As mentioned in earlier posts, paradoxically one of the great attractions of the Lamby was its dangers. For young children there was something thrilling about the frission of fear you felt as you heard stories about being trapped in mud and succumbing to the racing tide.
The River with its muddy banks and fast moving currents was clearly dangerous although sometimes daring young boys would swim in it when the tide was high. The other place of great danger was the featureless mudflats along the Channel that stretched seemingly to the horizon at times of low tide, though if you looked carefully you could always see a thin white line caused by breaking waves far in the distance. The danger was that despite their name, the flats were not just a featureless plain of mud. The tides had carved subtle channels into the muddy plain that would fill with the incoming tide more rapidly than the rest of the mudflats making for very dangerous traps.
Further up the Channel the mud is interspersed with flat outcroppings of rocks and within these wide flat outcroppings are wide depressions that trap some of the retreating tide. Fish, including migrating salmon would be temporarily trapped in these ephemeral ponds and local fishermen would use nets to catch these imprisoned fish. Despite the knowledge of the dangers working these reefs for most of their lives, every so often there would be a fisherman who stayed too long or misjudged the tide and such mistakes would result in drowning.
In the section of Channel near the Lamby, there were no rock outcroppings with handy depressions to catch tide and fish so fishermen made traditional fish traps from willow. These traps would be set at low tide and if the fisherman was lucky a fish would enter the trap on the rising tide and could be retrieved at the next low tide.
In the following story our four protagonists are tempted onto the mudflats, not by fish, but by the wreckage of a small plane that they had often wondered about. How it got there was a mystery to them but that did not stop them concocting wild tales involving daring pilots and dogfights. All of them had knew well the dangers of the fast moving tides but it is a strange thing about children that knowledge of danger can often be more of a temptation than a deterrent. There is also the ever present challenge of the “dare”. To be dared to do something is to be faced by a double challenge; the challenge of whatever dangerous thing comprises the dare but also the potential loss of face if one does not take the dare. What if you pull back but another of your friends takes the dare and succeeds in overcoming it. That threat of losing face often seems more terrible than the physical danger involved in the dare. In a sense this is what happened to our four young adventurers when Peter challenges them to follow him out onto the mudflats to see the wrecked plane.
Read and enjoy but don’t attempt this yourselves. Remember it is just a story and the mudflats and racing tides are truly dangerous combination.
CRAZY NAKED MUDFLAT ADVENTURE
Saturday turned into a particularly fine one once the early morning mist had burned off the fields near the River. Being Saturday Roddy and his friends would, despite the improving weather, do as they usually did on that day and go to the cinema for the morning children’s show and there indulge in the usual scrimmage bordering on mayhem that was called the “Children’s Matinee”.
This week’s show was not a particularly good one. The cartoons were a repeat of those shown some months ago and the cowboy feature was starring some new cowboy called Roy Rogers. Not only did Roddy think the name was rather bland and not at all as good as the name of his hero, Hoppalong Cassidy, but the man didn’t look like a proper cowboy. His outfit was too fancy and his horse was too clean and well-groomed to be the horse of a proper cowboy. Hoppalong was not scruffy but he always wore dark workaday clothing and didn’t have a horse with fancy reins that were covered in silvery medallion things. This Roy fellow was obviously a fake cowboy and he also had this girlfriend called Dale who kept on popping up during the film. Peter and the rest of the gang felt the same way about this imposter and they began to boo at some of the sillier scenes and when the man began to sing it was the last straw and the entire audience of children hooted their derision at the screen.
Afterwards they had no enthusiasm for going to the den and re-enacting key scenes from the morning film as they usually did. Imitating such a fake was unthinkable. This Roy fellow was not a real cowboy like Hoppalong who looked as if he had lived a hard life and dealt with really tough men out on the range. In contrast Roy Rogers, in his shiny white and cream clothes and his horse that looked as if it was more at home in a horse grooming competition than out on the range as the mount of a hard riding cowboy, was just not believable. The entire Gang thought that the morning show was not worth imitating or even discussing, as they would have done for hours after seeing Hoppalong Cassidy in action on the silver screen.
So they began to talk of other things and decided that they needed to go exploring, as they liked to do when they found the home fields around their den temporarily unexciting and too restricting. Today was one of those days as the disappointment with the Saturday matinee and the absence of their hero had drained their usual energy and enthusiasm. They needed some new stimulant to get them moving.
Explorations typically involved walking out on the sea bank for a little way before cutting across into the fields and daring one another to jump the reens that bounded the fields and looking for the wonderfully engineered nests of the reed warbler or looking for the elusive kingfishers that glinted their way swiftly through the reeds of some of the larger reens. There were many fields to explore but often these walks ended up at the old wartime army camp with its brick shelters and concrete pads that once held the anti-aircraft guns. For the boys the War was a constant fascination and they were always trying to find abandoned military items. One boy in their school made them very envious and at the same time more avid in their searches when he showed them the dented and scratched helmet that had he said once belonged to an American soldier. Such an item would have become a gang treasure and a major prop in their war re-enactments if they had been lucky and found one.
