Boys will be boys
From Colin Webb
My story took place when I was 12 years old.
My father had been invalided out of the navy and had purchased 49 Regency Square in 1942.
During the war years the square had, at the south end of Queensbury Mews, a large brick built water tank about six feet deep and the width of the green.
There were three slit trenches and an ammunition dump guarded by a Italian prisoner of war in the centre of the green.
Us kids used to get him to give us a box of blank ammunition and we would open them up, put all of the gunpowder in a pile with a brick on top, make a long line with the cordite, light it and stand back when the brick went flying through the air.
The Beach Hotel was empty and was used by the ARP. We would sneak into the basement and have rides up and down in the dumb waiter. Abbots Hotel and a few others on the eastern side of the square were filled with Polish airmen.
During 1944 the Fire Brigade emptied the water tank, so we all climbed in to see what we could find...We found a few pennies and several rounds of ammunition. So it was back to the square where we soon tired of pulling ends off the bullets and blowing up the brick that we lit a fire at the bottom of a slit trench and dropped the bullets into it. But as we couldn't see where they were when they went off, one of us got the lid off the pig swill bin and laid it on the fire. We then dropped the bullets onto it and stood around the lip of the trench and watched as they exploded.
Then it was back to the tank where we found this whopper of a shell, that too we put on the fire. We knew that this one would make a big bang so we hid in the air raid shelters that were built in the road outside of the houses on the east side.
When it did go off, it broke several windows in the square. Within minutes the Police, Fire Brigade the army, navy and air force personnel arrived and were milling around, us kids were ignored, nobody thought of asking us so we bunked off home.
All though exploding bullets make a sharp noise; nobody came to see what we were up to. And how the ammunition got into the tank will remain a mystery. My buddy was Jack Mills who today smokes fish in a hut on Brighton seafront.
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