A Strange Sort of Baby Food

 

It’s just where to start, just where to begin,

The boy with a bomb in the Ostermilk tin,

With a chemists collusion the passing of cash,

Salt-peter, sulphur and ground charcoal ash.

 

The boy was quite young being just eight or nine,

The making of gunpowder well in his time,

A bomb or a banger ‘just questions of scale’,

And this is the essence of my little tale.

 

The Chemist was ‘Barney’ well set and mature,

For every known ailment he had every cure,

But there in his back room a measuring pan,

For most every chemical offered to man.

 

The boy was no genius but very well read,

From the home guard instruction book under his bed,

The war was long over but knowledge was there,

And this little angel was stripping it bare.

 

Potassium Nitrate that magical name,

When combined with sulphur will burst into flame,

But just add some carbon and pack in a tin,

Then light a long fuse and just wait for the din.

 

An ounce makes a good noise for shaking a street,

But when you explode it be light on your feet,

For under three shillings ‘I think half a crown’,

Those products from Barney could rattle a town.

 

A Duraglit tin was the optimum prize,

It needed six ounces and just the right size,

A thirty inch fuse got you cover in time,

And the ruction that followed was really sublime.

 

Now if you remember the fifties at all,

It didn’t bode well if your baby was small,

An Ostermilk feed made them bonny and bright,

And it came in such big tins ‘a wonderful sight’.

 

The boy saw the feeding of baby next door,

And the castaway tins that remained on the floor,

He asked for one casually, stored it away,

A good useful something and fit for the day,

 

Now at rough estimation ‘this tin being large’

It was going to need an exceptional charge,

So back down to Barney’s to work out the cost,

A venture quite risky and easily lost.

 

But Barney was affable helpful and kind,

If all this is needed then why should he mind,

Amounts of salt-peter to be ordered in,

For though never rationed supplies were quite thin.

 

The boy now had some little time to prepare,

The Sulphur quite easy, good charcoal quite rare,

Blue twine soaked in nitrate a thirty foot fuse,

He worked on the detail, perfecting the ruse.

 

Materials purchased ‘a full ten bob note’,

A rapid walk home with them under his coat,

Rammed down in the tin with a batten of wood,

He looked on his work ‘and he saw it was good’

 

Then out to the wasteland with no-one about.

A nail through the lid and the fuse running out,

A quick reconnoitre ‘there’s nothing to see’

The striking of matches and just time to flee.

 

But here hangs a problem the boy had not seen,

His log-table knowledge was patchy and mean,

He understood mass not combined gross effect,

And that’s where the base calculation was wrecked

 

The shock was incredible, so was the roar,

The boy cowered terrified flat to the floor,

The soil and the herbage were blasted away,

And heaven was raining a coarse blackened clay.

 

A steep sided crater was cut through the loam,

The boy stood there gasping then legged it for home,

The smoke like a pillar was marking the spot,

So our little hero was off like a shot.

 

For two or three days he stayed close to his bed,

Concussed and confused and not clear in the head,

The blast some had said could be heard for a mile,

Was it left over ordinance? ‘that made him smile’.

 

The crater has vanished where houses now stand,

And he boy now a man sees no harm to the land,

No damage was done and as time flows away,

Perhaps only he will remember that day.

 

Barney’s long dead but remembered so well,

His motto was ‘don’t ask’, the boy’s ‘never tell’,

And yet in this writing I’m making it whole,

Confession they say is so good for the soul.

 

I can’t see a visit to ‘Boots’ would allow,

The purchase of sulphur and salt-peter now,

But good caring Barney still lives in my past,

When being colloquial ‘life was a blast’.