. My only worry was running out of pellets and even then I knew that turning our sofa upside-down and beating it would produce a usable selection of ammo.

 

Rabbit sniping, being mainly an early morning and late evening sort of sport, often meant my having to push through a mini-copse of dew-sodden elm saplings at the base of my hide tree, and subsequently arriving at my high seat decidedly damp. I sorted this by breaking off sufficient of these finger-width saplings to allow me dry passage and thought no more of it – until the day that Mother Nature paid me back for my blatant tree abuse.

 

I’d just shot a rabbit, and, as I’d done so many times before, I slithered down my nail ladder to make the retrieve. Only this time I stepped off the final nail a nail too soon and found myself free-falling the last four feet to the ground. I landed full-square on one of my freshly broken elm saplings, the splintery stump of which made short work of the crutch of my Tesco-bomber denims before burying itself smack-bang in the place where piles now flourish. Yes, there. There by at least three inches, as it happens.

 

Some types of pain transcend normal pain barriers. This was exactly that type of pain. There I was, propped like some grotesque Airfix model, standing on tiptoes, wide-eyed, open-mouthed and screaming silently, with an elm sapling stuck up my bum. Only by hauling myself back up the tree could I un-dock from the sapling and go howling home, loping like a chimp, Airsporter and rabbit forgotten, bleating manfully for my mother.

 

I was at the doctor’s surgery in minutes, where he ‘tutted’ at my stupidity as he tweazered bloodied elm splinters from my bottom. Once I was de-wooded, the doctor prescribed regular applications of a magical healing compound called Betnovate. For the next six months, tubes of Betnovate ointment became my life-support system.

 

After a full day’s worth of active country doings, a ‘certain area’ would be in dire need of Betnovate and a single, generous application would always soothe and subdue. Then, one evening, after inflaming my ‘problem’ with a four-hour footslog behind a couple of manic lurchers, in my haste and in the half-light, I slapped on not the gentle coolness of Betnovate – but a handful of Deep Heat.

 

Once again, the pain that dare not speak its name raged through me, as I grabbed cold flannels, bath sponges and our new shower attachment, desperate to flush the monster from my bottom. Until you’ve tried to plunge your burning bum in a sinkful of cold water, with every non-irrigated second a living hell, you can’t possibly know what true panic means. I, Terry Doe, know panic. I also know that Mother Nature is a wonderful friend, but to those who abuse her bounty – she’s a terrible, vengeful enemy.

[ginger]

For crying out loud Terry, stop sending in these ridiculous stories, I can't do anything for laughing and my wife thinks I am nuts when I, for no apparent reason, burst into a fit of giggles half way through my Horlicks!

[Wordbender]

Sorry.

 

Peter Waller made me do it.

 

Blame him.

 

For, like, everything.

[captain cojones]

briliant stories!more please terry!!

[Steve Burke]

captain cojones:

briliant stories!more please terry!!          

Ditto, Terry. Pretty please.....

[Huge_Vitae]

Terry,

 

I think we ought to meet..........

 

By the time I was 10 I would be taken to the local A&E department and the staff would all know me by sight and first name.

 

5 years ago, and slightly older, I was again in A&E for an x-ray, having gone computerised with their records they were able to tell me that I was not permitted any more x-rays except for serious medical investigations as I had exceeded the recommended limit.