‘ Brimmo’  –  he was one of the gang leaders and his sort of base was in this builder’s yard just down the bottom of the garden.  We had our Dinky toys and all the rest of it in the yard.  There were several of those little cannons about – they were yacht race cannons really for starting races. They used to take them on their boats and fire them off. They weren’t very big, only about nine inches or a foot long. There was no gun carriage, it didn’t look like a little gun, it was just a brass pipe basically.  It wasn’t a miniature cannon but it made a bang when you fired it.  In those days everybody used to load their own shot gun cartridges, so everybody had shot and wadding, it was in every back garden shed.

 This toad hopped out of the water butt – somebody fired at it with a catapult and missed it.  The suggestion came up that we get this cannon and trig it up, and we’ll get this toad.  We went indoors, got the cannon set up on a couple of bricks with a couple of bricks holding it down, rammed it and all the rest of it, lit the touch hole and all retired round the next pile of bricks.  We were all cowering behind the bricks and  –  nothing.
Everybody said, ‘ Well, what are we going to do then?’
Dicky in the end went out round and kicked it, and it went off.  Of course, it fell off the bricks and he got one of the pellets lodged in his eye. He went home because he only lived in Ommanney Road, and didn’t tell his mum.  The next day at breakfast, she said, ‘What’s wrong with your eye, Nipper?’   And he said, ‘I’ve got something in it.’
I think it was the lead poisoning that caused him to lose his eye rather than the impact. Alec Cokes b 1945