Dave, Me, and the 'Chalk-Pit Cave', Blakes Rd, Wargrave.

I’ll mention often in this blog about my old ‘friend’ Dave. (Dave’s Vault of Evil).

Well, just across the road from Dave’s house in Blakes Rd (ByeWays)  was a disused chalk-pit. (One of many in the area). We were a bit bored, so Dave suggested we make a Secret Cave for ourselves by cutting one into the side of the chalk-face. We could keep ‘stuff’ there that we wanted to keep secret from our parents and friends. This was to be ‘only’ known to us. We wouldn’t tell another living soul about it..... EVER!

YEP! Seemed like a great plan to me, and off we went with our bowie knives and a hand-axe to burrow away into our future ‘Den’. We spent almost three whole days digging and carving our way into the pit wall, and I have to admit, it looked great.

We cut hollows into the walls so that we could store stuff away. Dave had his side, and I had mine. We stocked it full of apples, cherry’s, pears and damsons which we scrumped from the nearby orchards. We had several bottles of ‘Corona’ lemonade and cherryade, which Dave filched from his Mum’s larder. (They were well-off and she used to stock up with such things). All in all, our Den was a ‘crackin’ little place which no-one knew about …... except us.

We built it fairly high up the chalk-face to deter would-be nosey parkers, but we would get covered in chalk each time we went there as we scrambled up to get in. So we had the idea of cutting steps, a bit like a ladder, into the chalk so that we could get up there a lot quicker and cleaner. (Even if it did mean the nosey-parkers might also get up there easier).

It took us a Saturday morning to cut out our steps, and once done, we decided to go back to Dave’s house and get his Mum to cook us some lunch. She was very kind like that. (As most were in those more sociable days).

Lunch eaten, a quickie game of chess to let our lunch go down and it was back to the ‘Den’...... Except it WASN’T!…..It wasn’t there any more ….. AARRGGHH!!

Where we’d cut in too deep for our steps, we’d obviously weakened the whole wall and it had all collapsed into a pile of rubble at the foot of the chalk face. Bits of our ‘stuff’ could be seen broken and smattered throughout the heap, making for a very sad day for both of us.

Then, we both looked at each other, realising at the same time that if we’d 'not' gone to lunch, and played our game of chess afterwards, WE might have been ‘smattered’ in the rubble as well.

NO. We didn’t carve ourselves out another one. Instead, we found a dirty great big Pine tree near the 'building site' (Beverley Gardens) just up the road from ‘My’ house, where we built the best tree-house modern building materials could build.

All FREE! …. (From the building site?) …. Hmmmmmm??

Fred .......... (Age 10/11)