I went for a walk this afternoon. I went to Mollicar Woods. This was my local stamping ground when I was a kid. I was an outdoor girl, my best friend was Buzzer (David Boothroyd) and we walked everywhere round our homes up to being 12 or 13. I think our favourite thing was to take our lunch (always a tin of beans and sausage and a tin of rice pudding), an old pan and a box of matches down to Mollicar Woods. We had our favourite place, nestled in a bend of the stream.
There we would make a fireplace of stones and light a fire and "cook" our dinner. The most memorable day was a wet one, not actually raining when we set out, but heavy grey skies. We took Smokey along, a neighbour's dog and off we went to the woods. We lit our fire, got our beans and sausage heated up and eaten, then it started to rain, just a little.
Being intrepid explorers, this didn't put us off, so we washed the pan and continued to hear the rice pudding. The heavens opened. The rain lashed into our rice pudding leaving little puddles where it landed. We began to laugh .... spurting rice pudding ....
All of a sudden there was an almighty crack. We thought someone has fired a gun. So did the dog .... he shot off as fast as his legs would carry him. The we noticed that one of the stones next to the fire has exploded ... made of slate, it must have had a crack in it filled with water that heated up in the fire and split the stone. It was certainly dramatic.
We spent the next worried hour or so looking for the dog who, of course, had just run back home. We eventually arrived back home soaking wet and none the worse for the experience.
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