childhood memories

Chicken's feet were a fascination and a plaything
When I was a kid my dad had a chicken run in the front garden. Occassionally, invariably on a Sunday, he would do a bit of poultry harvesting (in a bid to reassert his masculine hunter-gatherer status I'm sure). After the whole family had savoured the delights of Nature's bounty, us kids would get the chickens feet to play with. We would get the whole foot including the scaley bit of the leg. And the best thing would be that a piece of ligament would be hanging out the end of the leg. This came in very useful when you wanted to scare the shit out of your classmates. I would sneak up behind them, position the chicken's foot just at the side of their head, in their peripheral vision, then I'd pull on the sinewy thread which caused the chicken's toes to curl and grab the air. A fool proof way of scaring the shit out of anyone. Oh what fun we had!

I failed in my attempts to revive a hamster from the dead
When I was about 14 I bought my sister a hamster for her Christmas. The day that the hamster died my sister wrapped it up in newspaper and put it out in the bin. Later that day she called me from work to tell me a woman in her workplace had told her that she too had a hamster die on her, or so she thought. Apparently when hamsters get too cold they go into hibernation. Perhaps my sister's hamster wasn't dead after all. I therefore went out to the back of the house, rummaged past old teabags and empty milk cartons and retrieved the hamster. I placed it under my sister's bed and directed the fan heater on it. Four hours later, when my sister came home from work, her bedroom was very warm, very smelly and the hamster was still dead.

I used to deliver parcels of meat to old ladies
When I was thirteen I got a job in a Butcher's shop working as a delivery boy. Most of the customers were elderly ladies who were living alone and infirm so unable to go out and get it. They therefore had to call on the services of a thirteen year old boy who would bring them their weekly dose of meat.

Two broken arms and one broken skylight
At primary school I managed to break both my arms. I broke my right arm when I was climbing up a tree. As I was climbing up I reached for a higher branch. The branch snapped and I came plummeting to the ground. All in all a very normal boring way to break a limb. When I broke my left arm, well that was a bit more exciting and a whole lot more stupid.
I was with my friends David and Neil at the time and for a bit of fun we decided to climb on the school roof. You know how kids love to do this kind of stuff. The skylights, which let light into the school below, were dome shaped and, we discovered to our delight, made of perspex and very flexible. In our infinite wisdom we decided that it would be a laugh to start bouncing on them. We started bouncing from one to the other and were having a brilliant time when (not very surprisingly for an adult, but bone-breakingly surprising for a ten year old) the skylight gave way as I was having my last bounce. I went crashing through the roof only to land face down on the school floor 20 foot below with my arm twisted underneath me. I suddenly found myself in a lot of pain, panic and confusion.
My freefall through the air had managed to miss the field of vision of the security cameras. As I'd been at that school for about five or six years, I knew where all the cameras were and consequently how to avoid them. I dashed in and out of the classrooms desperately trying to find a window that I could climb through, but for some strange security reason, all the windows were nailed closed.
I made my way towards Miss Dougal's office. As she was our Headmistress I was convinced that her window wouldn't be nailed closed - headteacher's privilege to have a functional window, or so I thought. Damn! She couldn't have been that important as her window was nailed shut too. As I left her office, to my complete and utter dismay, the school security alarm let rip. With a vision of 6 large police vans, a hoard of armed police and more rabid, snarling, blood-thirsty alsations than you could shake a stick at, I made a mad dash to the last three remaining classrooms.
Fortunately, one of the windows in the first classroom I came across, had been smashed and was boarded over. I punched and kicked the board off then jumped through the window, all the time praying that the only thing to hit the ground eight feet below would be my feet and not the arm that was becoming fatter and more pulsatingly-painful by the second. I landed on my feet, ran as fast as I could out of the school grounds, then made my way home.
Once home, I went straight to bed, with the comforting reassurance that when I awoke in the morning, my arm would be fine. At this point I had no idea that I had broken my arm. I couldn't sleep and was in complete agony all night. In the morning I told my mum that I couldn't go to school as I had a sore arm. I explained to her, in a very convincing manner, that I had been running along the street and I had tripped over and hurt my arm. I told this story to the doctors in the hospital too. And Phew! They all believed me! Yeah, right.
The next day as my mum was walking past my school, Miss Dougal ran out after her and asked her to come in for a chat. My cover story was blown. I had been caught on the school cameras. But surprisingly I didn't get into trouble. My parents didn't mention it other than to say that they knew what had happened and none of my teachers gave me a telling off either. One of those rare times in life, when adults realise that the punishment the child has inflicted upon himself is more than enough.

I starred as Snow White's wicked stepmother
We used to do plays at primary school and I always wanted to be the lead role. It didn't matter what the gender was, I wanted the fame and the glamour. My teacher usually obliged but she did draw the line at letting me be Snow White. She assured me that we really did need a girl for this one and that I could play the evil Step Mother instead. A far better role for showcasing ones' acting abilities anyway, if you ask me. I don't know why she became so gender-specific for this play, because in the previous play she let me play the part of Tattherhood, an ugly duckling of a girl who turned into a beautiful Princess, complete with cheap pink scratchy nylon Tutu-frock. The moral of that particular play subtly conveyed in our out-of-tune rendition of 'Everyone is beautiful, in their own way. Under God's heaven, the world's gonna find a way'. Poetry in action.