But today, instead of diverting into the adjacent fields, they continued to walk along the sea bank, as their goal was another wartime relic and one that they had often discussed but never visited because of the danger involved. It was Peter who had suggested it for, as they walked across the railway bridge to gain the sea bank, they had all noticed that the tide was ebbing and the current was flowing fast, and already the River was well below its muddy banks. Soon the water would be low enough to expose the rocks that littered the bed of the River, at which time the River would grow loud with the sound of swirling and gurgling as the water rushed over its rocky bed. All of them agreed with Peter’s suggestion while inside each felt a prickling of fear, for the relic was the skeleton of an aircraft that sat on the mud flats that at low tide would stretch for what seemed miles.
They had often stood on the low grassy “cliff” that marked the limit of the highest tides for most of the year and looked out at the wreck and watched the incoming tide swirl around it while arguing over what it was. The popular opinion was that it was the wreck of a fighter aircraft., perhaps a Spitfire, that had taken off from the nearby aerodrome across the River and had been shot down by a roaming Messerschmitt. Romantic and appealing, as this story sounded, it came straight from their imaginations without any benefit of fact. Much as they wanted the wreck to be that of a Spitfire the shape of the skeleton of the wreck was too fat and lumpy to be that of a sleek Spitfire or even its slightly less romantic sibling, the Hurricane. Although they were not sure what it was they had no idea how to find out, but their unspoken suspicion was that it was some minor and unexciting aircraft that was probably already ancient when the war began.
Nonetheless it was an intriguing mystery but they had never ventured out to it because it lay far out on the dreaded mud flats and they had been told over and over by parents and adults to stay off them because of the danger of either sinking into the mud or being caught by the brown rush of the incoming tide. Often they had stood and watched the racing tide and had wondered what it would be like to be caught on the mud unable to move while the fast-moving tide raced around and then engulfed them. The thought of what might happen triggered a little shiver of fear that usually caused them to quickly abandon any thought of walking out to the plane wreck over those dangerous tidal flats.
So, adult warnings aside, they had never been tempted to go out over the mud and look at the old wrecked plane. Why Peter suddenly suggested that they do so was inexplicable except that they knew that he was the most daring of the gang and a great risk taker. When Peter suggested some new adventure, such as climbing tall trees that they had never even attempted before, the rest of the gang were reluctant to say no and although fearful would at least try to go some way with him in whatever adventure he had proposed. All of the boys in the Gang wanted to be seen as brave and fearless by his friends, so no challenge was refused lightly.
But this was different as none of them had any experience of the mud flats and, unlike climbing trees, something that they had all experienced to some degree even if they were not as strong and athletic as Peter, the twin threats of a racing tide and sucking mud worked as powerfully on their imagination as the prospect of meeting an ogre or a ghost.
So they continued walking along the sea bank behind Peter who now had a determined look about him and was starting to walk faster and faster as if he knew that the window opened up by the retreating tide was not long and they needed to follow the retreating tide in order to gain the maximum safety. As they walked Roddy looked about him at the expanse of short salt grass on his right and the fields, hedgerows and reens on his left. It was a rare sunny day and the air was full of the songs of skylarks singing at the top of their trilling voices to ensure that these earthbound invaders stayed away from their fragile but almost invisible nests tucked into the folds of the salt grass. He wondered how they knew to make their nests, lay their eggs and teach their young to fly before the spring tides inundated their nest sites. Why didn’t they just go into the adjacent fields though it did strike him that they too were dangerous places with haymaking and cattle that could easily tread on a fragile nest despite the lark’s desperate attempts to lure them away. The more that he thought about this the more he recognized that birds were rather clever creatures to have worked this out in their very small heads.
With these thoughts of Nature’s wonders whirling through his brain he barely noticed that they were already close to the place where the sea bank took a major jog to the left and ran more or less straight along the coast to the next town. One day he promised himself that he would walk along that part of the sea bank where it acted as a sea wall to protect the low lying farmland that lay behind. In front of the sea wall was a flat area of sea washed turf that ended in a vertical cliff of hard mud that separated the short grass from the watery mud of the foreshore proper. The mud cliff had little coves carved into it just like a rocky cliff face, that it resembled in solid-mud miniature. In some of these there were small half-moons of beach made of sand and broken shell that looked incongruous against the muddy expanse of foreshore.
