When I look back on life, I can understand why young children do things without thinking. I used to be one of them, of course, and clearly remember climbing aboard a motor boat which was on dry land on the Marine Drive, just around the corner about 100 years from the Corrigans Amusement Arcade at the beginning of the far pier. I was with a red-headed Friarage school mate called Christopher (Chris) Fox, and we boarded the boat and pretended to be the crew. We wandered up and down and pretended to be pirates (like you do) until Chris fround that the door into the small cabin in the bows was unlocked.
We clammered into the cabin, but there was nothing in there except paint and paint brushes - and that to us was great joy. We immediately stopped being pirates, and became painters, and so we set about painting the boat. Of course, it was a little slap-hazzard as one would expect from a pair of unsupervised 8 year olds, and the colours didn't match. In fact it ended up being a total disaster - a mess!
At some point, a passerby shouted at us to stop painting and we got scared and ran away. I ran up towards the Castle and Chris ran along the seafront.
About three hours later, the police came knocking on the back door at my home and my mother answered. I tried to creep upstairs, but the policeman knew what had happened and knew it was ME! I later found out that, because Chris had chosen the seafront as a route of escape, he had been followed, reported to the police and apprehended. He had told the police where I lived, etc.
I got a real belting from my mother, who chased me all over the house with one of my dad's big leather belts. After a lecture from my mother, it dawned on me that we really shouldn't have painted the boat - but you don't THINK when you're only 8.
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