A story I found on a yahoo group that's been inactive (like most yahoo groups) for a long time.
During my early childhood my family lived in a large house on the border of a forest in the South of England. My father was seldom home as he was a long distance airline pilot and thus I enjoyed a liberal and relaxed upbringing under the benevolent management of my matronly mother.
I had a circle of about 6 pretty close friends, boys and girls, who usually gravitated to my house at week ends, largely due to the happy and free environment and the proximity to the magic playground which the adjacent forest afforded.
Needless to say, most of the games I and my mates played were of the "cops & robbers" variety, some of them lasting for days on end, interrupted only by meals and bedtimes. These breaks were often made
entirely at my house on a parentally authorized "sleep-over" basis and, therefore, my home became the headquarters of our frequent adventure games.
At first, our games tended to take the form of wild, unstructured chases involving little other than squirting each other with water pistols and playing "dead" when shot. However, things changed for the better one summer morning during the school holidays when our "gang" was augmented by two newcomers to our village, twin brothers who came from Canada. These two boys, Jon and Cam, aged 9, were a year older than the rest of us and, as it turned out, very much more experienced in matters of action play.
In no time at all, Jon and Cam had organized our group into two teams of four, he and his brother in one team with one boy, Jimmy and a girl, Suzie, from our old group and me, my best buddy Doug, Henry and the only other girl, Jenny, on the other team. Also, for the first time, set rules and objectives were set.
Team 1 (Jon, Cam & Co) were "cops" and would occupy as their HQ an old wood shed in the forest, which had long been our "fort".
The other team, of which I appointed myself leader, were the "fugitives", more dramatically described by Jon and Cam as guerillas, and would be hunted by the other team. Those of us who were caught would be taken to the wood shed and held captive. Our team could try to release our team mates as best we could. We, in turn, would try to capture as many cops as possible. Obviously, the team who managed to capture the whole other team were winners. The cops were not allowed to "sit" at their HQ and capture would be effected by a direct hit by water gun. Each team member was issued with two lengths of rope (cut from several hanks found in the garage) and a couple of not all that clean rags (for gagging). The rule was, if captured, your materials would be used to tie you up and not those of the capturer. That way, no one would run out of binding materials.
At this point I must point out that tying up had never been a strong feature in our games up to this point and most of the "gang" were pretty inexperienced when it came to ropecraft. However, Doug and I had both discovered a mutual enjoyment of tying each other up and had become quite expert, at least for our age, in restraint techniques.
For this reason I paired with Henry while Doug and Jenny made up the second group, thus sharing our binding expertise between the two groups. We all ran off into the woods, our two groups remaining apart so that we wouldn't all be caught together, but maintaining distant visual contact.
Henry and I concealed ourselves in a shallow dug-out which the gang had created behind a huge oak tree to await the inevitable arrival of one or more of the cops. We didn't have to wait long before we observed Jon and Jimmy approaching from the direction of the wood shed, Suzie and Cam presumably having been left to guard their HQ. We knew Jimmy knew about the dug-out and would probably have told Jon of the likelihood of us being there as it had always been a key strategic point in our forest playground. Using the big tree as cover, we stealthily crawled away from the dug-out to a point about 20 yards away from it where we could observe it without being seen.
As we expected, water pistols at the ready, Jon and Jimmy charged up to the dug-out, only to find an empty pit – and to be shot in the back by Henry and I!
Having immobilized them (it was agreed that once "shot", you had to drop your own weapon and stand motionless with your hands up) we went up to the two cops and retrieved their water pistols. As Henry didn't have much of a clue about tying up, I undertook the task of binding our prisoners.
Taking one of his ropes from his pants pocket, I pulled Jon's arms behind his back and tied his hands together, pretty tightly, using Doug and my preferred criss-cross method, drawing the rope horizontally then vertically around his crossed wrists, tying the rope off in a double reef knot at the top of his wrists where he couldn't reach the knot. Having finished
with John, I then tied Jimmy's hands in the same manner with a piece
of his rope. I then used their strips of cloth to gag them, stuffing one strip into each of their mouths and holding the gags in place by winding the other piece several times around their mouth and head. We then led our disarmed, gagged and bound prisoners deeper into the forest undergrowth to a small clearing, well off the beaten track, where they were unlikely to be found by their team mates.
Now, one of the rules of our game was that you could tie up a prisoner any way you liked but not TO anything, i.e a tree, post, chair etc. You could also only use the materials your prisoner was carrying. Placing the captives about three yards apart, lying face down on the leafy ground, using the second of their ropes, I tied their legs together, winding two loops round their ankles and cinching the bond tight by pulling another couple of loops round the horizontal binding, between their ankles and tying the whole thing off in the usual double reef knot in a position which couldn't easily be reached by searching fingers. Finally, I applied my coup-de-gras, pulling their bound ankles up behind their buttocks and joining the free ends of the ropes which tied their feet and hands in a close "hog-tie" (of course, we didn't know the meaning of the word then but Doug and I had practiced the technique having seen it done in many of the Saturday matinee cowboy films of the day).
Having secured our prisoners and reduced the "enemy" strength of numbers by half, we set about forming up with Doug and Jenny to mount an assault on the wood shed and capture the remaining two cops.
adlawrence