Peter left the sea bank and strode across the salt grass to the edge of the mud cliff and looked out at the retreating tide. Turning the others he told them that they really needed to get on as the tide was now well out and as they never even knew about the existence of tide tables, they were unsure about how much time was available before the tide turned and conditions became unsafe. What they did know from observing the incoming tide in the past was that it swept across the flats very quickly. The question facing them was how they would get down on to the mudflats without getting themselves covered in mud. Then they needed to decide what to do with their shoes and socks, as they could not wear them to cross the mud. Keeping their shoes free of mud was vitally important as they would be impossible to clean thoroughly and dirty shoes would be clear evidence of their where they had been and would lead to questions and more questions, until they finally stumbled over their inadequate fabrications and were forced to tell the truth. No, they would have to do this barefooted and they had little experience of going barefoot outdoors other than on sandy beaches. This mud would be a different matter completely.
Their unease grew as they walked along the foreshore to a place that was nearly opposite the wrecked plane. They found a place where the mud cliff had crumbled, making it easy to scramble down without getting too dirty. It was at an indentation in the mud cliff that formed a miniature cove that had trapped some sand and broken shells making a narrow curve of beach over the otherwise omnipresent mud. Peter went down first and sat down on the patch of sand and began to remove his shoes and socks, carefully folding the long grey socks and pushing them into his shoes. The others scrambled down to where Peter was sitting and began to fiddle with their laces but with little urgency. They all realized that they had gone along with Peter’s suggestion without any argument or discussion although none but Peter seemed to have any enthusiasm for this daunting escapade. As Peter finished taking off his shoes and socks and carefully setting them together on the patch of sand, he looked across and saw that he was the only one to have done so.
“What’s the matter”, he said in a voice so challenging that it was almost belligerent.
Silence. Not one of them dared to be the first to open their mouths as they knew that Peter’s commanding manner could easily turn to anger and that anger would be focused on the first to speak against his idea.
“Look”, he said, “the tide is well out and we don’t have to walk very far to get to the plane and the mud flats are not called flat for no reason. They are as flat as anything. Just look. It will be easy.”
More silence from an apparently cowed Gang, a silence made more embarrassing as it was in deep contrast to the faint rumbling sound of the waves breaking in the far distance. Finally, Derec broke the silence.
“But won’t we sink in the mud and get stuck and then drown as the tide comes back.”
Peter looked at him in disbelief that his own brother could be so scared of a little walk on the mud and worse, strike a blow at his leadership by suggesting that his idea was too dangerous. His reply was to get up and walk to the edge of the crescent of fine sand and broken white shells, then continue onto the mud of the foreshore. After a while he stopped and turned back to face the other boys who were watching him earnestly and with some concern that he would not suddenly sink into a pocket of soft mud.
He put his hands on his hips and looked at them defiantly.
“See, I’m not sinking in the mud. It’s just a thin layer of slop and beneath that it is pretty solid. You don’t have to slip on your bum either as all you do is just curl up your toes and dig them in to keep your balance.
The rest of the Gang looked on in dismay as he had now made it almost impossible for anyone to not follow, just as he did when he was leading on a new tree-climbing route. They were being shamed into following him onto the mud flats and there was no way to resist, at least not without being shown-up in front of their friends. So, slowly, they took off their shoes and socks and lined them up with Peter’s. Then reluctantly with much hesitation, they walked toward the edge of the tiny sliver of sand and broken shells. Peter looked back at them for a moment before turning and starting off again toward the wrecked plane. Walking steadily and carefully and taking some care as to where he put his feet, he moved steadily across the muddy plain. They could see that he wasn’t slipping or falling on his bum and getting his clothes dirty. Suddenly they realised that he was now quite some distance from the little sandy strand and the gap somehow looked quite frightening. As their leader continued to recede into the flat grey-brown of the tidal flats, they stirred from their fearful trance and began gingerly to walk onto the mud flats.
Luckily all they had to do was follow the smeared indentations in the sloppy mud that marked Peter’s track. It suddenly struck Roddy that his feet were not sinking deeply into the mud as they had so often been warned would happen. Just below the top layer of liquid mud that was the surface, the ground was quite hard, even solid just as Peter had said. This was a real surprise and some of his anxiety began to flow away and his body began to relax. He called to the others and found that they too had noticed and were relaxing more. They all began to look around them and take in what was becoming a pleasant day after a cool and cloudy morning. The breeze was from the south-west, which meant that it was blowing up the Channel, usually the direction from which the big storms came, but today this wind was light and it seemed to warm them as they trudged further and further out toward the distant thin line of breakers that marked the lower limit of the tide. The bright sun seemed made everything seem safe and pleasant and they became more light-hearted and even began to talk to one another and exchange jokes and banter.
