When I was a kid (13) me and a very good friend used to hang around Risley MoD base near Warrington. It had been closed for years, but it was still littered with all sorts of stuff. It was damn dangerous (flooded underground boiler house, collapsed barrack rooms, self closing blast doors on bunkers) and we could easily died there. But HEY, we're kids! We're gonna live forever!

One day we came across a full propeller assembly leaning against a hanger wall: another time we came across three rusted out trucks loaded with steel boxes. Great place!

So we unloaded a box and found all these grey "sausages" inside them (work it out for yourselves), which we proceeded to burn in a heap outside. Nothing happened, so we walked home bored. Phew.

So mate Phil comes in to school one Monday with a secret "thing" in his school bag, one of about 20 he found in a pile over the weekend (we didn't always go together). Looked real cool, even if it was a bit rotten-looking. It had four alloy fins on the bottom and weighed about 6 pounds, with big rusty holes in the side showing greasy-looking yellow stuff. After the initial excitement, the other kids started playing "chicken" with it in the yard next to the science block - I wasn't so sure about it and didn't join in. Jimmie Dean, the Physics teacher for our year, watched the increasingly crazy long distance throws of this hard-to-see-at-a-distance object until he realised what it was and decided to stop the silly game.

We all got the rest of the day off as it turns out it was a corroded British Army mortar round, vintage 50's, that contained a rather nastily unstable explosive. The Army bomb squad was called in (this was in the early 70's before the IRA were really giving them something to practise with) and the area co-ordened off. Oh! such a jolly laugh! If we'd dropped it it probably would have killed the lot of us. Phil was pulled up in front of the beak, given a warning, and taken to the base to recover the rest of the pile which disappeared soon after.

There's a housing estate there now. It's been there for a few years. Who's going to tell them about all the buried Amatol and other stuff (including, purportedly, a few tons of buried 108mm shells)?