The Good Scout

by Neil Harris

"Men are always wicked at bottom unless they are made good by some compulsion." Niccolo Machiavelli

It is night time and I am in the middle of a field in the North Bucks countryside. My heaving breath comes out like plumes of smoke in the cold and I squint into the darkness. My gang spots a group of shadowy figures hugging the hedgerow and we spring into action, chasing and screaming them into a corner. In the pitch black someone is pinned to the wet ground and a knife blade is held to their neck as we interrogate him.

We are not on Army maneuvers, we are thirteen years old and it is a Thursday night at the Scout Hut. With this kind of savage fare on offer for fifty pence each week, who wouldn’t keep turning up? We didn’t attack each other every Thursday, these were special occasions set aside to test us for something. Something truly disturbing, perhaps? Quite how charging around fields in the dark like cavemen could serve God, Queen and country was less than obvious. This huge exercise across square miles of land was called a ‘wide game.’ I don’t think I ever found out exactly how a wide game worked and this vagueness was what made it so exciting.

“Gather round, boys…..quiet please…for this evening’s wide game, the blue team of scruffy adolescents will take this bucket of water as far as they can into the countryside at night, not worrying about whose land they are on or whether they should be there or not. They will be given an hour to get as far as they can. The Red team of scruffy adolescents will then be set loose to go and get it by any means possible. The first team to bring the bucket back to the breeze block hut on the edge of town would win. There may be bloodshed and tears, but there will be cocoa afterwards.”

In this rough manner, Scouts taught me a lot about life. Sure, there were badges and uniforms, but Scouts taught me about right and wrong. There was scouting precedence in my family, as my oldest brother had tried it once many years before, he complained about the hot chocolate and did not return. You have to admire his decisiveness. I also recall seeing a photo of one of my sisters in a little brownie uniform looking angelic. Now it was my turn to be angelic, by being party to putting a knife to someone’s throat in a field at night.

It is a Thursday night and I have walked a mile across town and up a steep hill with my anorak ready to be zipped up in case I had to hide the fact that I was in a scout uniform. I have fifty pence in my pocket for subs and fifty pence for some chips on the way home. The hut is a large plain rectangular building built from pale breeze blocks. There are no windows. The door is sturdy to deter break-ins and, as you cross the threshold of the double doors, you enter a space rammed to the gills with stuff. There are dozens of orange canoes suspended from the roof beams and flags and crests all around the walls. Barrels and boxes containing all manner of outdoorsy things fill the corners of the room. It is somehow both cold and musty smelling whilst also clean and well maintained. We are summoned together to stand in little rows at the two edges of the hall, to make our pledge and listen to the leader. These little rows represent your six, your division within the wider group. Tonight’s news from Akela is, once again, not good for me. Another smaller boy with a smarter jumper and an angelic smile has been promoted above me. This has become something of a pattern for me. Always a private and never a rank. This is tolerable at eleven, as the knock knee’d phase of Cubs becomes the trousered Scouts, but I am all of fourteen and still stood at the nobody end of line of six. I feel aggrieved once again,

“What have they got that I haven't?” This is the wrong question as it should be “What have they not got that I have?”

The answer is I have a chip on my shoulder and an attitude as a result.

I grudgingly work my way towards some badges, although my heart is not always in it. We go canoeing at Stoke Bruerne Canal and I take to this quite well, picturing the huge biceps I will have. We are to execute the inappropriately named Eskimo Roll that involves purposely tipping the boat over and righting yourself again. I soon revise my thinking about my new found passion when I find out that there is raw sewage in the canal, I find this out by seeing suspended turds in the stagnant water whilst paused half way round.

We learn to orienteer in readiness for a survival week in the Peak District. This is a remarkable experience, as the fog descends on Kinder Plateau and we come close again to a degree of danger that, this time, does not involve knives to throats. Compass reading is an important part of the Scouting experience but more important for me is the setting of my moral compass. Still smarting by being cruelly overlooked in my promotion, on my next visit to the chip shop I pop into the small games arcade which adjoins it. Arcade games are the latest thing and we enjoy firing lasers up into a dark sky to shoot down little spaceships. Tonight is different though, as there, in the lock of the small door which empties the machine of cash, shines a small key. There is no scout badge for proficiency in this kind of dilemma, and, after no more than a few seconds, I put it in my pocket and walk out. The deed is done. The following week sees my friends and I visiting the arcade a little too often, emptying the machine and feeding it back in, one corrupted coin at a time, as we see off all galactic invaders. I figure that at least we are not technically stealing money, or are we? With each visit, my conscience works a little better, until one night I decide I have had enough and I will do the right thing, whatever that might be. After one last illicit session of free galactic fun, I make my way back home across the river stopping at the middle of the bridge over the ford. I look both ways and, in an act less of moral fibre than guilt, I throw the key as far as I can into the fast flowing water. For God, for country, and for the Queen.