Roddy was looking around him with more interest and he realized that the apparently flat and monotonous expanse of mud was an illusion. Cutting across the mud flats were sinuous shallow channels that looped and split as they neared the shoreline. The difference in height was not great and they were quite gentle for the most part but he also noticed that some of the larger ones had steeper sides and that some water still lay in the bottoms of these shallow gullies that wound back on each other like snakes. He looked ahead to see that Peter had also noticed this and was now stopped on the side of one of the deeper gullies and clearly hesitant about crossing. The rest of the group caught up with him and looked down at the obstacle, for that is what it was. The sloping sides were not too steep but steep enough that they could easily slide and lose their balance and land in the mud. That would be a disaster as if their clothes became smeared with thick grey-brown mud it would be almost impossible to remove. They looked to Peter for a decision but he just continued to stand there, looking, and then he suddenly turned and looked back to where they had left their shoes and then back to the gully at their feet and then off toward the wrecked plane that still seemed to be as far away from them as when they began this trek.
Then he turned to them and said, “We must go back to shore and leave our clothes there.”
The Gang was stunned and looked at him wordlessly before Clive was able to gasp out a protest. They had never been without clothes in all of their games and while they had seen some older boys swimming naked in the River on a few summer evenings, they had never wanted to copy that and had never even discussed it.
“We can’t go without clothes. Someone will see us and report us for being naked in public.”
Peter, no lover of authority, looked at him with a sneer, “Who will see us here and what will they report. We are miles from the fields and hardly anyone comes out this far on the sea bank and we are not even near the sea bank now. If one of us slips while we are still in our clothes, they will be covered in telltale mud and that will be bound to cause our Mums to tell our Dads and then we will be in big trouble. If we want to go to the plane wreck again we would never be allowed and they might also ban us from coming to the Lamby, and what would we do then.”
They could see his logic. One accident would lead to them being found out and the consequences would be drastic. Banned from all of their favourite haunts and worse, they would be under suspicion and therefore watched all the time in case they tried to sneak off somewhere. But taking their clothes off would be a big step, as they had never seen one another naked before. It was not because they had a fear of being naked or because of any potential embarrassment, but more because they had neither done it nor thought or talked about it before. Except, and Roddy was the first to articulate this, what if someone told.
“If we do take our clothes off then we must all swear to secrecy and we must have a big punishment for anyone who breaks the oath. I’m not going to do it unless everyone swears to a solemn pact of secrecy.”
They all looked at him and slowly, one by one, they began to nod. Peter looked them over and them turned and started to walk back toward where they had left their shoes. The rest fell into line behind and slopped and splashed along. The trail of footsteps was now becoming a wide irregular crease through the mud, a real track. Back at the shore they carefully climbed the mud cliff, being very careful to keep the mud from staining their clothes. First they had to wipe their feet on the short sea grass to remove all traces of mud that might stain their clothing as they undressed. Hesitantly at first, then faster as if to just get it over with, they stripped off their short wool trousers and shirt followed by their underwear. Each spent some time carefully folding their clothes in an attempt to delay the moment when they would have to stand and face each other, before laying the neat piles of clothing on the grass.
Peter saw this and stopped them.
“Don’t leave your clothes on the grass here. Someone might just see them. Let’s take them down to the little patch of sand and shells and put them by our shoes. They will be alright there and out of sight.”
So, trying hard to not stumble while carrying their clothes, one by one they lowered themselves down to the sand and shingle and found a spot next to their shoes for the clothing. Roddy carefully repositioned his shoes to a drier spot and placed his folded clothes on top of them. He did not want to risk getting them muddy and did not want to take any chances. Derec and Clive followed his example.
They tried not to look at one another as they all felt awkward and embarrassed. All that is except Peter who seemed to be focused on getting out to the wrecked plane as quickly as possible. He led the way, stepping briskly off the little arc of sand and shells onto the muddy foreshore. The others walked slowly after him, limping slightly on the sharp shells until they too finally reached the foreshore mud, which felt so smooth and soft in comparison. Taking care not to stare at each other, they walked in single file back along the muddy scar that marked their previous attempt to traverse this sloppy mud plain. In order to keep from slipping and falling, they had to adopt a sliding gait and keep pushing down with their toes to maintain balance. The passage of many sliding feet had formed a furrow exposing the slightly pinky-grey coloured mud that lay beneath the darker gelatinous top layer.
