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 the tomato sauce in my hair. I took after my dad, a notoriously messy eater. It was a dead give away.

Where have you been young man?
Tracy Thomas’s.

What have you been eating?
Nothing?

WHAT have YOU been EA-TING?
Chips.

Chips??

I caved in under my mother’s expert interrogation, the story came out.

It was the summer holidays and we’d been playing in the street all day. ‘Hide and Seek’, ‘Beth yw’r gloch Mr Blaidd’, ‘Queenie, Queenie Who’s got the ball?’ and ‘Best to Die’ (my favourite). We were tired and hungry.

Roberta, wise beyond her years, had invited us for chips, so naturally we all trooped off with her. We lived in the same type of council house, a Cornish style semi detached with two bedrooms and a boxroom. The houses all had an…