Читать книгу Long Before Forty - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 6

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The outstanding incident of those years was the Big Bang. It seems to me now to be just as unbelievable as all the rest of it, but it really happened. Maxwell—Willie Maxwell—it was who first started it.

‘Do you know,’ he said to me one day, wide eyed, ‘Cooper’s sell gunpowder?’

Cooper’s was the oil and colourman in a side street near the school.

‘Go on,’ I said—not that I did not believe him, but because that was the conventional reply to any statement of fact unknown to the hearer.

‘They do. Reelly they do. And you can buy a penn’orth of it in a big bag.’

That was real news. I had naturally believed that such a heavenly commodity as gunpowder could only be purchased for unattainable sums like sovereigns. But pennies were to me comparatively easily come by, with two big brothers and an indulgent mother. My soul yearned for gunpowder—a big bagful of that was all I could get, but gunpowder in pails, in barrels, in roomfuls, if possible. For days I must have thought and dreamed nothing but gunpowder. In the end a whole sixpence came my way, and on Saturday morning in the course of running domestic errands I went into Cooper’s with my heart nearly bursting with excitement. Mr Cooper would not sell me six penn’orth of gunpowder. Three penn’orth was all he would run to—a monstrous bluepaper cornucopia of it. I nearly died with disappointment when, reaching home with my pocket bulging with gunpowder, I could not slip upstairs straightaway to gloat over my purchase in the solitude of the playroom. I had instead to go back to Cooper’s to buy all the things I had been told to buy there and had forgotten in the excitement of the moment.

But at last I was alone with my gunpowder. I ran my fingers through it lovingly like Midas with a cornucopia of gold-dust. I went off into day dreams wherein that pound of gunpowder expanded into the barrels-full of my ambition. It must have been an hour or two before I really started playing with it. Some benevolent spirit over me must have guarded me from harm when I did so. I put pinches of it into the fire, I hit pinches of it with a hammer, I did most of the things a small boy can be expected to do with a pound of gunpowder. Yet there was still some left on Monday for me to take to school to display proudly to my friends.

An epidemic of gunpowder-fever broke out instantly. Everyone who could raise a penny expended it on gunpowder. But it was unsatisfactory somehow. We could not get a real big bang out of it. Even when a small group of the more daring of us lit quite a little pile of it in a secluded corner of the playground it did not make much noise. It merely went up with a gratifying flare and a mild roaring sound and a mass of smoke.

Despairingly at home I read up the subject in the Encyclopaedia, digging out facts from a whole series of fascinating articles on Gunpowder and Explosives and Guns and so on. The reason was there to be found, and I found it at length—gunpowder will not explode, as opposed to mere rapid burning, unless it is confined. The first idea suggested by this discovery was to obtain a bit of iron tubing, cram it with gunpowder, and put it into the fire. Fortunately my guardian angel saw to it that no iron tubing was to be found. As a substitute there promptly grew up the idea of a mine—dig a hole in the ground, put in your powder, cover it well up, and set it off. The Encyclopaedia had some interesting data about mines, and the more I debated the idea the more marvellously beautiful it appeared to me. Life was utterly imperfect until I had achieved a mine.

But a mine called for the use of slow match; slow match sent me back to the Encyclopaedia. Probably it was not for another day or two that the method was worked out. Slow match is made by soaking cord in a strong solution of saltpetre and allowing it to dry. Saltpetre? That was one of the three constituents of gunpowder, here, ready to my hand—it never occurred to me that perhaps Mr Cooper could have sold me saltpetre out of his shop.

Next there comes on the scene the figure of Stanley Williams, the only son of his mother and she a widow, one of the ‘nicer’ boys of the school, one of the few with whom my mother countenanced my associating. I cannot remember whether I decided that his help was necessary or whether his presence in my home on one of the rare occasions when I was allowed to have a friend to play with my lead soldiers was a mere coincidence. Anyway, one Saturday there he was in the playroom with me. Already I had stolen a gallipot full of water and recklessly I poured some of my new three penn’orth of gunpowder into it. We stirred it, first hopefully, then desperately. To all appearance the gunpowder was unchanged save to become a mere messy mud. But I saw it with the eye of faith. Even though the charcoal and the sulphur still remained to constitute that mud, the saltpetre must have passed into solution. I soaked string in the liquid. I hung it before the fire to dry. Hopefully I tried it. It would not burn properly. It gave a splutter or two, but it would not burn smoothly or continuously. Not even when it was properly dried would it burn. Stanley Williams sniggered, and I could have killed him. But I would not despair; my faith in the Encyclopaedia, though shaken, was still living. Fiercely I poured still more gunpowder into the gallipot and stirred it up.

