Audere est facere...
Many moons ago (late-sixties) our local Victorian-era cop-shop (long since replaced on the site by a Tesco supermarket) backed onto the town park, bordered by a spinney and a grubby brook where the town's pre- and peripubertal 'yoof' was want to pass the daylight hours in the pre-Gameboy era. Each October this glorious pre-Health & Safety playground would see a series of children maimed and disfigured by fireworks.

One autumn day I, aged about 8, was dared by an older and wiser yobbo to run to the back of the police station about 25 yards away, light and lob a banger into the huge steel waste bin at about six foot high under an overhanging porch at the back of the building... sure to make a top class bang and get the coppers out and running after us. Everything went to plan.... over the fence, across the scruffy back yard, lit the banger - but I was too eager to unload the ordnance and chucked it in before it had begun to 'fizz'... and legged it. There was no big bang... just a muffled 'thud' as if the banger had misfired and I reached the safety of the spinney as the jeers rose from my tawdry pals. The banger had not misfired. It had nestled down in the soft bed of waste paper that filled the bin which now began to burn... under the overhanging wooden roof now being licked by flames as burning tar from the roof felt dripped down and fed the growing inferno. We legged it to our respective homes. I can still hear the siren of the fire engine in my 'mind's ear' as I remember I sat watching 'Crackerjack', my cheeks burning as my mother said: 'You're home early tonight Roger....'

Length? About three inches and red in colour. Called a 'Little Devil' IIRR. They cost sixpence each which was a lot of money in those days.
(Roger Darce sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, Mon 5 Nov 2007, 20:15, Reply)