The Bare Bum Gang and the Football Face-Off (4 page)

I wish I could say that he was a gentle giant who liked to pick wild flowers and look after sick puppies but he was just a big bully. He was also spoiled rotten, and had a PlayStation 3, an Xbox, a Game Boy Advance, a Nintendo DS and a PSP. He has a load of friends who hope one day he'll let them play with all his stuff, but he never does.

So there was Dockery, with his gang. Oh, I should say, they were also the gang from the old estate who used to burn down or wee on our dens whenever they found
them. So from now on I'll just call them the Dockery Gang. As well as Dockery; there was William Stanton, James Furbank, Paul Larkin and some others whose names I could never remember. They were mainly in Year Six.

To begin with they joined in with the song, but they soon got bored with that. So then Dockery came over and pushed me down and then sat on me, and then he shouted to his friends, ‘Right, if this is the Bare Bum Gang, let's see their bare bums!'

He was sitting on my chest and it really hurt. I saw Jennifer out of the corner of my eye, and she had stopped leading the other kids in the song, and she wasn't looking crazed any more. In fact she looked a bit sad, probably because she wanted to do all the teasing herself and didn't like anyone else getting in on the act. She ran off, and the rest of the choir scattered, but Dockery was still sitting on my chest.
Luckily, before they managed to pull my trousers down Miss Bridges appeared.

‘What's going on here?' she said in a strict voice.

‘Nothing, miss,' said Dockery. ‘We're just playing, aren't we, Ludo?'

‘Yes,' I mumbled. I didn't have much of a choice. Then Dockery got off me.

‘See you later,' he said as he and his gang walked off.

‘Are you OK?' asked Miss Bridges.

‘Fine,' I said, looking at my feet.

‘There's nothing you want to tell me?'

‘No, miss.'

I should have told her that Dockery was a big bully, but he'd have got me for it later.

No one really bothered us for the rest of the break, except that every now and then one of Jennifer's class would come up and say ‘Bare Bum Gang' and then run off.

Jennifer didn't say anything. But at lunch break I saw her doing cartwheels. She could do one after the other, and the only thing that stopped her was reaching the wall at the end of the playground. Even though I thought that was quite cool, it still seemed like she was only doing cartwheels because she was so happy about getting her revenge on us.

We all met up in the den that evening after tea to talk things over. We had to fix up the extension bit first, but that didn't take us long. The damage looked worse than it was. The Dockery Gang would have made a much better job of wrecking the den, not to mention the weeing-on-it part.

The earth inside the den was always nice and dry, even when it was raining outside, and we also had an old dog blanket and some newspapers on the floor, so compared to most dens it was a palace. Noah had
some fizzy fish and Phillip had some crisps. Mum had given me some raisins but I was too embarrassed to get them out. Raisins are OK if you're on an expedition and there's nothing else to eat for miles around, so you'd starve without them, but apart from that they aren't much use. Noah shared out the fizzy fish, but he kept the red and black ones for himself, which we agreed was probably fair.

‘That could have been much worse,' I said when we were all settled. I meant the day of teasing and being sat on by Dockery, not the destroyed extension.

‘Yeah,' said The Moan, ‘we might have been squashed by a steamroller and then chopped up into bits and then flushed down the toilet. That might have been worse. A bit.'

‘No need to be sarcastic,' said Noah, loyal as ever.

‘I'm going to have nightmares for the rest of my life about it,' said Jamie. ‘All
I'll hear is “Bare Bum Gang, Bare Bum Gang” for ever.'

I said, ‘Well, it was pretty embarrassing, but it should die down now, don't you reckon, Phillip? She won't go on for ever, will she, your sister?'

‘You don't know my sister. Once, when I annoyed her, she threw all my Airfix models out of my bedroom window. I was watching the telly downstairs, and at first I didn't realize what it was. Just saw these streaks out of the corner of my eye. Then I looked properly, just as my last Spitfire bit the dust.'

We all quietly absorbed what The Moan had said. There were obviously no depths to which the evil Jennifer would not stoop. But then something happened that, for the time being, put all thoughts of the Jennifer problem out of our minds.

The first thing we heard was a loud rattling noise, the second was a yelp and the third was a voice crying out,
‘Poooooooooooooooh!'

The traps!

