The Bare Bum Gang and the Football Face-Off by Anthony McGowan Page B

with all my might. It whistled in, and the few people still there cheered loudly. One of them was Mrs Cake, who’d put Trixie back on her lead. She walked over to us.
    â€˜I’ve got something for you boys.’
    We didn’t know what it was going to be.Perhaps she was going to set Trixie on us, now she’d got her breath back from chasing Dockery halfway to London.

    â€˜I was going to share them with your friends, but as they’ve run away, you might as well have them all to yourselves.’
    And then she gave us a huge bag of mixed sweets, with chocolates, chews, fruit pastilles, jelly sweets,
everything
. It was almost as much as we’d had in our stash.
    I made everyone say thank you properly, and then she went back to her bungalow, dragging Trixie with her. It turned out that Mrs Cake wasn’t such an old witch after all, unless she’d poisoned the sweets or sucked all the goodness out of them, but that was a chance I was prepared to take.
    â€˜OK, you lot, back to the den,’ I said. ‘We can eat half of these, and put the rest in the shoe box ready for the next emergency. The Gang is saved.’
    â€˜What about me?’ said Jennifer as we began the walk to the woods.
    â€˜You, Jenny? Well, you’re one of us now. One of the Bare Bum Gang. It began as an insult, but now I think we should sing it out loud.’
    And we all did.
    â€˜
Watch out, people, here we come
,
    We are the Gang with the big bare bum
.
    Ring that bell, clang clang clang
,
    That’s why we’re called the Bare Bum Gang
.
    We’re like something off the telly
,
    We’re all bare and we’re all smelly!
’

Supplementary material, chiefly concerning the manufacture of fart bombs, and the making of traps. And also dens.
Making a Smarties-tube Fart Bomb
    The hardest part of making a Smarties-tube fart bomb is getting the farts in the first place. There are two main ways of doing this. The first is just to wait around until one comes along. Although this can be boring, you have to remain alert at all times in case you miss it. While you are waiting for one to come, you could do something else as well.
    I suggest the following:
    Make a model aeroplane. Although the Spitfire is the best ever fighter aircraft, you might decide that a Hurricane is better when waiting for a fart, as a Hurricane is also a kind of mighty wind.
    Throw stones – but not at other children, or animals, except for ones that are attacking you – for example, bears, leopards, giant eagles or octopuses. Aim instead at things that don’t have feelings, like trees, puddles and girls. Only joking. DO NOT THROW STONES AT GIRLS – they’ll tell on you and you won’t be allowed to watch
Dr Who
If you don’t want to just wait for a fart to arrive, you can force it to come by eating special food. As is known by everyone, beans are best for this. Any type of bean will do, except for Mexican jumping beans, which aren’t technically a bean at all, but a type of worm. Don’t waste your money on fart sweets from joke shops because I’ve tried them and they don’t work.
    The next most difficult thing is getting the fart into the Smarties tube. Some people think this is best done in the bath, where you simply put the tube over the bubbles. However, a more scientific answer is to use some proper equipment. I have designed a fart-catching apparatus, which I can now reveal.

    Once you have loaded the tube, you next make the trap. Dig a hole in the ground. You can use sharp sticks for that, or borrow a spade. Not a toy spade like you use on the beach, because that will probably break, and then you’ll have to hide it and pretend you didn’t know what happened to it when you next go to the seaside. Put the tubes in the hole. Put some twigs over the hole and then some grass over the twigs. It is now invisible, and all you have to do is wait for someone to set it off.
    This is what