Illustration by Sheena

WHEN you’re 12, you tend to go through quite a few best mates.

There was Woody and me, Starsky and Hutch, but he was a sporty type and in the school football team.

He’d be dragged away with it to train in Blackpool for a week every summer. I think it consisted mainly of running on the beach between piers and eating hotdogs.

There was Jammy and me, but he was really bright and preferred chess and reading Brendan Chase.

Which just left me and Trevor Barlow (now there’s a name you’ll not hear at many 21st-century baptisms).

Trev lived two streets from mine and we became mates serving school dinners.

A pair of juniors would have the job of dishing out the two courses to a table full of infants during a double-sitting lunchtime.

We’d get it all in huge silver tins with lids on.

It was great, especially during afters, because you could cut bigger bits of the sponge pudding for yourself.

I wonder how many malnourished infants I was personally responsible for? (I bet they did it themselves when they became juniors.)

One dinnertime, Trev told me he was joining the Scouts and asked me if I wanted to.

I can’t remember the name of the troop, but if we call it the 666th Keighley, I think that probably says it all.

Meetings were held in the basement of a soot-blackened church in Devonshire Street, which, the couple of times I had passed it before, I’d thought was derelict.

If you went further up the street you came to Guardhouse, which was a rough area (on a wall for years was painted the legend: This Is Guardhouse – There Is No Turning Back) and further up, Braithwaite, which was rougher still.

All the lads who went to 666th Keighley were from those parts.

I was to discover it was like a mixture of the hardened criminality of The Dirty Dozen crossed with the buffoonish ineptitude of Dad’s Army.

The leader’s name was Roger and his two sons, Mark and Mark, were also members.

Looking back, they both had the same name because (a) Roger was the most forgetful man in the world or (b) by some strange quirk in the space/time continuum, he married a woman and they had a son called Mark, got divorced and he remarried a woman who had a son who not only looked exactly like his son, Mark, but also had the same name.

I was in the 666th for only a fortnight, but that was one set of knots I could never fathom.

One of our first tasks was to erect a tent on the church’s blasted but consecrated ground.

It was an old canvas thing with wooden poles and no groundsheet and it wouldn’t have looked out of place starring alongside Burt Lancaster in Zulu Dawn.

We put it up inside out, flung tent pegs at each other, tied someone’s legs with the guy ropes and stuck the poles inside shirtsleeves and played scarecrows.

It was growing dark when Roger had finally had enough. After a serious rollicking, during which he said we weren’t fit to wear the badge of the Scouts

(I wasn’t, yet), we packed up in a silence punctuated with many sniggers.

One of the lads, Pixie, walked home with the tent mallet, saying his dad would be really chuffed with it.

A venture into the woods went equally awry.

We were told to bring tinned food, bread, beans and what not, because we were about to learn the basics of campfire cooking.

Roger’s mate from another Scout troop was coming with us and his troop, guided by an elder, was to follow us.

Not only were we going to learn cooking, but also tracking and trail finding.

Roger’s mate’s troop would set off an hour after us and find us because we’d be leaving behind secret signs made from twigs and pebbles, which they would follow.

Only Roger and his mate were excited by this. We were all thinking of another thing: food.

Needless to say the day was a complete disaster.

Someone fell into the canal and a campfire nearly got out of hand and at one point threatened to engulf the entire woods (even though we formed a competent chain from canal to fire and doused it with billycans of water. Roger wasn’t in the mood to award us all a firefighting badge).

And the fact that Roger’s mate’s troop didn’t turn up until the moment it was decided we’d be marched back home only added to the disappointment.

It turned out that all the twiggy, pebbly signs that had been laid had been subverted and, indeed, perverted by Pixie, the mallet lad.

‘Oh, what’s that? A lighthouse made of twigs? Oh, no, it’s a…ugh.’

As I’ve said, I lasted only a fortnight.

What drove the final nail into the coffin was our annual town celebration, Gala Day (gala pronounced gay-la).

That was when various committees and organisations got together and decorated floats, drove vintage fire engines, marched jazz bands and exhibited the beauty queens of surrounding areas

(Miss Braithwaite always had to wear a long-sleeved frock to cover the home-made tattoos).

The entire town’s Scouts and various other troops gathered and marched, accompanied by bands.

(I never understood the attraction of the St John Ambulance Brigade until Pixie pointed out to me the attractive blonde leader and said they all practised mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on her.)

The procession was quite a spectacle as it snaked its multicoloured way through Keighley’s streets like cider through the veins of a wino.

The whole town turned out for it – from babbies to grannies – waving flags, swigging pop and cheering (there were no home computers in those days and video had not yet been invented).

For once, 666th Keighley was looking like a proper troop.

The flag was at the front and we were all resplendent in green and mushroom.

That was, until we got to Goulbourne Street.

There, on the low sheds of Driver’s Carpentry, sat Pabs, Tigger, Andy Brown and all the hard lads who congregated on the bandstand in Lund Park –

all Oxford bags, Wrangler jackets and packets of 10 No. 6.

They were armed to the teeth with shooters and boxes of Whitworth’s dried peas.

I never knew foodstuff could hurt so much.

By the time we reached the end of the street, not one of us had escaped a couple of bullseyes in the face.

After that, I hung up my beret and never went back.

Trev and I drifted apart and my uniform was eventually given to a friend of my mum whose lad was joining up.

I tried Googling my former troop, just to see if it was still going. It wasn’t. It’s blown away, down through time like campfire smoke. It’s suddenly hit me, though. I’ve finally unravelled the knot.

Perhaps Roger just happened to like the name, Mark.