Paul Andrew Russell.com

I was over at Poets United, looking at the Thursday Think Tank Prompt, and a memory from my childhood popped into my head. It’s not in poetic form, so I’m just going to post it here on my blog and not link to it on Poets United. I’m a poet at heart but also love writing prose.

When I was a child we didn’t have computers, video games or even cell phones. We had to go and ‘play outside’ in the fresh air. It was a ‘healthier’ time. Our parents weren’t afraid of us being abducted  or getting hurt by anyone, so we were basically free to roam the local countryside until it was time for us to ‘get back home for tea’.

The most exciting place we knew of was the ‘Clayhole’. This was a huge hole in the ground, maybe half a mile across and a hundred feet or so deep; the home of the local and long since unused ‘Byron Brick Works’. At some time in the past it had become the site of the area dump.

Lorries would drive in and out of the dump all day long, depositing load after load of rubbish in this massive hole, never getting anywhere near filling it. Everything was dumped in the Clayhole; cars, household waste, industrial waste, chemicals, everything. And this was our favourite playground? Oh Yes. It was a virtual wonderland for a group of eight and nine year old kids.

In one far corner of the Clayhole were two bodies of water. I hesitate to call them ponds; they were holes filled with water. One was black as liquorice, the other the colour of a sea-washed piece of green glass. The liquorice water, we avoided at all costs. Even we  kids knew it  was toxic, the smell emanating from it like a cross between rotten eggs and Alka Seltzer tablets.

The green pond, we used as a swimming hole. We used to jump off the top of a rusty old car that was partly submerged in the water. We had no idea how deep it was but it must have been well over forty feet, as one day a friend of mine dove into the water, lost his underpants and we watched them sink down into the depths for what seemed like an age, until they disappeared from view.

There were old cars, rusty bed frames, cans, industrial  ironwork and all kinds of heavier- than-water rubbish in that pond, yet we spent hours a day in there in the summer; all without the knowledge of our parents. We must have been crazy! Not more than a hundred feet away there were long, deep trenches dug into the ground, where liquid industrial waste was endlessly pumped from tankers and then covered up once the trenches were full of the steaming, putrid sludge. Still we swam in that water. God only knows what we came into contact with. Did I mention they were healthier times back then?

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