I flooded the school and burnt down the church hall
When I was 6 I had just started first school in Bristol, and I'd like to say now that I'm a perfectly law abiding sort of chap, but for about 6 months at this young age I went though what can only be described as a period of criminal insanity.

The classroom was a very liberal type, you could come and go to the toilets or the school hall as you wished without asking permission, so I would quite often just wander off when bored, and one day for some reason I decided just before home time to stuff soap in to all the over flows on the sinks and turn all the taps on just a little.

I returned 10 minutes later to see that while water was trickling over the edge it was somehow then going down behind the sinks in to the floor and it was not obvious that the room was flooding, sad about this I then returned to the classroom and we all went home. For the weekend.

Needless to say the school was closed on Monday and we had a 'very special assembly' on Tuesday.

It seemed that the entire basement boiler room had been flooded, then the school itself had been flooded due to my antics - I don't remember feeling in the slightest bit scared that I might be caught or that I'd done anything wrong, I even told my friends it was me. Nothing happened.

I then set my sights on making a very old stone built wall in the playground collapse, right on to my friends foot, which was smashed in to a bloody mess, again nothing happened to me and I felt no guilt about it.

Then a few days later my juvenile criminal crime wave came to its apogee, my next door neighbour had stolen a lighter! Wow, we can make fire, so we set off to the school church hall which was a wood built building where we would have things like the Christmas play and nativity, it was the middle of summer and closed in preparation for the approaching holidays.

Walking around the side of the building and having burned everything we could find on our way here (crisp packets, leaves, trying to make a flaming torch etc.) we saw something which made us go absolutely silent - a huge pile of hay protruding from a broken window - to this day I have no idea why hay was coming out of a window, but there it was.

So yes, we set it on fire and laughter turned to sheer terror as the whole pile of straw instantly burst in to flames and the whole building started to burn to the ground.

I honestly feel terrible about these events now, but at the time I just went home and kept quiet, even when the police came at 9pm and got me out of bed I kept calm and quiet and denied everything.

My friend admitted to it and seeing as it was he who stole the lighter he took the full blame. His family moved away shortly afterwards and I never saw him again.

After that the whole madness seemed to stop and I never did anything that naughty again.

I still cannot understand my odd behaviour for those few weeks, I even returned to visit the site of the fire a few years ago and there are now flats built on the land.

So there, I've confessed, it's out in the open, and I promise I won't do it again.
(craigix, Thu 8 Sep 2011, 20:00, 1 reply)

Burning down the hall
I think that if reading the replies here has taught us anything, it's that an awful lot of us have come very close to disaster like that, and it was just pure luck that we escaped it. It's not for want of trying either, kids really do do some very destructive things sometimes and usually have no idea why.
(richardm, Fri 9 Sep 2011, 11:58, closed)