Summer Boredom

Even though now in my 70’s, I can still clearly remember the hot summers day during school holidays when 2 small boys were just ever so bored. My pal Richard Daly and myself lived  two doors apart and on that day we were trying to find something to do in his garden that could relieve the boredom. Eventually we found a pile of soot that the chimney sweeper had dumped down the end of the garden. Naturally this would attract any small boy, so we started throwing stones at the soot to see the way it would shoot up in clouds of dust.
This soon lost its appeal and one of us (never could remember which of us) climbed up the high wall at the end of the garden behind which was a large country house with a yard and a line of washing gently blowing in the breeze. Again I do not recall whose idea it was, but it seems we both thought ‘wow what a great target’ and proceeded to role stones in the soot and and fire them at the sparkling white sheets hanging on the line. We did a very nice job of decorating a number of the sheets and to this day, I do not understand how the world didn’t fall down on our heads. It must have been so obvious that this appalling deed came from the houses directly behind, but nobody ever came knocking on our doors so we were never caught out and of course, never told our mothers!!!
There is a footnote to this tale. Many years later when I started working for John Jamesons the distillers, my company eventually merged with the two other distilleries in Ireland and a certain John Ryan who was a director in John Powers and an ex- governor of the Bank of Ireland, became one of the directors of the merged company and he was the gentleman who owned the house behind ours. Guess who also was never told this story!!