I should explain about our traps. Because our dens kept getting discovered and smashed in or weed on, we invented some traps to catch anyone who came near. There were two sorts of trap. The first sort was a hole dug in the ground and then covered over with sticks and bits of other stuff to hide it. The Moan wanted to put broken glass in the bottom, or nails pointing up, or sharpened wooden stakes, but Noah said that was barbaric, which means bad, so we didn't. Instead we put either nettles, dog poo or Smarties-tube fart bombs in them.

You make a Smarties-tube fart bomb by farting into a Smarties tube, which takes quite a lot of skill. Then you quickly put the top back on the Smarties tube to keep it in. The idea of the Smarties-tube fart bombs is that the fart gas becomes really strong and horrible by being stored for a long time in the Smarties tube. Then, when
one of our enemies steps on the trap, they burst open the Smarties tubes, and the fart gas, by now really, really poisonous, floats up and suffocates them, but not to death – just enough to make them sick, so they run away home.

In case you are wondering what a Smarties tube is: well, back in the olden days, Smarties used to come in a special round tube, with a cool lid that you could pop off and on. When I was little, I used to eat quite a lot of Smarties, and I always saved the tubes, because I knew they'd come in handy one day, either for farting into or for keeping other sweets in, like Jelly Tots or wine gums. The new kind of Smarties tube has eight sides and a cardboard lid. They don't really work very well for keeping farts in, because they aren't airtight or, rather, fart-tight, as they have too many holes and the fart gas leaks out. I suppose you could use them in an emergency, but they wouldn't be very potent. If you haven't
got a load of old, proper Smarties tubes, you could use Pringles tubes. Obviously, they take a lot more filling up, as each one can hold up to four big farts, eight medium-sized ones, or twelve tiny little tummy squeaks.

Anyway, altogether there were six of these pit traps around the den – three nettles (because they were the easiest), two dog poo and one Smarties-tube fart bomb, because they were the hardest to make, and my supply of Smarties tubes was getting low.

The other kind of trap was what is called a snare, which is a piece of string or wire made into a loop. When one of your enemies puts his foot in the loop, it tightens and they are trapped. Jamie wanted to tie the other end of the string or wire to some bricks high up in a tree, but yet again Noah said we couldn't, because it was barbaric and you might bash someone's brains out, and then you'd go to jail. Also, it would be hard to get the bricks up into the tree, because we were all rubbish at climbing trees, except Noah, who wouldn't do it because of what he said about it being barbaric.

So I had the brilliant idea of attaching the other end of the noose to a load of old tin cans that we took out of the recycling bin. That was a bit of an adventure in itself, because during the expedition The Moan fell into the bin and cut his hand on a sharp edge and, what was worse, got covered in manky old baked-bean juice. He didn't need any stitches, but his mum
had to put the biggest plaster in the whole packet on it – the giant oblong one.

Once we had the cans we made holes in them, using a hammer and a nail, and then tied the snares to them, using about six cans for each snare, and then we hid them really carefully around the den.

I knew at once that the rattling noise was the sound of someone stuck in a tin-can snare.

The Gang all looked at me, waiting for a decision. Should we stay in the den to see what happened next? Or should we go out and face whatever was there?

‘Come on,' I said. ‘We'd better find out what we've caught.'

We crawled out through the cement-bag door and came face to face with our worst fears. Dockery was there with three of his gang. Dockery had got stuck in a tin-can snare and was shaking his leg about, trying to get it free, and that was rattling the cans like mad. His gigantic head and tiny face were glowing bright red. One of his gang, the one called Larkin, who was tall and skinny as a lamppost, had put his foot in one of the pit traps and was waving his hand in front of his face, which had gone a pale green colour, a bit like mint ice cream.
That could have been a Smarties-tube fart-bomb trap or just the dog-poo trap, because they were both quite smelly.

But we couldn't really enjoy the success of our traps, because there was a good chance we were going to get bashed, and that's never very cheerful.

When Dockery saw me, he stopped looking mad and started laughing.

‘Ha, look what we found! It's the Bare Bum Gang and their cosy little den. Oh, correction, I mean
our
cosy little den.'

‘It's not your den,' I said. ‘It's
our
den. We built it. There's plenty of room in these woods. Why don't you go and make one of your own?'

Dockery came stumping up towards me, sticking his jaw out. The cans rattled and clanked behind him, but he didn't seem to notice them.

‘We want this one,' he said.

I was frightened of Dockery. He was older and bigger than me, and so were his
friends. But I knew that bullies are usually cowards, so I made myself say, ‘Well, you can't have it.'