Soon they reached the gully that had caused them to turn back earlier and they all stood looking down and discussed how to negotiate it. Peter, taking on his role as leader once again, was walking back and forth along the side of the gully trying to establish the best crossing point. Clive meanwhile decided to push ahead and attempt the crossing immediately. The others watched as he made the tentative first steps down the gentle slope and by digging in his big toe he was able to keep upright. The further he went the greater his confidence and he began to lengthen his stride a little from the short tentative sliding steps that he had taken at first. The rest, except Peter, watched tensely as if expecting disaster to strike soon. Clive was gaining confidence with every step and he turned his head to tell the others to come on and follow, when he took one step that was a little longer than the others and suddenly his right leg shot forward and his body became airborne for a brief moment before falling back into the mud with a wonderful splatting sound and he slid the last few feet to the bottom of the gully where he lay briefly on his bum and back before raising himself with his elbows. The faces of the watching boys flashed from gasping concern to one of joyful grins as they saw Clive struggle to his feet and show a bum that was completely covered by dark brown mud. At that point they could not help themselves and they began to laugh and point at Clive’s muddy bum. Clive had landed mainly on his buttocks and then fallen back on to his shoulders so that the mud left two large splotches of mud on each buttock cheek and a broad patch across his shoulders. In between there were just a few mud splatters on his smooth white skin.
The effect was to emphasize his bum and make it stand out grotesquely like the effect that clowns sought with their makeup. “Clown bum”, shouted Derec, and at that moment all the nervousness and fear that had marked the journey so far evaporated in hoots of delirious laughter. This was not going to be too hard after all. The air was warm and the sun had warmed the glutinous mud sufficiently so that getting it over your body was not so terribly uncomfortable, they were not going to sink without trace into some mud hole and falling over might even be fun.
Peter meanwhile had found a place where the slope of the side of the gully was less steep and he had carefully walked down and across the deeper layer of sloppy mud on the floor of the gully, and was taking the tentative first steps up the far side. The rest of the Gang needed to chose between following Clive and perhaps falling as he had done or taking the less slippery route and keeping themselves free of mud, at least for the moment. They chose to follow Peter and they all made it across this gully without falling. Clive had managed to climb the other side and they walked over to join him. Peter looked at Clive and gave a fleeting smile before resuming his walk toward the skeleton of the wrecked plane. The others quickly followed as they saw that they was some way to go and they sensed a new urgency in Peter’s gait.
Time was passing and they still had several hundred yards to go to the plane. Luckily they only encountered one more gully but this one was more difficult to traverse than the first one and both Derec and Roddy slipped and hit the mud before sliding down to the bottom of the gully on their bums. They now had more mud on them than Clive and he was now able to laugh at their expense. The tables had been neatly turned. Only Peter with his keen sense of balance was able to avoid falling and his body was still pristinely white in contrast to the backsides of his fellow gang members who, from the rear looked like badly made up actors in a comedy show.
Finally they reached the plane and Roddy looked back to where they had left their clothes and was surprised to see how far away it was. Much further than he had judged when looking at the plane from the shore. The others had not noticed him looking back as they were busy walking around the wreck. It was thoroughly corroded by the sea and the mud. Only the skeleton remained and there was no sign of any instrument panel or any other parts that they could rip off and take back as souvenirs. It looked as if the plane had been thoroughly stripped already and they decided that as it had crash-landed within sight of the aerodrome, perhaps mechanics had been sent out to strip away anything that was valuable. Even the pilot’s seat was missing and the engine that had sat at the front of the fuselage was also gone. Only the frame of the fuselage and the struts of the wings, now almost completely covered in mud, were left.
Naively they had imagined that there would have been enough left of the plane that they could sit inside and pretend to be fighter pilots struggling to land their damaged plane after a tough but successful dogfight in which an enemy plane had been shot from the sky, trying to keep the plane on course for base so that they did not have to land in the grey blustery Channel with its fast currents and strong winds. Instead all that they could do was look inside the bare corroded skeleton of a fuselage and feel disappointed.
Just then Clive shouted and pointed toward the sea. The thin line of grey-white that marked where the waves were breaking on the far mud flats was much closer than it had been a while earlier and, what was more worrying the line was getting perceptibly closer by the minute. All of them remembered the stories of people who wandered out on the flats being caught by the tide, which came in at great speed. Even experienced fishermen, who had gone out to empty the willow fish traps that they had set to trap fish on the incoming tide, as their ancestors had done for generations, were sometimes caught out and drowned.
The sight and the sound of the incoming tide sent a shudder of fear through the group and Derec in particular began to panic and shout that they should start back to the shore, and soon. Only Peter seemed unworried by the incoming tide and, after a glance at the advancing white surf line, he continued to search around the aircraft wreck without appearing to be in a hurry. Roddy could not understand what he was doing. The expedition to the wreck had been only moderately interesting and the wreck itself was hugely disappointing, just a bare skeleton. There were no weapons or guns or other stuff that could be stripped off and taken back to the den and used to impress other children that they were tougher and more adventurous than others and not a gang to be taken lightly. Instead there they were, naked and with mud splatters over their legs and bodies and if they came back without anything they could never tell anyone else for revealing that they had to take off all of their clothes would just cause people to laugh and their Gang would become a Village joke. As he was looking down at the muddy slop around his feet and contemplated the potential humiliation that would come from this expedition, he was suddenly shaken out of his dismal reverie by a shout.
