Page 216 - It's a Rum Life Book 3 "Ivy House Tales 1970 to 1984"

gas pipe with a knife, leaving the gas turned on of course and leave a cryptic note.
If this did not work then the equipment was either confiscated or dumped in the nearest
land drain.
Now, they would begin to take notice!
To try and find a banger in those really big fields needed help and perhaps a land rover.
To locate the banger, one needed to home in on the noise and gradually pinpoint the exact
location. Without some wheels in a field of 100 acres you could wear yourself out on foot
and still never find the thing.
Those bangers set up by the unpleasant farmers would be going off every 10 minutes or
so, this would help to locate them within an hour.

Once they were found and dismembered, you could just visualise the faces of all those folk
lying in their beds trying to sleep, relief at last. We were doing the community a service, of
that there was no doubt.
Over the years we lived in New Bolingbroke, the “phantom crow scarer stoppers” were
forced to venture near and far but seldom in the same field twice!
Even after we moved to Great Steeping there were nights when absent landowners tried to
force their unpleasant and unfriendly farming methods on unsuspecting neighbours. After
a visit from the “phantom” they never tried it a second time.

THE WORST ONE

Finally, I must tell you about the most difficult one ever, while we were living at New
Bolingbroke. I was tracking it on a bicycle across country.
On roads at first, but then I had to take to the fields and between the fields were dykes and
land drains large and small. I must have been about 31 or 32 years of age at the time and
very fit.
I needed to be on this night, the number of times I had to back- track to get round long
lengths of water was becoming very irritating. I could still not see the offending machine
but it was getting nearer or rather I was getting nearer to it!

Eventually I found it, right on the boundary of a large field about two miles from home. By
this time, I was really annoyed with the infernal thing, I cut the hose into little pieces
leaving them on the ground, hefted the gas machine into the land drain where it
immediately disappeared in about 15 feet of water. The gas cylinder felt fairly full so I
thought I should have some compensation for my two hours or so of effort.

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