There was a garage, an air raid shelter and a coal hole. The first two had a relevance, the coal hole didn’t. The air raid shelter was too scary to go down into and always struck Ever as an extraordinary thing to have in a suburban garden.

No one moved the leaves that were waist high; a mixture of rotted and fresh that collected at the door at the bottom of the steps. On his only trip down there, which he was forced to make or have his pants taken down by the girls next door, a concrete bunker room was revealed.

That was it.

That was it, against a bomb.

Maybe it was having this continual presence of something that protected you from bombs that gave Ever the idea to make one.

The coal hole, well, that kept coal, not used anymore and, every New Year’s Eve, Ever would have coal dust smeared on his face, then have to knock on the front door to be let in as a good luck charm. To bring good fortune to the coming year. This superstition was to do with his Welsh mother being the daughter of a coal miner. Although the need to have an abundance of coal in the mines the following year was lost on Ever, even as a child,

Then there was the garage where he found some old fireworks, bangers, whose sole purpose was to make a bang, probably too damp on bonfire night but now, months later, dried out. The fourth prompter into action was as non-sequential as the other three. There was a soda syphon, red, with the press down arm, and the place where the sparklet of gas was inserted was in chrome. Plastic chrome. When the gas had gone into the water and had been shaken for ten minutes or so, you got the miracle of soda. Leaving an empty mini torpedo of metal with a pierced hole at the top. It was an ancient contraption. It was obvious really: fill an empty sparklet with the gunpowder from the fireworks. Compress it in tight, pack it. Create a pressure. There was a bomb, that would explode and send the metal, shrapnel-like, everywhere.

After this preparation he took the bomb into the garden, laid a long trail of gunpowder that he could light and that would travel up to the bomb.

And.

He laid it on the bit of terrace that dropped down two steps by the fence and the posts that held the washing line. He spread the trail of gunpowder, the fuse, up the path away from the washing line until the gunpowder ran out. Quite a way up the path. He wanted to be safe. He lit it.

Then his mother came out with a pile of washing in a pale blue plastic version of a latticed basket, with a cigarette in her mouth. And he shouted.

‘Hang on Mum.’

And repeated the shout.

Did he shout loud enough?