When We Were Young

Growing up on an inner city housing estate can be hard, very hard, but don't get me wrong I wouldn't change it for the world.  While I've done things that I'm not proud of, they've made me the man I am today and judging by the family and friends I have, cant be all that bad....

The key to growing up on Fox Estate was to have a group of close friends, friends that would look out for each other, if you were a loner best to stay inside where your parents can keep an eye on you, cause you'll be a target outside, even for the weak, and when you're 12 years old you are a target.

I was lucky, I had a group of friends that I could trust and shared great times with, it was only a small group but enough to offer protection from outsiders.  Dean & Martin were brothers, two years apart and from a military family so eager to break away from tight supervision and Lee who had moved down fro Liverpool a year earlier and lived on the same block as me.

Lee had his eyes opened to life on the estate very early on, probably after being on the estate 2 or 3 hours and within 5 minutes of meeting me and Dean.  It was the summer holidays, and when you live on a housing estate to tend to have to make your own entertainment, usually because you're poor and from a broken family, but that's another story. 

On this day Dean and I were down a small long clearing in between a church yard and row of pine trees, which we called the run.  The run was about 100 metres long, and 3 metres wide, more like an alleyway that can only be entered from one side.  The only known use for the run was for people to dump household items no longer wanted, mattresses, tv's, fridges and the odd sofa every now and again, all of which were 'opportunities' for 11 year old budding pyromaniacs.  So burn the rubbish is usually what we'd do, but not before setting traps for the fire services when they came to put out the fires.  At the time we thought we'd employed SAS standard operational traps, but really they only amounted to holes dug in the earth to trip over in, trip wires to bring down rocks from the over hanging trees or fishing line tied across the gap at head height.

Dean and I had just finished setting the traps and were introduced my a well doing neighbour to this lad who was our age with a weird accent.  So we did what every other group of kids would've done, we tested him, we asked Lee to go to the end of the run to find the football we'd supposedly just been playing with....... to summarise, we had to dig the hole deeper to actually trip a man, the rocks were perfectly placed and the neck wire would only work on somebody over 5 foot tall.  Lee came back bruised and empty handed but laughing, so Dean and I knew we'd found a new friend, a friend that we'd share lots of adventures with in the future.