After playing "piggy in the middle" in the garden for about twenty minutes, they had ignored their parents' warnings and had visited the pond, rumoured to have a flooded well in the centre of it. One of them had placed frog spawn in Neil's wellington boots, and Neil had panicked, screaming and crying and slowly backing into the depths of the pond. Desperate to keep him quiet, Tom and Jeff had begun to throw stones in Neil's direction, and they had splashed around him.