RUNNING WILD

[Stanley]

RUNNING WILD

1 February 2005

As many of you will be aware, I started 2004 with a rescue Lurcher called Joe who had been locked in a shed for nine months and then had escaped and run feral. I persevered with him for five months after which, very regretfully, took him back to the kennels. The big problem was I couldn’t conquer his refusal to come to hand when called. I have little doubt that this was due to some baggage he was carrying from the days when people were grabbing at him to try and catch him. I felt as though I had failed Joe and even after I had taken him back I agonised over the fact that perhaps I hadn’t tried hard enough, perhaps some fault of mine had condemned him to the kennels again.
Then I found myself with another rescue Lurcher, Jack, a Greyhound X Bearded Collie. He spent the first 18 months of his life with a dipsomaniac who beat him and allowed him to roam all day. Six months later he has persuaded me that I wasn’t at fault with Joe, just unlucky. Jack is completely bonded, comes to hand and I have no doubt we will have to put up with each other for many years to come.
I got to thinking about feral behaviour this morning whilst following Jack round his morning tour of inspection of a local park and transferred what I know about the subject to myself when I was a lad. We used to run in packs, we called them gangs. A different collective noun but I think it was exactly the same behaviour. We travelled afar and sniffed out the exciting places where we knew we shouldn’t go. We squeezed through gaps in fences and found ourselves in magic places like derelict factories, clay pits, the loco sheds and the river bank. The rat runs were our thoroughfares and if there was anything that could be climbed on or burrowed under, we were there. I have very clear memories of this being one of the best times of my life.
The secret was of course that we had total freedom and a base to return to when we were hungry, cold or tired enough to persuade us to go home and face the music for cut knees, torn clothes and general grubbiness. I must admit that occasionally we were caught doing things which we should not have done and were returned by authority in the shape of the Park Keeper or the police. This was a drag but made for exciting re-telling in the ensuing days as we relived the chase, exaggerated the dangers and generally polished our status, what would now be ‘street cred’ I suppose.
Then there were the dens. We were like beavers, given a suitable location and some handy materials we would erect substantial residences and fill them with all the comforts of home. We even had one with a stove made out of an oil drum complete with tin chimney. It was winter and we used to take paper bags full of coal with us, I suspect because we liked the smell of it burning. Apart from mild vandalism our chief activities were making things, dam-building, bridges, aerial rope-ways and of course den construction and maintenance. We’d be about six to nine years old and I can never remember sex or girls upsetting the even tenor of our lives.
We had one great advantage over our modern counterparts, it was wartime and there was a treasure trove of shrapnel, spent cartridge cases and occasionally even live munitions and Home Guard thunder-flashes. One brilliantly successful episode was triggered when Dennis Robinson ‘found’ some railway fog signals and we stopped a local train when we put them on the railway line. Half-pennies could be converted into useful discs of copper alloy by placing them on the line and the scrap heap at Cheshire Sterilised Milk was a never failing source of large ball bearings that were wonderfully satisfying to play with. We made explosives from match heads, sulphur and old celluloid film stock. We once attempted nitro-glycerine but after a premature explosion as we were mixing up we decided that this was too advanced for us. Carbide and water in quart pop bottles was incredibly dangerous, we used to tie a brick to the bottle, load the ingredients, screw the top down and then lob it into one of the deep pits at the brickworks. They made very satisfying depth charges. The old film that we found behind the Savoy Cinema on Heaton Moor Road was useful raw material. There was a garage nearby and we used to ferret amongst the rubbish for the old fashioned valve caps which looked like a small aluminium bottle. If you packed the film in tightly and then lit it, it made a very satisfactory stink bomb.
In winter, an essential item of equipment was a pocket torch. Batteries were always available because of the black-out, everyone carried a torch at night. We favoured cycle lamps with the big double cell batteries because they gave a better light and were dual purpose as we all had bikes later on. We used to play a game we called ‘Gestapo’. It was an advanced version of hide and seek and always played outside. Everyone hid and as each person was discovered they joined the hunting pack and the game went on until everyone had been found.
Looking back, it’s quite clear to me now that this was feral behaviour and true freedom. The only time we suffered any constraint was when we got caught. Apart from one episode of stone-throwing at a derelict factory which led to a broken window and a threat that we would be hauled up before the Chief Constable I can never remember any serious vandalism.
My conclusion is that in a different time and place we would have been branded as juvenile delinquents. What saved us I think was that there was a very strong ethos of obedience to authority and a healthy fear of punishment that kept us in check. After all, our opportunities for theft, arson and violence were just as great as they are today.
I’m not going to draw any comparisons with today’s lads because I don’t know enough about them. However, I don’t see as much evidence of den building or dam and bridge construction as there was when I was young. Of course, it might be that we were unusual in our choice of activities. There is also the whole subject of what the girls were up to, this was totally without our ken.
So, when I’m out with Jack I work on the assumption that he needs his furtling time, bushes and lampposts have to be examined, other dogs checked out and people greeted. I shall become really intrigued if he builds a den or starts manufacturing explosive devices.
(1 February 2005)