Growing up on a sprawling council estate on the fringe of Manchester could have been a dismal start to life, penned in by concrete and social problems. But beyond the Liverpool-to-Manchester railway line, through the Three Arches tunnels, lay Chat Moss.

The Moss was once a treacherous peat bog, where many an unwary traveller and, legend has it, an entire Roman legion, disappeared, never to be seen again, in mist-shrouded days of yore. The bogland was drained in the 19th century to facilitate the building of the railway and to provide valuable farmland to feed the burgeoning population of the world’s first industrial city. As a result, the Moss was the playground of the kids from our estate, who would emerge—like those kids who went through the Wardrobe—from the damp, dark tunnels of the Arches into a veritable Narnia of fields, streams, ditches, and riverside slopes.

We were all Tarzan on the rope swings, John Wayne as we tempted the horses into a spot of bareback riding, or war heroes taking on the Nazis who lurked in the ferns and long grass. You never stayed on the Moss too late, as the older kids would terrify us with stories of ghostly legionnaires, deadly quicksand, crocodiles that had forsaken the rivers of Africa to take up residence in those murky ditches, and the very real threat of the formidable Farmer Jeffs and his shotgun.

One day in the long, hazy summer holidays, my brother Pete, five years older than me, was told he had to keep an eye on me as mum was heading into Manchester on a shopping expedition. That meant the eight-year-old me, snot-nosed and snake-belted, tagging along with reluctant Pete and his 13-year-old friends as they went on the Moss in search of adventure and derring-do.

We headed for the “Grand Canyon,” a ditch that had one low bank and one high, with the latter getting progressively higher as you walked along it. The challenge was to start at the “easy” end and jump from the high bank to the low and gradually work your way along the ditch, each leap higher and more difficult than the last. The boldest, or daftest, kids would reach the end, risking life and limb to take the biggest leap of all.

After an hour of this fraught fun, Pete and his pals decided to head back to the estate to stock up on penny Arrow bars and frozen ice pops, but I decided one last display of bravado was necessary to impress the older kids. Climbing into the cleft of a small tree that sat atop the higher bank, I shouted to the retreating group, “Watch this, then!” Waiting until they had all turned around, I took my courage in both hands and threw myself into the void.

Then it all went wrong. My welly boot, and the foot inside, had wedged into the tree cleft, so instead of gracefully soaring, landing, and rolling on the far bank, I swiveled, still stuck in the boot until I reached a downward angle, at which point I slid neatly out of the welly and hurtled head-first into the black water. I emerged, spluttering and draped in duckweed and filth, to my audience who went from wild-eyed, open-mouthed incredulity to hearty applause and cheers for my death-defying dive.

None of them had noticed the offending welly-bob, still wedged at a jaunty angle in the tree, and thought my plunge was both intentional and of Olympic quality. So, naturally, I took a bow and gratefully accepted the back slaps and sweets. To this day, they don’t know that my prodigious feat was a clumsy accident.

Life lesson learned: think before you leap, and if it still goes wrong, just style it out.

‍