Somehow before the new solution could be tried Stanley Williams had to go home, and my experiments were interrupted. It must have been only by a series of miracles that our investigations remained undetected—I can picture, even if I cannot remember, the sort of mess two boys with a jar of water and a pound of gunpowder and some experimental fuses could make. It must have been some practical difficulty connected with parents and sisters which prevented me, on my discovery next day that the new slow match worked simply perfectly, from going into the garden and digging a mine there and then. It actually was not until next Saturday that I put the scheme into practice, in Stanley Williams’ garden.

For this choice of site I can suggest several reasons. I must have wanted to prove to Stanley that my plans were not as chimerical as he thought them. Mine digging in my own garden must have appeared impractical because a sister or someone must have been digging at her silly old pansies or something just where a mine would be most effective. Stanley Williams’ garden, on the other hand, was convenient in having a door on to the street—his mother rented the top of a corner house and Stanley had the run of the garden.

Be all this as it may, Saturday morning found me (at a time when I was supposed to be running errands) in Stanley’s garden explaining what we were going to do. I had a yard of the new fuse, a box of matches, and my pockets simply bulged with gunpowder—the result of several purchases, which must have been made (I greatly fear) only with pennies obtained by means not strictly legitimate. I paraphrased the Encyclopaedia as I explained that we must dig a hole, put in the powder, and ram earth well down on top, with a bit of fuse protruding. Stanley Williams had an idea—stimulated, it is to be supposed, by the knowledge that his mother’s landlord did not approve of Stanley’s digging holes in his garden.

‘Look at this,’ said Stanley.

He led me to where a brand new clothes line post stood at the end of the garden. The careful tenant had dug a beautiful socket for it, a foot deep or so, lined with wood, into which the base of the post fitted most accurately. A combined effort on our part heaved the post out of the socket, and we examined that beautiful hole with admiring care, our heads first on one side and then on the other. It was an ideal mine, and the tall post would constitute ideal ‘tamping’—that was the word the Encyclopaedia used. We poured the gunpowder into the hole. We inserted one end of the fuse into it, left the other end trailing on the ground, and then with a vast effort we upended the clothes post again and set it into the hole on top of the powder. I bent to light the fuse, and then remembered we were not treating the occasion with the solemnity it deserved.

‘You must go and hide,’ I said to Stanley. ‘Hide behind the corner of the house in case of the explosion.’

Stanley went. He was a biddable soul, and although he did not think there was the least chance of an explosion he was willing to enter into the spirit of the game. Then I lit the end of the fuse, and stood admiring the spark for a moment or two, as it crept along the string, spluttering valiantly and smelling adorably. Then some instinct (or it may merely have been the same spirit of make-believe as had influenced Stanley) sent me running to the side of the house to where Stanley was peering round the corner. I reached his side and had just turned to look back when the crash came. Underneath that clothes line post was about as much powder as was used to charge a thirty-two pounder in Nelson’s day. There was a deafening crash and a cloud of smoke. That solid clothes line post shot solemnly into the air, turning over and over as it did so, and then fell with a clatter into a garden two doors away. Bits of stone rained all round us, and as we stood paralysed we heard the tinkle of broken glass from various windows near by which had been blown in.

‘Coo!’ said Stanley. ‘Coo! Coo! Coo!’

But other voices than that of the turtle were to be heard in the land. Quite a crowd assembled with miraculous haste. I still stood fixed and marvelling; Stanley still said ‘Coo!’ for some seconds after the first arrivals. Stanley’s widowed mother arrived, frantic, and caught him up to her bosom where he instantly dissolved into tears. The owners of the broken window panes arrived. A policeman—terrifying spectacle!—hastened up with his notebook and his pencil.

And that is where my memory breaks down, drawing a dramatic curtain before the scene at its climax. Who took me home, what was said and done there, I simply cannot remember, students of Freud may perhaps advance an explanation. I can remember that for two or three days afterwards I crept about labouring under a heavy conviction of guilt, which nagged at me and sapped my vitality just as an aching tooth might do. But my family, impressed though they might be by the indignation my action had aroused, never really thought I was to blame. They could not bring themselves to believe that an undersized spectacled little boy of studious and solitary habits could, on his own initiative, make fuses and mines in the way Stanley Williams said I did. They did not make enough allowance for the effect of a close study of innumerable books of adventure, backed up with all the illuminating information the Encyclopaedia can give.