Peter had wandered away from the wreck in his searching and now appeared to Roddy to be quite a way toward the advancing line of grey white that marked the breaking waves of the incoming tide. He was waving wildly at them and also looking down at something by his feet. Clive and Derec were just standing and watching. Clearly they were reluctant to go any further into what appeared to be an increasingly dangerous place. Roddy looked back toward Peter and wondered what on Earth he was getting so excited about and why he was not returning and hurrying them back toward the shore and safety. Reluctantly he walked over toward Peter noticing that the sloppy mud thickened as he walked further seaward from the plane. When he reached Peter he saw that he was digging around something that lay partly buried in the mud. It was a shell or a bomb, Roddy was not quite sure which, but his first thought was to run away as he had heard all about unexploded bombs. Peter and Roddy looked down at the bomb or shell. They were unsure of what it was.
“Peter, I think it is a bomb and we have been told that they are dangerous and that we should keep away. Come on; let’s go back now. Leave it!”
But Peter was not going to be deterred. He too had been thinking about how this whole episode would look if word of it got out to others and he knew that Derec was likely to gab at the first opportunity to embarrass him. Not only would the gang face jokes and laughter as the details were embellished, but Peter as the one who had suggested this in the first place, would have to bear more than his fair share of humiliation.
It was a great disappointment to have not found some striking prize from this adventure that would make the entire thing seem heroic and madcap to anyone else, and perhaps it was because of this deep sense of being cheated that he suddenly decided to take the shell. It was just over a foot long; a grooved cylinder joined with a smooth cone. Too large to be a bullet they thought but not really a proper bomb like the ones that they had seen falling out of the bomb bays in the many war films they had watched. It was a puzzle but not one that they could be bothered to work out even if they wanted too.
“When I said that we ought to finally come and look at the old plane wreck, I was really hoping for some sort of souvenir to show that what we did was not just daring but worthwhile. If any of our mates find out that we just came out here naked and found nothing we shall be a laughing stock and the butt of jokes for months. I am afraid that my brother will accidentally blurt out something. Taking this shell back would be something really serious and it might help to keep my brother from blabbing.’
“But what if it goes off?”
“Nah! Don’t worry about that. It has been lying out here in the mud and been covered by the sea twice a day for years. I would think that it is just a dud.”
As if to reinforce his belief, Peter gave the shell a push with his foot. Roddy winced and instinctively turned away as if expecting a big bang. Nothing happened.
“See, I told you so. Now if we take it back with us, I can use it as a way of keeping Derec quiet by telling him that we will get in trouble with the police if this comes out. That way he will have to keep quiet about the entire adventure.”
Roddy looked quizzically at Peter. He couldn’t quite explain it but he too suddenly found himself interested in doing something quite daring. Like Peter, he felt that just coming out to the plane wreck and having to strip down to do it was somehow a bit weak and embarrassing.”
“Alright, I’ll help”
Peter and Roddy again looked silently down at the shell. Well if they were going to take this thing back, they had better get started. Peter was probably right. While the risk of it “going off” was unknown, it had lain here in the mud and the sea for a long time and was probably harmless by now as long as they did not bump it too hard. The certainty of humiliation was much more likely, and to these proud Gang members, a much worse fate to bear. For an adult, the logic of leaving the probably unstable shell where it lay would have been inescapable. But for Peter and Roddy the fear of the shell exploding was overwhelmed by the threat of shame and embarrassment and thoughts of reckless accomplishment.
Roddy bent down and began to help dig the shell out of its shallow muddy grave. Even though the soft sloppy mud layer was thicker here than it was closer to shore, there was still a layer of hard mud below and the shell was partly in the grip of this harder mud and they only had their hands with which to scrape and scratch this away. Peter took hold of the conical end of the shell and gave it a good yank. It did not move much as the sucking mud continued to hold it firmly. They dug some more and with more urgency as they both heard the sound of the breaking waves getting louder, and that meant that time was running out. Peter tried again and this time the shell moved a little. Once more he tried and again failed to dislodge the shell. Roddy suggested that they should both try it, so they maneuvered themselves one behind the other so that they could place all four hands on the cone of the shell and in unison pulled on the shell which suddenly yielded with a loud final “suuuuuccckkk”. It came so quickly that they fell back into the mud with Peter almost sitting in Roddy’s lap, and sat there in surprise until the embarrassment of their position caused them to scramble to their feet, scattering more mud slop over themselves in the process.
They looked down at their prize. It was covered with mud and the metal had lost its sheen and was just a dull grey colour. “We could clean it and polish it quite easily”, Peter said optimistically. “It would look very good at the entrance to the den. It would impress those City kids and perhaps frighten them away”.
