AT 7 pm on a Friday a siren would sound out over Crowthorne and Broadmoor – something akin to a cross between a World War Two air raid siren and an old school US police vehicle. It was the siren from Broadmoor prison for the criminally insane which was at the top of the hill on Wellington Road.
Of course we knew it was only a test – no seriously ill criminals had escaped with the intention of scalping you and our family or driving burning stakes through your eye in a long time.
As previously discussed, as young children we would play in the grounds of Wellington College– something that you would now be criminally liable for according to signs I’ve seen. We were just kids, 7 or 8 years old.
One day, in memory it seems to be a dull grey afternoon typical UK mid-summer, we were in the grounds, playing pretend war games- using sticks for rifles – as the war had JUST finished – when we heard the alarm go off. Now the time between the alarm going off and the realisation a prisoner had escaped might have been 15 to 20 minutes. Just long enough for them to get down the hill to the college grounds…… We’d had it drilled into us that if the alarm goes off, you lock yourself indoors and arm yourself with something to fight off the escapee. So, we found some thick bushes to hide behind and clutched our rifles – level of effectiveness- minimal.
It is unclear in memory if the alarm continued to sound but while it did we hid in thick bushes that partially concealed us- for good measure as it happened: Along the path came a deranged looking character in classic white bog-catcher underpants and cross stitched cotton undergarment. he was bearing his own stick of somewhat greater size than ours. We became mice. Quite and frozen as he walked by, his head scanning back and forth like a lighthouse light. Thankfully his gaze did not pierce the bushes and he carried on along the path. We all breathed out and scarpered for home rapidly.
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