Excerpt from Kev's Autobiograpy:"The Nearly Man"

I think it was the summer of 1968. We had such glorious summers then,the summer holidays contrived to last forever, as we used to doss about in the woods and have water fights , seemingly for weeks on end.
The summers seem shorter now, or is just the greyness of adulthood grumpily descending on my rose-coloured spectacles?

There was Pim, a fairly studious boy, but just on the right side of cool, his Dad used to be a Cinder Track rider, and he had the pictures to prove it , which gave him a certain credibility amongst the rest of us.

There was Bake, academically challenged at this stage of his young life, but I always felt he could have been a footballer. When we used to play in the street, with our coats thrown down as goalposts, you simply could not get the ball off him.

There was Fos, he lived a good few doors away from us, actually around a bend in the road so you couldn`t even see his house! Add to this the fact that he went to a different school to the rest of us and was fully one
year older, and you had a very mysterious boy indeed.

Then there was me. Schoolwork and I were not particularly comfortable bedfellows, and my forays into sports always left a lot to be desired.
In fact I don`t recall excelling in any particular area at that time of my life, except perhaps for being very adept at avoiding tidying my bedroom!

Regardless of our idiosynchracies, we were together, the four of us, through those endless summers, Kev, Pim, Bake and Fos, messing about as only kids can, our lives, unblemished, stretching ahead of us.


It seemed in those days that you could still wander anywhere without fear, explore the woods and stay out until dusk with only the mildest reprimand from your parents. As I get older, I mourn the passing of that age , the
innocence and the freedom that went with it.

It was on one such typically english suburban summers day that Fos paid me a visit.
"I`m forming a group, do you want to join?" he said, studying me from behind his National Health specs.
"What sort of group?" I countered, expecting another one of Fos`s fiendishly clever Secret Agent clubs he was in the habit of creating.

{These involved various activities to occupy would-be secret agents, such as
shadowing practice, where two or more spotty ten-year-old boys would follow a woman up the street, convinced that they couldn`t be seen because they were observing her through eye-holes cut in a newspaper, eventually forcing the poor woman to sprint for the nearest shop, convinced she had wandered into the village of the damned!

There were aptitude tests too, along the lines of; You are trapped in a sealed room, the door is locked, and poisonous gas is flooding in through the only vent. The room contains only a coffee table on which stands a houseplant and a paperclip How do you escape? The answer, according to Fos and obviously inspired by a warped interest in first year biology, was to hold the houseplant to your nose, the theory being that you could buy yourself time by inhaling the oxygen the plant gave off as a by product of its growth cycle, allowing you to leisurely fashion a precision lock-picking device from the paper clip with which to facilitate your triumphant egress, James Bond eat your heart out!}

Kev Moore