Damned if I Do Read Free

football and cricket. My bat and ball skills were poor. I was good at gymnastics and okay at swimming but not much else. I spent a lot of time ­reading magazines like Popular Mechanics and getting quite interested in the whole idea of what you could do with chemicals. I read in a school textbook about the basis ofexplosives and I started to try to make gunpowder—that was quite a challenge in ­country South Australia. I had to get potassium nitrate, the active ingredient in gunpowder. A chemist in Clare, the nearest significant town, told me that sodium nitrate, also known as saltpetre and used in preserving meat, would do. In our town,Koolunga, there was only one shop, but they had bags of this stuff, for people who wanted to cure their own meat. I bought a lot of it, got some sulphur and crushed-up charcoal, and made gunpowder.
    Then I began building little cannons and working out some way of firing the gunpowder using electrical detona­tion. My best friend at the time wasPhillip Lange, who grew up on a farm and spent most of his time playing sport, but was quite intrigued by the idea of manufacturing explosives. We built a small bomb and put it under the water in the local creek, the Broughton River. We’d rigged up the electrical detonation and, when we pressed the plunger we’d made, it blew up impressively underwater. We thought that was fantastic.
    Then I became even more ambitious. I started to read and think about more sophisticated explosives, like nitro-glycerine, and thought if I could just make this, that would have an impact. I had become a trusted member of the ­science class atschool, as one of the few people interested in chemistry.Tom Bowden was the science master there and he used to give me free rein of the laboratory, in return for helping out and cleaning up. Although I did pay my dues. I remember one time when the class was doing an experiment to demonstrate the enzymatic dissolving of starch with saliva, Bowden said to me, ‘You’re the science monitor, you can collect the class sample.’ So, with my beaker, I had to go around to all the students asking them to spit into it, and, of course, two or three of those bastards deliberately spat onto my hand.
    â€˜Oh, sorry.’
    But, as I say, I was trusted, and I got access to the ­chemicals and was allowed to take the odd thing home, including the necessary nitric acid. I had a little laboratory set up in the back yard and was sitting there, gingerly pouring my nitric acid into the glycerine. When I look back at it … well, people lose their hands and their heads. It’s dangerous stuff, and my experiments with it didn’t work, but I was lucky I didn’t lose a limb, or worse.
    My parents were vaguely aware of my experiments but not too concerned about them. They thought it was very good that I was taking an interest in these kinds of ­academic pursuits. My father became annoyed once, though, when I fired one of the cannons I’d made. There was a large ­explosion and it shot a steel projectile—a bolt about half an inch in diameter—straight through the wall of his galvanised iron shed and out the other side.
    Related to this kind of mischief was an incident that got me the only caning I ever received atschool. I was having a conflict with another person: my friendPhillip Lange. We’d built these home-made pistols that fired starting-pistol caps. Philip was annoying me, so I took his poetry book out of his locker and fired the pistol straight at it. The cover and the first ten pages disintegrated, and quite a bit of smoke and a stench came out of the locker room.
    It was reported to the headmaster,Mr Slee, and Lange and I, and another bloke who just happened to be there, were hauled up before the head to explain. I was the guilty one but the other two wouldn’t dob me in. Slee said, ‘You’re all going to get caned’, and we did. I was the bus prefect, with the