It was a dark and stormy night…

…and somewhere an owl hooted. It really did. But a bit of background first…

A mate of mine at school was in the Air Cadets. Well it was mainly square-bashing and stuff like that and a little bit of rifle practice* and the odd visit to RAF bases and the odd trip up in a Bulldog trainer. But it also involved camping trips…

So my mate and his platoon are up in the wilds of Northumberland pitching camp in the dark and he gets the task of digging the latrine. Now the the Northumberland National Park is a pretty big place and all hills and fields and fairly rugged terrain. If you’ve never been there I’m sure you can sort of picture the scene.

Anyway he trudges off with the spade or entrenching tool or whatever and starts digging and he finds a clear plastic bag and drags it out and shines his torch on it and discovers it contains bones. Well, you’re fourteen and alone in the dark on a windswept moor and you’ve dug up a bag of bones - what would you do? So he runs back to camp and informs the CO in a state of abject terror. I ought to add here that this lad was into gruesome horror movies and this was not long after I’d watched American Werewolf in London at his house. Well scenes of pandemonium amongst the teenage lads (and a couple of lasses) ensued until the adults managed to calm it down and one of them went to inspect the er… find. And he don’t like the look of it (who does like the look of a bag of bones other than paleontologists and even they’d be pushed to be too enthusiastic after dark in a bleak and isolated spot). So one of the older lads is despatched to the local pub which I guess must have been a couple of miles away to telephonically summon the rozzers. I suspect he probs took the opportunity to have a stiffener but that is merely a guess on my behalf.

So the police turn-up and they summon the local Quincy and the bones are professionally examined and after much humming and hawing they are declared not to be human remains but in fact the remains of four dogs with no heads or feet which isn’t exactly too comforting either.

Shortly after this revelation dawn started breaking and as the huge expanses of Northumberland were slowly exposed the mood of the camp started returning to something close to normal (but very tired). At this point one of my mate’s colleagues turned to him and said, “You daft bugger, only you, in all this space, could find the one spot where someone had buried a bag of bones”.

Quite why someone buried the bones of four dogs with no heads or feet up in the Northumberland Moors is still a matter of conjecture. My native area is very attractive with lots of big castles and things and is well worth a tourist visit though I must warn you this didn’t happen that long ago and the phantom bone-burier might well still be at large. He may even have moved on to choicer prey…

*Another one of them once was given a brief go on a 7.62mm belt-fed machine gun. Big mistake. He was told to fire short, controlled bursts at a target. Well… he floored it annihilating the target and partially demolishing the brick wall behind it (I shall never forget his description, “Bricks were fucking off all over the place”.) and then he noticed the barrel beginning to glow so he panicked, kicked it over and that set the grass on fire… Anyway that’s what I was told. He later joined the RAF regiment aka the Rock Apes due to them not being noted for their sagacity.