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It was a dark and stormy shop, well OK, in truth it wasn’t particularly stormy but it was dark, and also somewhat mysterious. It was a chemist shop and it could be found in Great Yarmouth by those who wanted to and were in the know. It would sell almost anything chemical. I was in my early teens around 1960 and I was rather into chemistry. I had what I told my parents was my ‘chemistry set’, the contents of which terrify, the now slightly more mature me.
I had fuming nitric acid, concentrated hydrochloric and sulphuric acids; I had red phosphorus and yellow phosphorus, potassium and sodium chlorates of course.
I had the more amusing metals: magnesium; sodium; potassium (the last two of which if I remember right had to be kept under oil). You name it and I had it, especially if it was dangerous.
This made me famous or more probably notorious at school as the guy who made things go bang though usually not in the night.
A favourite activity of mine was to make Nitrogen Tri-iodide, an extremely unstable compound that was a high explosive, meaning its decomposition rate broke the sound barrier. Made very simply from ammonia and iodine by filtering out the precipitate, it was safe as long as it was wet but when dry the slightest encouragement would set it off and a very gentle jab would leave ones ears ringing from the other end of a quite long stick.
As I said the chemist would sell pretty much anything, and one time and all at the same timeI I bought iodine crystals, .880 ammonia and even filter papers without even the hint of a raised eyebrow: not since that old joke about the little shop on the corner where, for a mere sixpence, you could buy a big bag of rat poison——and a rat has a commercial transaction been so blatantly ill-advised.
I found that even the most pathetic of explosives could be used interestingly. Did you know that, if you take a test tube filled with sodium chlorate and sugar out into the woods with a few school friends it will whoosh quite nicely for a while, and when your friends start commenting how disappointing it is and as they prepare to leave, if you had (prior to filling it) put a chunk of Sodium wire at the bottom, the heat and water vapour would displace the oil, expose the sodium and there would be a Hell of a big explosion, spreading small shards of glass over a wide area, and you would be grateful that no one had got too close during the 'boring' period.
Then there was Mike and the matchlock. Mike was into engineering, and once took a long metal tube, put a plug at one end drilled a small touchhole, added a stock and had a rather nice looking matchlock. So I made a fine batch of gunpowder for his gun (and let me add that this was indeed a fine batch, one of, if not THE best I ever concocted). We went down to Aldeby marshes to test it on a long straight dike. Loaded it and he aimed it carefully as I acted as spotter. A big bang and I could see the splash of the bullet way down the dike. I turned round to see an ashen faced Mike. Either he had flinched or sensibly moved his head at the right moment, because the plug had just missed him as it, following Newton's third law, had been ejected from the erstwhile gun and presumably gone a similar distance in the opposite direction, though we never did find it.
So far it's all been fun and games, however uppance was a-coming as I mixed a potential solid rocket fuel. I was wearing a protective face shield, but It'd got really grubby, so I wasn't being all THAT foolish when I raised it to gaze down on what I had wrought just as it decided to spontaneously test itself.
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