Those were the
criminal days Duncan
Graham
When I was a schoolboy, praying pubic hairs would soon appear
like those I’d seen in the communal cold shower after playing rugby, I became a
terrorist.
Or would have been if the standards of today had been applied.
First I acquired a hand gun.
It was a powerful air pistol. It
may have come through a swap with a friend.
I already had a revolver with no trigger guard that I’d found in an old
air-raid shelter, useless because I couldn’t get the short .32 ammunition it
needed.
But I did have same
calibre slugs for an air rifle which was used to ping squirrels and rabbits;
however no-one knew of the more easily concealed weapon.
One evening I took a friend and the pistol for a wander
around the streets. Keen to show off I took aim at a sparrow in a bush, missed
and shot out a window in the house behind.
We ran home followed by the shouts of a furious woman, but
in those days street lighting was either absent or dim so we got away.
Today the charge sheet would have read: Going armed in public to cause terror,
discharging a firearm in a public place, having an unlicensed weapon, causing
wilful damage to property, endangering life - and probably a few more.
Convictions would have barred me from travel and public
service jobs as I also became a bomber.
Joining the cadet corps was not compulsory ‘but I can’t
remember anyone not volunteering, Graham,’ said the fat red-nosed ex-soldier employed
as the public school’s sergeant major.
His job was to shout a lot, teach us how to bayonet sacks of
straw and strip a Bren gun. Under his
tutelage I learned that violence was evil, though that wasn’t the message he
delivered.
On Saturday afternoons we had to run around parkland and shoot
at the enemy with our Lee Enfields.
Each cadet was issued with ten blank rounds but no-one
counted if all were fired. I kept a few and
bought others from mates. The .303 cartridges had crimped ends which could be
prised open to access the cordite.
When I’d accumulated enough I found a short length of old
waterpipe with one end closed. Following
instructions in a book I … well, I’d better censor the details lest I’m accused
of aiding and abetting criminal behaviour though it’s all on the Internet. All this was done in my father’s tool shed.
He was at work. So
was my mother.
My younger brother and I went to a nearby abandoned quarry
where perverts occasionally came to ask us to masturbate them (something we
never reported because it was too embarrassing) and blew up our pipe bomb.
It sounded like the crack of doom as the explosion bounced
off the chalk walls. The thick-walled
pipe, ripped open from top to bottom like a banana skin, became an impressive
trophy and lifted my peer rating.
Today I’d have been arrested at gunpoint by an anti-terror
squad. My pixelated features would have
made the TV bulletins as the flak-jacketed police pushed me into a car to face a
charge sheet that would have me imprisoned for years.
Instead of going on to write the news, I’d have been on the
news, denounced by shrill editorials headed EVIL IN OUR MIDST, my behaviour
analysed by social scientists, my chances of a good career shredded.
I don’t know why I didn’t make more bombs; maybe I realised
the dangers, but more likely having done another naughty deed, it was time to
try something else.
This meant running away from home to escape my quarrelling
parents, which I achieved easily after sabotaging the telephone.
This time I had no instructions, but science classes had
helped. I unscrewed the base and pulled out a couple of wires. I already had a
passport and friends in France, so it wasn’t difficult to escape – nor for the
French police to find me and get my father to take me back to Britain.
Interpol was involved, but the incident was treated as a silly
teen’s emotional escapade– though it certainly shook my parents into better
behaviour. I think I remember someone
saying ‘he’s just growing up’, which I considered an insult.
Then came the Hungarian Uprising where the brave youth of
that communist dominated country were risking all to seize freedom. Or that’s how it seemed in the right-wing
papers my Dad read.
Who couldn’t be stirred by the determination of boys just
like me? They needed help; I knew how to clean a 1914 rifle and make a bomb, so
I’d be invaluable.
Fortunately my father, having realised he should pay more
attention to his offspring, disappeared my passport. He channelled my energies into the Boy Scouts
where I was given adventures aplenty and soon became a much-badged troop
leader.
And eventually an Australian citizen with no criminal
record.
Thank God I’m not growing up today.
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