You just 'Triggered' a memory there Peter,. . .I shall now proceed to bore you silly with it.
My childhood friend Johhny Porter, who was in my primary school class. . .and I used to hang out together and get up to all sorts of mischief. The street next to ours was due to be demolished, so we nicked as much of the lead, from water pipes that we could, as we had found out that you could melt it quite easily. Then we found some clay from the riverbank down the road, and made sme moulds, by pressing Sherriff badges into the clay, then heating the clay moulds in his, or My Mum's cookers until it went hard. Then we would pull the rubber hose off the boiler gas supply, . . light it with some swan vestas matches, and use the flame to melt some of our stolen lead piping into a steel bowl. . ..
We Poured the molten lead into our home made Sherriff's Star and Marshall badge moulds and made badges which we then sold to school friends for a tanner each.. . .we made nearly three quid doing this. . . three quid in 1956 was a bloody king's ransom. . .but we were caught and stopped by Johnnie's mum. . . the headmaster at the school said that they were the best castings he'd ever seen, but was horrified when we told him how we'd made them. . .another bloody anti-capitalist pig. . . .