MORNING SERIAL

BECAUSE of this it was accessible only through the houses and gardens of Crescent Street, and so just a few of us children had uninvited access there.

The river was so polluted back then that it generally ran black and there was little that lived in it, save sometimes a few sticklebacks and tiny bullheads, nervous in the shallows and hard to find. In summer when the river ran low, the sole plant life beneath the water, a greenish algal slime, would find itself stranded above the surface and its decomposing stench would fill the air.

And yet this was my own wild place, to be explored over and over, a place where I could lose myself and never be bored no matter how much time I spent there. I made a friend of Bryan Griffiths, who lived at number 16 and was the same age as me. Bryan stood out from most of us with his fair hair and blue eyes. He laughed easily and was unfailingly kind, but I liked him most because he was clever. I liked to be around clever people.

Together we would spend hours looking for the perfect stones for throwing. Flat ones for skipping, counting off the bounces in competition with each other. Sausage-shaped stones were for ‘bombing’, producing the perfect splashless ‘thock’ of an Olympic diver if you got good height, and the spin just so. Floating – and sinkable – targets were greatly prized and we would scour the riverbank searching for bombardable jetsam.

Since the river was a place where many had no qualms about disposing of their rubbish, there was generally no shortage of fresh target material. Bottles were best of course. Thrown in as far upstream as we could manage, they floated through our furious barrage of splashing stones as we each raced to be the one to fire the fatal shot. Each pop bottle became a little vitreous Bismarck, a dangerous enemy battleship that had to be stopped at all costs before all was lost, as it made a break for the open water south of Taff Street where the great Victorian arches supporting the railway line marked the end of our territory.