Jesus - they just keep coming back to me.
As usual, these stories start with beer.

I was, for some very strange reason, having a beer in The Royal British Legion club (I'm not in the armed forces, nor have I ever been, and I was about 19 at the time!)

My dad was in there having a drink or 9 at the same time, and he came over to where I was sitting and said, "Ear, dchurch, what you doing tomorrow morning?"

"Not a lot,"

"Ok, you're coming to Belgium with me at 5.30am as your mum and I were booked on this trip with the RBL and you're mum's not very well today, so rather than waste the seat on the coach, you're coming with me."

"Ok" says I, and continued to drink the cheap lager thus ensuring that a 5.30am start would begnin with a huge hangover.

5.30 comes around and sure enough, I'm being almost forcefully dragged from my bed - ok, an exageration, but I did protest and beg to be allowed to stay.

We get on the ferry a bit later, and as RBL club members are prone to do, start on the drinking immediatly.

This was supposed to be a trip of homage to those that died at Ypres in WWI, yet, as always, turned out to be a slash up for old(er) people.

We get to the gate at Ypres and, as they do every day at 11am, played the Last Post.

After this, we went to some of the trenches, which are now surrounded by a memorial garden and tea rooms etc... most of which is actually quite haunting - if you haven't been, go, it's worth it, just to be humbled (the same is true of the Normandy beaches too).

So, we're walking around, having had a few beers in us, and I see alump of mud that looks just like a hand grenade.

"It can't be" thinks I, but as I pick it up and flake away 70 odd years of mud, it turns out that my first thoughts were correct (almost, they were called Mill's Bombs then I am told).

My dad looks at me as if to say, "what's that you've got there then?", sees what it clearly now is, and says in a hushed voice, "put that in your pocket, quick"

So I do.

After having smuggled it back through two lots of customs, I finally get back to my mates house (which also happened to be a pub), this was long after closing time, so I start banging on the door until her dad comes out.

I'm standing there with two crates of duty free lager on one shoulder and a WWI mills bomb in the other hand.

First thing I said to Bob (as that was his name, the landlord of the pub and friends dad), was "look what I've got" and then tossed it to him like a stupid pissed idiot would toss an 70 odd year old unexploded bomb.

"Get that the f*ck away from here" he says, and eventually I had to agree to leave it outside.

A day or two later, my dad gets hold of it while I was at work, and upon going to his local haunt once again, i.e. the RBL, he pushes the door open, shouts "INCOMING!!" and hurls the grenade through the door!

That went down like a lead balloon as I'm sure you can imagine. Pissing myself thinking of it now though, but at the time, the local patrons were not amused.

After a lot of "FFS! you CNUT" from the RBLers, he finally agrees to go to the local army barracks and tell them what we found 'in the garden'.

When he gets there, yep, it's another of his mates on the guard door, and knowning that my old man is a bit of joker would believe not one work of this tale and told him to sod off, which he then did; to the local cop shop.

He told the copper at the desk, who once again, we all know (it's a small village), and the coppers says, "where is it now then?"

"Here," replied my old man pulling it from his pocket.

He said he'd never seen a copper move quite so fast in his entire life.

The copper eventually made a call, told my dad to take it home, put it in a bucket of cold water and wait for the bomb squad to arrive. It had started to leak thick, green water by this point as well, so was starting to look a little volatile. My wire-brushing it up in a vice probably did little to help it stay stable.

Not long after, the bomb squad turn up at my parents house, and take the bomb and my family to a local field, surrounded the grenade with semptex (sp?) and got my sister to touch two wires together.

Boom.

...and that was the end of my WWI memorial trip.
(dchurch bah, Thu 6 Nov 2008, 15:59, 11 replies)

It's a miracle you're still alive
*click* for good yarn
(bazmorningstar efil4nat3b, Thu 6 Nov 2008, 16:03, closed)

This is fantastic!
Very well written, a pleasure to read.
Nice work.
*clicks*
( Cawl, Thu 6 Nov 2008, 16:04, closed)

Thanks
...yep; looking on back on some of the things I did as a teenager/early twenties, it's bloody is a miracle I'm still alive.

I've got bloody scars all over me from those days. Some are mental too! ;-)
(dchurch bah, Thu 6 Nov 2008, 16:07, closed)

Yay! Bombs!
Maybe next time you'll find a SEVERED HEAD!
I used to do some work on the Northstowe Project, in Cambridgeshire (building a new city). They had ordinance days for blowing up all the old unexploded stuff left behind in the barracks. Good fun!
(w4I4q1O1 was hard at work on, Thu 6 Nov 2008, 16:11, closed)

As it happens...
...a severed head did once turn up on the beach right near us.

Apparently it was a burial at sea, that hadn't gone according to plan.

Pretty gruesome stuff. I was about 7 at the time and can only just remember it happening.
(dchurch bah, Thu 6 Nov 2008, 16:18, closed)

LOVE IT
CLICK
( whenanimalsattackhumans clad in global hypercolour, Thu 6 Nov 2008, 16:13, closed)

*click*
For the imagery of Dads and old men pissing around
( elgordo, Thu 6 Nov 2008, 21:10, closed)

but..
why did they get your sister to do it? was she the most qualified in disarming explosives?
(loobyla, Fri 7 Nov 2008, 0:00, closed)

Not sure..
..I was at work when they blew it up; I suppose they thought that she would think it was fun. This was in the days when people didn't take everything quite so seriously and before the PC brain-deads infected every aspect of our lives.
(dchurch bah, Fri 7 Nov 2008, 17:56, closed)

You are a lucky lad
I used to know a bookmaker called Three Finger Mick, courtesy of the detonator from a WW II grenade.
(Redemption blamed it on the Bossa Nova since, Sun 9 Nov 2008, 8:45, closed)

semtex

( Dr Preference AjcuiVd289, Sun 9 Nov 2008, 17:21, closed)