Roddy agreed, but his concern was how they were to get it back and how quickly they could reach the shore ahead of that surging line of breakers. “Yeah, perhaps, but the first thing that we have to do is get it back to the shore before the tide overtakes us. Come on let’s hurry”.
They each took and end of the shell and began to carry it back to the others who were still standing near the wrecked plane waiting for the signal to start the walk back. The shell was not so much heavy as awkward. It was too heavy for one of them to carry far, but for two the problem was one of coordination, as they had to match their pace to avoid stumbling. They reached the wrecked plane and put the shell down. Clive and Derec looked rather scared as they stared down at the squat shell.
“Will it go off?” said Derec in a wavering voice.
“No, it has lain here in the mud for years and is probably all wet inside and you know what happens if you get fireworks wet before Guy Fawkes and how they can just fall apart. Come on we need to go now”, Peter said, as he looked back toward the advancing tide that was now fast approaching the spot where the shell had lain. “Quick, let’s get going. We need to take it in turns to carry it. Come on Clive and Derec, it’s your turn for a while, we carried it this far”.
Both boys started to argue with Peter but he just gave them a withering look and they gave in. Together they lifted the shell and started off toward the shore. They found it difficult to coordinate their pace and worse, their difference in height and strength made the task more complicated. On they struggled, slipping often in the slick mud and straining to keep their balance and not drop the shell as it had occurred to them that, despite Peter’s assurances, if they dropped the shell it might be enough to make it go off. Finally they could go no further as they had weakened, so it was the turn of Peter and Roddy to take the shell and continue.
So, slowly, too slowly it seemed, they trekked back to the safety of the mud cliff while behind them the dirty white line of breakers came closer and closer accompanied by the rushing sound of breaking waves. Finally they reached the first channel in the mudflat and were dismayed and frightened to see that the tide had got there first and a strengthening wind was driving small waves up the channel and over their path to safety. Peter looked around to see if there was a way around. They could go through the rapidly filling ditch but they were not sure how deep it was.
Peter told Clive and Derec who had been carrying the shell to put it down and hurry to the shallower crossing point that he had used earlier. They tried to run, driven by the overwhelming fear that they might be completely cut off from the shore and trapped between the gully and the advancing waves behind. But running on this slippery mud was not easy and as they hurried along they slipped more frequently and then the inevitable happened and Derec lost his balance and did a spectacular spin as his legs accelerated forward and left his body suspended momentarily in mid-air before it smacked, backside first, into the mud sending out sprays of brownish slop. It would have been funny if it were not for the noise of the waves surging up the gully and made worse by the wind which had now changed from the balmy breezes of a few hours ago to a cool stiff wind that was churning the sea and was even beginning to make a moaning sound as it blew over the flats. The morale of the group was sinking fast and there was a strong sense of fear that caused their faces to harden into solemn masks.
Both Peter and Roddy knew that they had to do something quickly. Derec was sobbing after his fall and Clive was standing hesitantly at the edge of the gully and looking back at them. Neither Derec nor Clive was moving to cross the gully and the waves that were sloshing up the gully seemed to be getting larger and noisier by the minute. The situation was getting serious and there was no one around who would hear their cries for help. While Roddy knew that he could swim, he was unsure that he could manage to negotiate the fast-moving tide and he did not know who else in the group could swim. He decided that the best thing was to abandon the shell on the side of the gully and make a dash through the gully and the muddy waves for the other side and then run up to a point opposite Derec and Clive and help them across. This would be faster than running along the seaward side of the gully and would also mean that one of them at least was on the landward and therefore safe side of the gully.
Before he could move Peter shouted at him to hold the other end of the shell and move across the gully. His voice was so commanding that Roddy didn’t even think of how this would work. As if in a trance, he did as he was told and they moved down the slope of the gully and into the surging tide. Strangely, they did not slip uncontrollably as he thought that they would, instead the water around their legs seemed to act as a stabilizer, allowing them to move more easily over the muddy floor of the channel as if the water was sweeping off the sloppy and slippery surface mud and leaving the rougher harder surface of the under layer for them to walk on. To their amazement they reached the other side quite quickly and without falling and they carefully made their way up the slope using their toes to dig in and gain a stronger foothold.
Seeing them cross the gully broke the spell that had immobilized the other boys and they too decided to make a dash for safety, driven partly by the possibility that they were being left behind. Now there was just one more obstacle, the shallow gully they had first encountered on the journey out, before they could hurry to the little sand and shell beach below the mud cliff. They were now in relative safety and the rictus of fear that had gripped all of their faces faded and was replaced by broad grins. Not only had they beaten the tide but they had also beaten the potential for humiliation. They now had the shell and they had an adventure story that would impress all of their friends who were still in thrall to the severe warnings of elders to never venture out onto the dangerous mud flats. They had ignored those warnings and had survived and beaten the angry tide. Already the embellishments to the story were surging through their minds and causing the truth to twist and fade into the mists of imagination and mythology.
