Now in a kids life there are many figures of authority, parents, teachers, police, and a series of petty officials and a few others. When I was a lad it was not a few others but was practically every adult apart from a few known nut cases - as we used to refer to them. That is basically because we were taught to respect grown ups. If I was naughty in the town well away from home, say, someone would tell me off. If that someone was Mr. Pegg - the local copper - likely I would get a cuff and then be hauled home for a proper spanking. Otherwise word of my naughtiness would have got back to my folks almost as quickly as I could run home. Same result! So we respected our elders.
If our elders were petty or just officious and full of their own importance, we stopped respecting them. The beach inspector was a person hired by the council to look after council property like the bandstand and shelters on the sea wall. Oh! He did not have to mend them but patrol around and keep an eye on them. He had an attitude that anyone under the age of fifteen that was near them should not be unless accompanied by an adult and would even chase kids out of shelters when it rained! Now he had a bicycle and he knew, through experience, that if he left it to chase young offenders, when he returned it would still be there but in pieces! So we, the young offenders, would do something to cause him to chase us. Remember we were kids. Remember these were the days when kids could play out most of the day. We knew every inch of the town, every dodge, shortcut and very narrow way that it was impossible to drag a bike through. We would have that man chase us for up to half an hour or so at a time before we left him to do whatever he could. Another official was the mens lavatory attendant at the toilets at pavilion gardens. If we used the toilet we would be told not to make a mess and not to splash water. When we had finished he used to inspect the toilet or urinal to make sure we had not splashed or made a mess. Those toilets hat two exits, one into the gardens and another at the foot of steps leading up to the sea wall. The toilets themselves were situated under the sea wall and much of their light came through those gratings that had thick lumps of glass set in them that folk can walk over. If someone, a boy say, jumped up and down on the grating it made quite a noise below. If three or four boys did it then it was deafening in the toilets. So with a minimum of five boys the method was first ensure he was in there on his own then one boy watches each exit while other three take up the jumping. This would bring him out and he would run up steps form gardens or the other steps shouting for us to stop. As he neared the top we would all jump off of the seawall onto soft flower bed that never had any flowers in below, all but one dash into the toilets, turn on all taps leaving plugs in and get out of whichever door the lid who remained outside was shouting was safe. It didn't change him but we thought it fun.
There was another authority. An unsaid authority that was a stranger to grown ups. It didn't have a name but was everywhere where two or more kids gathered. It was the authority that made kids play various games like marbles and conkers together without cheating, it was the authority that named some kids bully and thus an enemy to all except the kids that sucked up to them, it was the authority that set gang territories and decided when there would be a fight for them, it was the authority that set neutrality and no mans land and it was the authority that occasionally made a particular kid an outcast. It wasn't kind or harsh or good or bad or anything else. It just was. It helped the kids make rules to govern themselves.
Now the town I lived in had a canal up one side of it and both the canal and the town was cut in half by the main road. When the canal had been dug the earth had been piled into a bank on the town side of the canal and two magazines built in halfway along each bank. They used to have AA and machine gun emplacements on top as the canal was used as a means to get ammo to the big gun emplacements at the end of the canal watching over the Thames estuary. Kids law said that each length of canal bank belonged to the kids who lived in the town on the same side of the road. Kids law said that the old empty and bricked up magazine that had been set in to the embankment but had a 12 foot drop in the side where the doors used to be, were forts to be defended. So, at some unstated but strangely known to all day, in the afternoon, 20 or so kids would attempt to get 20 or so other kids off of their fort. This was done with a lot of stick clashing and grappling and occasional punch up (but that was usually the girls). Funny thing, boys only ever fought the boys and girls only ever fought other girls. I don't think anyone fell off during these fights nor did anyone fall into the canal. You see there was an authority which made us take care not to seriously hurt each other by pushing the enemy off of a 12 foot drop or into a seriously dangerous canal. We didn't think about it. We just knew.