The recent unbearable heat wave in England has reminded me of an incident from my childhood during the long hot summer of '76. I was eight years old at the time and our house in Upney, North East London backed on to a tributary of the River Roding; you only had to walk out of the garden gate and onto the top of the back beside the river. It was only about six feet wide but to a child it might as well have been the Amazon, it was so exciting.
One day during the six weeks' summer holiday break from school my brother and I were playing football in the back garden, with an empty Dulux paint tin protecting my father's pride and joy, an apple tree sapling. Woe betide if we had damaged that.
Whilst we were playing we both heard a deep, sonorous rumbling sound, somewhat akin to the noise you hear when a mile or so from a busy motorway. We went out to investigate and the source of the noise quickly became apparent. At the bottom of the bank some eight feet below at the water's edge, there was a large misshapen mound of pieces of comic, twigs etc., around which a swarm of wasps were circulating. It was clear that the hot weather wasn't mollifying their native hostile disposition to potential threats.
We were on the point of going back inside when our next-door neighbour but one appeared on the scene. His name was Jim, a slender jovial chap in his early sixties at the time and he had the reputation of being rather henpecked by his animal loving wife. As a consequence, he seemed to spend a lot of time finding excuses to avoid her. He was also, according to my father, a bit of a know all.
At any rate, Jim stepped into the breech. "You don't need to worry about calling Rentokill," he said to us, "I can get rid of them."
He briefly disappeared inside and reappeared armed with a can of petrol, a box of Swan Vestas and an old rusty shovel, the blade of which seemed to be at angle of about forty-five degrees to the handle. It looked like it had been used to Dig for Victory in 1940. Even to my eight years old eyes I couldn't see how this was going to end on a positive note. I also couldn't quite work out the triage system that he had in mind; perhaps his plan was to pour the petrol on to the nest, set fire to it and then hit the fleeing wasps over the head with the shovel.
The sides of the river bank were very steep from back garden level down to the edge of the stream, perhaps eight feet and the sun had turned the grass into something more akin to pale yellow glass; it was obviously very slippery. Jim advised us to stand well back; we needed no second bidding.
Where many of the people whose gardens backed onto this stream went for walks, a grassless path perhaps a foot wide had been worn into to the top of the bank, and there was a discernible rut formed by countless feet over the years. Jim caught his feet in this rut and dived head first, shovel, petrol can and matches still in hand, straight into the wasps' nest. As I recall it now, the whole sequence of events must have lasted only a few seconds but it seemed like a lot longer at the time. Firstly, there were a series of agonised screams as the hosts made their feelings about the trespasser in to their home quickly evident. Secondly, Jim arose and still screaming began running along the water's edge with the rapidly decomposing nest worn rather coquettishly on the side of his head; paper, twigs and leaves, together with wasps falling around his shoulders as he frantically clawed at the remains with his flailing arms and hands. I am not sure if the angle at which he had chosen to wear it had been chosen for maximum comedic effect or not. Those of you who have seen The Duchess of York's daughters at various Royal Weddings, sporting their jauntily angled fascinators were there years after Jim.Finally, he jumped into the water and began frantically splashing water over his head. At this stage we ran inside to fetch my father.
The man from Rentokill arrived about a half an hour later, a few minutes after the ambulance, transporting a dripping wet and semi-conscious Jim, had departed for Barking Hospital. As I recall, he lit a cigarette and stared mournfully down at the still smouldering wreckage of Jim's finest hour, drew on it then shook his head sadly. "If only the public would leave it to us professionals," he said.
We went to visit Jim in Barking Hospital a couple of days later. Cocooned in bandages, he wouldn't have looked out of place at the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum; apparently, he had received over two hundred stings. We just managed to hear his muffled words through the acres of bandage. "I got rid of those buggers, didn't I?"