I actually grew up in a garden. It was a lovely garden, or at least I thought so. It was full of wonderful glass sculptures and porceline deities and the like - Gods with names like Shires, and Shanks. In the evening, the Setting Sun would cast Golden Lights from the Northern Sky, which would then trickle through the brightly coloured glass sculptures and shed an amber hue on the ragwort and rat's droppings.
It was beautiful.
People would come, and laugh at me playing in the garden, at its lack of decent flowers or anything very much green for that matter. But I loved the garden. And I knew my parents wanted me to appreciate it too, because they insisted I stay outside. I remember one or two times they even wanted me to experience the whole great outdoors feeling, because I had to sleep under the stars a few times. Or storm clouds. Whatever. That doesn't matter.
It was on one of these frequent outdoors trips that I discovered they had left an old Mills bomb grandad had hidden under his bed-clothes for thirty years, out there, just next to the porch. It caught my attention, in an odd,
Apocalypse Now sort of way.
Now I'm not any kind of genius, but I rigged up that old Mills bomb into an ad hoc booby-trap, and left it wired to the cat-flap. The next morning I staggered off to school, thinking nothing more of it. Imagine my horror! Upon arriving home I found all the glass and weeds and porcelaine Gods shattered! Besmirched liberally by bits of Victor Hugo the Cat!
I was never able to enjoy the garden after that. I was gutted.
But obviously not as much as Victor Hugo the Cat.