Location: Bedford, UK. Date: 1973
When I about 13 I had a best friend called Neil. Neil lived about a mile away, his house backed onto fields, in these fields there were the ruins of an old farm, it was a sort of an adventure playground for a lot of the kids who lived nearby. Neil had a sister Denise, she was about 16 and used to be what was known then as a tomboy, she would do all the stuff us boys did and more including every Saturday morning going to judo lessons. I had got to the stage where I was beginning to notice Denise, in other ways. Unfortunately she was growing up and had started to only hang out with us kids when she had nothing better to do, she had stopped the judo lessons and had started to dress in a bit more of a girly way, all this made me even more interested of course.
One day in the school holidays Neil suggested we play “armies”, this was a game devised by Neil where we would be divided up into two groups or armies, one each side of field and then try to capture the members of the other army and take them back to their den. I should add there were various “dens” built by us kids scattered all around the field. After much discussion there were two armies with about 8 kids in each, all divided as equally as possible by age and gender. Denise was in the other army but did not seem very happy, I got the feeling any moment she was going to storm off stating she didn’t want to play these silly kids games, that had happened quite a lot recently.
This game usually ended in chaos as the field had very long grass, trees and bushes and it was easy to loose members of your own army and even the opposing army. I was crawling through the grass when suddenly one of the other army kids pushed me to the ground, before I could get up another joined him and jumped on me yelling “You’re our prisoner of war!” There were strict rules that once you were taken prisoner you couldn’t escape and had to go back to the other army den or rather “prisoner of war camp”. The two kids took me back to their den, I quite pleasantly surprised to see Denise had been given the job of guarding the prisoners, and so far I was the only prisoner, things were looking up.