The Clifford boys and the flaming paint attack in Johnny Mac’s garden.
I had the incredible good fortune to be born in Brogborough. Known today as a small village close to the Amazon warehouse complex near the M1’s junction 13; just after the end of WWII, it was a three-street estate, on the B557 Bedford to Fenny Stratford road, with a population of probably no more than three hundred people.
The estate was built and owned by the Marston Valley Brick Company to house its workers. There wasn’t much place for Xenophobia; we were almost all immigrants, Poles, Yugoslavs, Italians, Germans, Estonians, Saint Helenians, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, a few well-integrated English. There wasn’t a lot of money around then, yet all the houses were accessible, you just had to put your hand in the letterbox and pull the door key up on a string. During the annual work’s excursion to the coast, the place was abandoned for the day, the contents of the homes still intact on everyone’s return in the evening. Everybody knew everyone else’s business, there weren’t many secrets. It wasn’t all harmony and light though, we’re all human, but if you were in trouble, there was always a neighbour to help.
Day and night, there was the constant clack clack clack of the cable trucks being hauled up the hill from the clay pits to feed the insatiable demand of the presses and kilns. Like Dante’s Inferno, the air was filled with the sulphurous fumes from the brickwork’s twenty-five chimneys, or at least that’s what visitors told me. Personally, I thought that was what fresh air smelt like, and I missed it when I was away.
Put a pin in the centre of Brogborough and draw a circle with a five-mile radius and that was our playground. What we got up to as kids, would today probably end in a custodial sentence or at least a visit from social services; then it was what kids did, perilous maybe but not malicious. I could write a book about those days, and maybe one day I will. Until then here’s a start.
We were always playing soldiers when I was a kid. There was a dump in the old clay pit at the bottom of Brogborough hill which was awash with ex-army stuff. This place was used to dispose of surplus World War II military materials such as heavy webbing shoulder straps with ammunition pouches, canvas covered water bottles, bayonet scabbards, and thick webbing belts with interlocking brass buckles. You could also find a diverse assortment of other items such as infantry training and weapons manuals, gas masks, and chemical warfare medical treatment kits. They never dumped any weapons there, which was a shame, but that didn’t matter too much because there wasn’t a shortage of those in Brogborough. Most kids had a bayonet or knife of one sort or another, Roger Beasley had a Fairbairn–Sykes commando fighting knife (that is a story for another time). Most of us had a 177 air pistol or rifle of some type and some of the more affluent a more powerful BSA 22 Meteor. There was some real hardware as well, for example, Rodney Bombfield would take great pleasure, when his parents were out, showing off the Lewis machine gun in his dad’s wardrobe that had been overlooked for recall by the home-guard.
In addition to this, there were various, supposedly, decommissioned mortar bombs, Mills bombs and other types of artillery ordnance. Generally speaking, for us kids, Brogborough was a veritable Dodge City set down in rural England. It’s a wonder there weren’t more casualties or trips to the Magistrates’ Court for that matter.
One of the greatest prizes from the dump were steel helmets, both British and American. Kids used to patrol the streets with these great metal pots on their heads, precariously supported on spindly necks, obscuring their vision.
One morning I went to Johnny Mac’s house all tooled up for action. In his back garden he had dug a hole, or to be more precise a slit-trench. The trench was big enough for the two of us, we both got in and settled down, with jam sandwitches and a Corona bottle filled with water, waiting for an imminent attack by fanatical Japanese Imperial troops. Our position was about four yards from the garden’s rear perimeter wire link fence, our first line of defence. Beyond this point was a lane that separated the rear gardens of the top street, Hill Crescent, from the bottom street Highfield Crescent. This lane ran from the back of the shops, on the main road, parallel with the top and bottom streets and intersected at right angles by Brogborough’s third street Ridgeway Road. It wasn’t long before Paddy Clifford, who lived at the far end of Highfield Crescent, came strolling along the lane back from a trip to the shops. Paddy, like myself, was another of Brogborough’s second-generation Irish. He was obviously not Imperial Japanese Guard, and so we held our fire and let him pass without incident. This turned out to be quite a big military blunder. Within a quarter of an hour, Paddy returned with his older brother John. The Japanese threat receded and what ensued was more akin to an extension of the Irish Civil War. The Clifford boys had come armed with a tin of duck egg blue gloss exterior house paint, a bundle of sticks and a box of Swan Vesta matches. There was an abundance of duck egg blue paint in Brogborouh at the time, some entrepreneur must have bought up a load of green, blue and white surplus military camouflage paint left over from the Second World War and just mixed it all together.
Unfortunately for us, we didn’t read the Clifford boys’ intentions until it was too late; we sat haplessly in our protective trench watching John poke a stick into the can, twist it a few times and pull it out with the end coated with thick paint. Paddy struck a Swan Vesta and put it to the stick. Within a few seconds, the end of the stick burst into flame, and John, with the wrist action of a circus whip master, flicked a lump of flaming paint towards us. We both ducked down as the projectile hit the lip of the trench and showered us with flaming molten paint. This bombardment proceeded relentlessly with us popping up after each attack to see if we could escape, only to be subjected to another salvo. We withstood this abuse for about ten minutes with splatters of hot burning paint raining down onto our hair and clothes. The Clifford boys thought it was hilarious as we cowered in our trench. Unfortunately for them, they had made a fatal miscalculation. Poking a burning stick into a pot of paint turned out to be not such a bright idea. As the paint in the can went down, and its temperature rose the can filled with vapour. Suddenly, as we cringed in our trench there was a muffled bang, a scream and the rain of burning paint ceased. We gingerly poked our heads above the parapet. The last insertion of a lighted stick had caused the vapour in the can to explode. Paddy and John were hopping around behind the fence covered in hot smouldering paint in what looked like a scene out of the ‘The Shores of Iwo Jima’.
“Get some water” they shouted.
“Buggar off” we replied and the Clifford boys, routed by their own hand, made a hasty retreat up the lane to their own home at the other end of the street. The two of us made a tactical withdrawal out of the trench to the safety of Johnny Mac’s house to rethink our own strategy and decided that possibly sitting in a slit-trench that close to the lane wasn’t such a good idea.