Those were the criminal days

When I'd accumulated enough I found a short length of old waterpipe with one end closed. Following instructions in a book I … well, I'd better censor the details lest I'm accused of aiding and abetting criminal behaviour though it's all on the Internet. All this was done in my father's tool shed.

He was at work. So was my mother.

My younger brother and I went to a nearby abandoned quarry where perverts occasionally came to ask us to masturbate them (something we never reported because it was too embarrassing) and blew up our pipe bomb.

It sounded like the crack of doom as the explosion bounced off the chalk walls. The thick-walled pipe, ripped open from top to bottom like a banana skin, became an impressive trophy and lifted my peer rating.

Today I'd have been arrested at gunpoint by an anti-terror squad. My pixelated features would have made the TV bulletins as the flak-jacketed police pushed me into a car to face a charge sheet that would have me imprisoned for years.

Instead of going on to write the news, I'd have been on the news, denounced by shrill editorials headed EVIL IN OUR MIDST, my behaviour analysed by social scientists, my chances of a good career shredded.

I don't know why I didn't make more bombs; maybe I realised the dangers, but more likely having done another naughty deed, it was time to try something else.

This meant running away from home to escape my quarrelling parents, which I achieved easily after sabotaging the telephone.

This time I had no instructions, but science classes had helped. I unscrewed the base and pulled out a couple of wires. I already had a passport and friends in France, so it wasn't difficult to escape – nor for the French police to find me and get my father to take me back to Britain.

Interpol was involved, but the incident was treated as a silly teen's emotional escapade– though it certainly shook my parents into better behaviour. I think I remember someone saying 'he's just growing up', which I considered an insult.

Then came the Hungarian Uprising where the brave youth of that communist dominated country were risking all to seize freedom. Or that's how it seemed in the right-wing papers my Dad read.

Who couldn't be stirred by the determination of boys just like me? They needed help; I knew how to clean a 1914 rifle and make a bomb, so I'd be invaluable.

Fortunately my father, having realised he should pay more attention to his offspring, disappeared my passport. He channelled my energies into the Boy Scouts where I was given adventures aplenty and soon became a much-badged troop leader.

And eventually an Australian citizen with no criminal record.

Thank God I'm not growing up today.