Follow-up

THE letter from Howard Thomas about putting coins on railway lines (peterborough) reminded me of joining 50 other sea cadets from HMS Victory in portsmouth at a summer camp in the Wiltshire villages of Steeple langford and Hanging langford in the Fifties. On a walk with my friends david Walker, Albert and brian Sandy, we came across a five-bar gate on the main bristol to Salisbury train line. We decided to put a penny on the track, then sat on the gate as a steam engine thundered by. Suddenly, david screamed and fell off the gate. When we finally stopped laughing, we saw he was hurt — the penny had pinged off the track and stuck in his calf. i pulled it out (after all, it was

my penny), but we panicked when we saw all the blood. We managed to get david back to camp and went to see the sick bay petty officer, who thought we had been playing with knives as the wound was so neat. We decided to say we had been climbing fences as we thought it would result in less of a punishment than admitting to playing near the railway line. All our instructors were serving in the Royal Navy and were strict, but fair. david got stitched up — and the rest of us got stitched up, too! We did not care too much for the sayings, ‘guilty by association’ and ‘idle hands breed mischief’. We had to clear up the evening meal plates, pots and dishes, wash it all up, chop wood for the field kitchen, pick up litter and, at 6am, make breakfast for the whole camp. John Porter, Waterlooville, Hants.