The Kaliwara Ninjas

The climax of each school year was the Christmas concert, for which rehearsals sometimes began as early as April. In grade two we had done a traditional Nativity play, in which I played the role of a shepherd. The only thing I can remember about it is how itchy and hot I felt in the hessian sack I was required to wear, for reasons just as impossible to fathom now as they were back then.

From grade three onwards, the boys and girls, having passed the threshold of reason and thereby shed their youthful incorruptibility, performed separately, presumably to prevent the kind of prurient, inter-sex fraternisation so beloved of children of that age. In grade three, this meant the boys dressing up as frogs, and serenading the audience, comprised mostly of parents and other relatives, on the multifarious delights attendant on living in a pond, the obvious advantages of hopping over walking as a method of locomotion, reminiscences of life as a tadpole, and our overriding, but repeatedly thwarted, ambition to go-a-wooing (which I understood to mean producing a wooing noise, somewhat like an owl). I imagine the whole thing was utterly, transcendently dire. My dad, at least, appeared to think so.

“Did you like our singing?” I asked him proudly afterwards.

“It was terrible,” he informed me. “Out of tune, out of time, and flat.” (If honesty is, as some would maintain, unequalled among the virtues, my dad was, and remains, a veritable saint.) Then, perhaps realising that by being so brutally frank he ran the risk of upsetting me somewhat, or more likely out of a desire to be perceived as complimenting my mum’s needlework (she being within earshot), he added, “I liked the costumes, though.”

Ah yes, the costumes. In my view too, they were far and away the best thing about the 1964 St Thomas More Primary School Christmas Concert. A muted pea green in colour, they were single piece garments that covered the entire body except for the face and hands (which were suitably coated in matching green grease paint). To me, their use as frog costumes was of distinctly secondary importance to the purpose for which they had obviously been principally created, which was to provide me, to the measureless envy of most of my friends, with a custom-made, entirely authentic-looking ninja outfit.

For several years during the 1960s, imported Japanese TV programmes littered the airwaves. Of these, far and away the most appealing to the average eight or nine year old boy was Shintaro, which featured the adventures of the eponymous hero, a medieval Samurai, as he travelled around the country righting wrongs, the majority of which seemed to be perpetrated by evil ninjas. Helpfully, these ninjas always alerted you to their iniquitous intentions by wearing black. Supporting Shintaro in his quest were a band of honourable, white-robed ninjas, whose primary purpose seemed to be to highlight their master’s near illimitable combative prowess by means of their own, equally supreme, ineptitude.

Even as an eight year old I was fully aware that virtue, or its lack, did not conform to any straightforward colour code, and this was one reason that I was delighted to be breaking new ground by becoming, as far as I was aware, the first ever green ninja – or, to put it another way, the first ever ninja not to wear his morals on his sleeve.

Every ninja worth his or her salt (yes, there were even female ninjas) needs a secret society to which to belong, and it was here that the nascent organisational and creative talents of Michael Allen came to the fore. I have no idea what happened to Michael in later life, but at the age of nine or ten, before the onset of the overtly distasteful misogyny and inflated opinion of self which characterised his early adolescence, he gave every indication of having all the makings of a first rate impresario, stage manager, or even director. The most obvious evidence of this came via the regular concerts which we – he, Richard and I, plus Barbara on occasion – performed for his and Richard’s parents. These concerts, which tended to be loosely constructed hash-megandis of songs, short plays or sketches, and comedy routines, were all arranged and, where necessary, written or composed – with considerable adeptness and imagination – by Michael. He was also the only one of us to display more than a modicum of aptitude for performing, which makes the genial forbearance shown by Eddie and Janet, our regular (and indeed only) audience, all the more commendable.

Michael’s talents were also given full rein in the genesis and development of an organisation which, for a brief time, was the focus of considerable amounts of our energy and attention, the Kaliwara Ninjas. Deriving its name from the local playground and sports fields, membership of this society was open to all kids in our neighbourhood, providing they successfully completed a series of carefully devised ‘trials by ordeal’. The trials, which included things like drinking at one go a special ‘cocktail’ made to Michael’s own secret (and supremely foul-tasting) recipe, and squeezing the stem of a rose bush until blood oozed out between your fingers (my idea), seemed to have the surprising effect of putting off a number of potential initiates, including Charlie Brown and my sister. Aloysius, by contrast, who had an overtly bloodthirsty imagination, would certainly not have been repelled by the initiation tests per se – indeed, he would probably have come up with a few of his own that the rest of us might well have balked at – but the prospect of going home with dirty shoes or hands was simply not to be countenanced. Similarly Colin, as easily the toughest boy of our age in the neighbourhood, would undoubtedly have sailed through the initiation sequence without blinking, but make believe games of this sort were never his cup of tea. Moreover, as his family did not possess a TV set, he probably had no idea what ninjas were.

In the end, our much vaunted secret society comprised just three members: Michael (the Samurai), me (chief ninja), and Richard (honourable dogsbody). One Saturday morning, laden with supplies, weapons (wooden swords, and throwing stars fashioned out of tin lids), plus the sort of boundless, questing, insatiable curiosity and imagination that only childhood can elicit, we embarked on our maiden adventure. In our minds' eyes at least, this would take us far beyond the boundaries of civilisation, and deep into the uncharted chaos, hidden menace, and unprepossessing uncertainty of the region that Michael, in one of his less inspired moments, had christened The Badlands.