Dangerous chips

“She cooked the chips in the fire!?”

My mother was aghast. At six years old I’d never encountered ‘aghast’ before and I was also about to learn several important lessons in quick succession.

1. Don’t dob your friends in;
2. Don’t tell your mother about anything interesting that you hope to do again in future;
3. Don’t expect your mother to see the funny side of anything remotely dangerous.

I’d just returned, excited, from my friend Tracy Thomas’s house.

I was excited because I’d just had chips.

The chips were exciting because Tracy Thomas’s sister Roberta had cooked them for us —Tracy (9), Tracy’s younger sister Angela (8), Wendy Rees from over the road (10), Stewart Morris (5) and me.

They were extra exciting because:
A. They were spectacularly good.
B. They’d been cooked in a blackened pan in an open fire.
C. Even I, at six years old, knew it was dangerous.

Oh, and D: Roberta was only ten or eleven herself and was cooking them because her parents were still at work.

My mother had collared me as I came skipping in. Her mum’s standard issue eagle eyes spotting the grease on my chin and…