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One summer, me (aged 11), my brother (aged 9) and a friend (aged 10) were playing "war" in a field when we happened to come across a box of discarded matches. Three excitable kids and a box of matches get along like... well, a field on fire.
We only meant to light a few "for a laugh". I mean, it was not every day we had pyrotechnic powers at our fingertips. We thought we were playing it safe by setting light to a bunch of dead grass away from the rest of the field, but we didn't anticipate a gust of wind having other ideas.
After about 30 seconds of frantic stomping, it became clear that things were getting out of control. We ran to the nearest row of houses that backed onto the field, some 30-40 metres away, and started hammering on random doors to attract anyone's attention. I guess most people were out that day, because we didn't manage to get hold of someone until we'd knocked on about a dozen doors. The fire brigade were duly summoned, so we returned to the field (with a bunch of curious neighbours) to survey our handiwork.
The fire had spread across a good portion of the field now and a thick column of smoke was rising high into the sky. The fire engine turned up in less than five minutes and about half-a-dozen firemen got to work beating the fire out. Looking back on it now it was probably a lot smaller than it looked and a piece of piss for the firemen to put out, but for us it was a towering inferno of flaming death that we thought was going to raze the entire neighbourhood.
Naturally, the police turned up too. In a desperate attempt to deflect the blame from ourselves, we brazenly told the cops that we'd seen "a bunch of skinheads" running away from the field when we noticed the smoke. It seemed fairly plausible -- at this time (early 1980s), gangs of skinheads would often roam the neighbourhood causing trouble. As luck would have it, within our circle of destruction lay about a dozen beer cans, which seemed to add some credulity to our tale. I don't know if the cops actually believed us, but they eventually left without giving us any hassle.
Later at dinner that night, my mum says something like, "Ooh, did you hear about that field catching fire today?" My brother and I just looked at each other, paralysed with fear, before finally managing to mumble something like, "Er, no!"
Some 20 years later, the only people who know the truth of what happened are myself, my brother and friend.
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