No Pain, No Gain

One night, I was playing with my friends when we came across our local policeman’s bicycle leaning up against a privet hedge. He was paying one of his romantic visits to women whose husbands were working the night shift. A week before this, he had caught us scrumping apples from one of the local orchards and I received a very painful crack around my left ear from his policeman’s gloves. He made us give him some of the stolen apples before a sharp telling off. Now, here was our chance for revenge. We took a reel of fishing line and wrapped it around his peddles and chain, then using an adjustable spanner which we just happened to have handy, we loosened his saddle, handlebars, and all his wheel nuts, then hid behind the hedge and waited for him to come back out of the house. A short time after, he came out of the woman’s house and after a passionate kiss on the doorstep, he said his goodbyes and made his way to his bicycle. What a laugh we all got when he fell off the bike. His policeman’s helmet fell off and went rolling down the road and we kicked it whilst we ran away. I could hear his voice in the background shouting “WAIT UNTIL I GET MY HANDS ON YOU, YOU LITTLE BASTARDS”. What language!!, Didn’t he know we were only children? After quickly brushing himself off he chased us at breakneck speed down the road. One of my friends, Trevor, was a little on the plump side for his age to say the least and found it somewhat of a problem keeping up with the rest of us. We ran as fast as we could down an alleyway that had a gate at the end of it which lead across a garden and out into the woods where we knew there was not much chance of being caught. We all knew the woods too well for that to happen! Unfortunately, when we reached the gate we found it locked. This left us no choice but to climb a six-foot wall at the side of the house and scramble over it, run across an asbestos pig sty roof, and then jump into the woods to get away from the now enraged village policeman. The policeman was still hot on our heels, and I just managed to pull Trevor up and over the wall and onto the pig sty roof before the enraged copper came thundering down the alleyway. I made a mad dash for freedom and ran across the roof of the pig sty and leaped into the woods. Unfortunatley, the roof gave way under Trevor’s weight and he landed squarely between two large smelly pigs, as he later stated, but managed to run off out of the sty, kicking over a pig trough in his path. The policeman however, had no such luck and had also climbed the wall hoping to catch us up. Unfortunately for him, he also fell through the same hole that Trevor had made earlier. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall of the police station when he returned to go off duty that night! As I recall, Trevor was sitting in a large space all on his own in assembly at school the next day. The smell of the pig sty stayed with him for a few days after that but we all had a good laugh at his demise!