Here's the story of the 'arson' incident Gilly is referring to, that I posted elsewhere...
ok…me and this lad used to ‘wag off’ lessons and hide in various areas of the school (when we could be bothered staying on the premises that is). Anyway, one of our favourite haunts was this storeroom where all sorts of things were kept, including the janitors cleaning stuff. This room was great for wagging it as, unlike the toilets, the teachers never checked it.
So we were in there one afternoon, puffing away on our embassy regals, and playing our ‘game’. The game was a ‘dare’ kinda game, and involved a large bucketful of paraffin-based floor wax and a mop. The object was to take turns setting a flame to the wax-saturated mop and then letling it flare up for as long as you dared, before extinguishing it.….in the bucket of floor wax.
You see where this is going right?
Indeed. For weeks we had been doing this, and on every previous occasion the wax in the bucket had successfully extinguished the flaming mop. But not that afternoon.…whether it was because we had got a little bit over-confident with how much we allowed the mop to flare before plunging it back into the wax, or whether the wax had got a bit too warm because we had repeated the exercise one too many times, or whether it was a combination of both.…whatever, the fucker basically exploded…
Flames upto the roof, seriously. No way could we put it out. So we legged it.
Fire alarms went off, the fire brigade arrived and the whole school was evacuated onto the playing field etc. We arrived in time for the head count (completely shitting ourselves)…but they sussed out the next day that we had been absent from our classes at the time. 2 of only 6 pupils that were truanting that afternoon ffs…would normally have been far more.
Anyway, we were all rigorously questioned (including by the police eventually), and us two lied our tits off…said we were in the toilets all the time. They didn’t believe a word of it. They knew it was us, but couldn’t prove it…tho it was really touch and go for a while. We were in the headmasters office, or stood outside it, constantly for weeks.
And what else could we do but lie? They would NEVER have believed it was an accident, we would have ended up being done for deliberate arson and getting sent to Borstal (as Youth Correctional Facilities were called in those days).
So, there ya go