They hurried as fast as they could with the burden of the shell. Peter and Roddy carried it most of the way as Derec was not very good at holding the shell and keeping up a reasonable walking pace. The tide was still advancing quickly but there were no serious obstacles ahead and the last shallow gully was easily crossed. Moving quickly now, they were able to at least match the pace of the water’s advance. The wind was freshening however and the pleasant, warm breezes of the morning were now a memory and their naked bodies were becoming chilled.
Roddy looked toward the shore and the nearby sea bank scanning for people. He could not see anybody but they had not been paying any attention to the possibility that others may have watched them trekking out to the plane wreck. Perhaps someone had raised the alarm already and perhaps even told the police who might be on their way now. The thought made his stomach knot up and a hot nervous flush surge through him. They were not safe yet. All of them had splotches of grey-brown mud on their naked bodies and they had not even thought of how they were to clean themselves properly so that they did not arrive home smelling of the pungent Channel mud.
When they arrived back at the small sandy patch that filled the notch in the mud cliff, they carefully put the shell down and looked at how they might carry it up the cliff itself. Although not high it was an awkward scramble and the hard mud could easily crumble while in places it was slippery and the thought of falling back from the cliff with the shell in their hands suddenly loomed in Roddy’s mind. The more he thought about this and the problem of cleaning up properly so that they would not smell of putrefying mud, the more it struck him that the perhaps entire adventure was a bad idea after all and that nothing but trouble would come of it
“How are we going to get ourselves clean?” he asked the others who were looking out at the advancing tide, “and what are we going to do with this shell? We can’t go home like this covered in mud and smelling as if we had fallen into a reen full of duck weed, and the shell is too heavy to carry all the way back to the den. Besides, someone might see us”.
The others looked at him blankly. They were so happy to get out of the danger from the racing tide that they had not even thought about these things. That is all except Peter who had indeed been thinking about these issues at the same time that they were whirling through Roddy’s mind. Peter quickly had them cutting and stamping steps in a collapsed part of the mud cliff that they had come down earlier. They manhandled the shell up the cliff, just barely avoiding sliding back down with it. Peter then looked around for a place to hide it which was very difficult on a flat expanse of salt grass, but luckily a turf cutter had been working nearby and had started to cut the sods in squares before stopping for some reason leaving a square hole in the otherwise flat and endless turf. They placed the shell in this depression even though it was not quite deep enough to hide the shell completely, but it did make it look less conspicuous, especially if they pushed it against the side closest to the sea bank so that someone walking there would be less likely to see the shell.
Now they needed to clean the mud of their bodies and there was no water around to do that, except the sea, and that was not the cleanest water as the incoming tide was stirring up the fine mud layer that lay on the tidal flats. But there was no choice and they started to go back down the mud cliff after first reassuring themselves that there were no people walking along the sea bank.
Roddy suddenly had an idea. “Lets scrape off the worst of the mud first and then we shall not have so much to wash off”. So they used their nails to scrape away the worst of the mud and were surprised that so much came off in thin flakes. The sun had helped dry them off and the strengthening wind though cold and uncomfortable had done the rest. All that was left was to clean off their feet and to do that they clambered down the mud cliff once more, taking their shoes with them so that they could put them on after washing so that they did not get mud over their more or less clean feet. The sea was cold but they bravely stood at the base of the beach and as the waves came swashing in they scooped up the water and helped one another to wash off their muddy feet then they slipped on their shoes and carefully climbed back to their clothes and dressed. It was strange to see themselves clothed again after getting used to being naked savages. Never before had they seen each other naked and now that they were dressed normally again, it just seemed like it had never happened.
It was time to start back but before doing so Peter and Roddy made everyone swear a solemn oath to not breathe a word of what they had done to anyone and emphasizing that if word got out to parents or other adults, they would all be in deep, deep trouble.
“Let’s wait until we get the shell back to the den before saying anything to anyone about this”.
Without the proof of the shell it would be impossible to make anyone believe what had happened and their half-baked adventure would just make people laugh at them. They all swore solemnly to not breathe a word and Roddy reminded them that to break that pact would make the person who squealed look as foolish if not more foolish than his fellow Gang members.
So, with the shell hidden as best they could and with most of the mud scraped or rubbed off their bodies, the disheveled group started the walk to home leaving a faint pong of fetid estuary mud in their rear. Roddy hoped that his mother was out shopping or doing something that would thoroughly distract her so that he could sneak upstairs and give himself a thorough wash and get rid of the smell of their reckless adventure.
LAMBY MEMORIES 