I was ten years old, living in southeast England in 1982. Unemployment in the United Kingdom had recently passed the 3 million mark for the first time in the nation’s history. Two months after this unwelcome high tide, Margaret Thatcher announced that the UK was going to war with Argentina over ownership of the Falkland Islands. (I wouldn’t say these are incontrovertibly related facts, but they are conveniently adjacent.)
Half of the country was thirsting for blood. The largest newspaper in the country, The Sun, sold T-shirts promising that proceeds would go toward a Sidewinder missile. And when the Argentine warship General Belgrano was sunk by a British submarine, leading to 323 deaths, the same Sun newspaper ran the exultant headline, “Gotcha!”
Boys in my schoolyard cheered. We ran around in packs miming machine guns, our forearms shaking as we pretended to spray bullets into enemies eight thousand miles away.
***
I was a young-looking ten, small for my age, anemic, prone to random nosebleeds, and I was also naive, even for ten years old. For example, I believed that our family lived in an impressive house—we didn’t at all, it was a tiny terraced home with a front door ten yards from a cemetery that my bedroom window surveyed; the house also backed onto a swath of wasteland where, under cover of darkness, locals would dump their scrap metal and garbage. This wasteland was where I played after school with other children from the neighborhood. Our toys included plastic machine guns that made rat-a-tat-tat sounds, wooden swords and metal cap guns.
But the imagined-grandeur of my home was not my only blind spot. I also truly believed I was being raised in the bosom of the happiest family on earth. I would come to re-evaulate this belief three years later when my dad left us for the woman with whom he’d long been having an affair. He would soon become father to another son.
But perhaps most ridiculously of all, trustingly and unwaveringly, I believed that my next-door neighbor Simon and I were absolutely the best of friends.But perhaps most ridiculously of all, trustingly and unwaveringly, I believed that my next-door neighbor Simon* and I were absolutely the best of friends. (It would transpire that we were, perhaps, just conveniently adjacent.)
Simon was thirteen years old, big for thirteen, stronger than me, fiercer than anyone I knew and with a meaty willfulness. Somehow I fell utterly under his spell. He offered to teach me to fish and I felt honored. We went to a store to buy lead weights, but when Simon saw a slingshot for sale he decided to blow all our money on that instead. Plans to educate me in the ways of the rod were abandoned, and instead of a day by the river, we returned to the wasteland, our wasteland, where Simon and I had built a fort from twigs, scrap metal and a rotting fence. Simon wanted to try out the slingshot and thought we could also test the vulnerability of our fort at the same time—kill two birds with one stone, ha! He fetched a bag of marbles and told me to defend our fort from his missile attack. I huddled behind the rotting fence.
The fort withstood bombardment admirably, missiles disappearing into scrubby ramparts, pinging from the structure’s metal flanks or thudding impotently into the fence. But then one of the marbles somehow arrowed through the narrow gap between two fence pickets hitting me right between the eyes, hard enough to knock me from my haunches, flat onto my back. A marble-sized lump formed immediately on the bridge of my nose. An inch either side and I imagine I might have been blinded.
I don’t remember how much concern Simon showed for my injury. I was shocked and dazed. But this had been only an accident. And despite the now-apparent danger, Simon was happy to swap roles, for me to attack with the slingshot while he hid inside our resilient fort. I declined his invitation. I needed to go inside and lie down for a while.
But accidents happen, right? And this mishap wasn’t going to stop me from playing with Simon. Honestly, once I recovered from the shock, I think I believed it was pretty cool we now owned a slingshot capable of knocking a ten-year-old boy from his feet.
We decided to build more defenses, digging small holes around the fort’s perimeter. We lined the holes with plastic bags, poured in water and then covered the holes with grass and twigs. I’m not sure what kind of a fortress attacker we had in mind. The kind of foe who abandons his plans or surrenders at the first sign of a damp ankle.
These imagined attackers continued to inspire us. Simon decided we needed more weapons. Having run out of money, we thought to build one of our own. We found the perfect-length piece of bamboo cane and an old, rusty nail. The cane was light, so into its hollow ends we pushed stones, feeling carefully for the right balance and weight. We pushed the head of the nail in after the stones and then used a lot of string to hold the nail fast to the shaft. We wanted to be sure that the nail would embed. After an hour or so the spear, this spear we had built together, was ready.
Simon looked down at me. And then, quietly but firmly, said to me, “Run!”
Simon looked down at me. And then, quietly but firmly, said to me, “Run!”I wasn’t sure what he meant. I squinted up at him as if trying to take a peek at the sun.
“Run!” he said, louder this time.
And I ran. I ran as fast as I could, all of my uncertainty suddenly stripped from me.
I knew Simon had thrown the spear because I could hear it knuckling through the air, a sound somewhere between a ripple and a whistle.
And thunk! The spear hit me, sinking its nose into my calf, digging in far enough that it remained embedded in my leg for seven or eight paces as I slowed, before finally coming free.
And what did I do, naive, ten-year-old me? I turned around, picked up the spear and returned our weapon to Simon, as if I were a bird dog offering my master his prize.
Blood was running into my shoe from the hole in my calf. Simon, holding the spear, looked immensely proud. I returned home to wash the wound and dress it with Elastoplast. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened for decades.
***
Was I the victim of a crime? I suppose, technically, yes. And should I have told my parents what happened? Probably. Although I might also add that, in the early Eighties, and in the neighborhood in which I grew up, if you returned home with a black eye, say, parents would ask, “What the hell did you do wrong to provoke this?”
I never saw Simon again. He went on a long summer vacation and before he returned our family moved to a different part of town. (A slightly more impressive home and with no wasteland at its fringes.)
In the three-plus decades since, I haven’t spent an inordinate amount of time thinking over the spear incident. I recall it now and then, feeling not so much a victim as a fool.
Was I the victim of a crime? I suppose, technically, yes. And should I have told my parents what happened? Probably.But the memory must have marinated in my subconscious for thirty years. After my first novel was published I started looking for ideas for a second. The spear incident came to me and I hastily wrote a short story—it seemed too slight a tale for a full novel. But then something occurred to me. What if throwing a spear at a supposed friend was only the first violent act of a fictional teenage boy? What if that boy went on to do something much, much worse? What if that boy tied a girl to a tree and started shooting her with a Red Ryder BB gun? Why would he do that?
I started writing what would become my second novel, Grist Mill Road, including the spear incident, recounting it almost exactly as it happened to me. The novel started to grow, picking up speed and sprouting a life of its own.
Writing it all down, I began wondering what had happened to Simon. I tried to find him on the Internet.
It wasn’t that I wanted an apology. I simply wondered how Simon remembered the incident, how he felt about it and how he turned out in life. Did Simon become a violent criminal—or the CEO of a successful company, perhaps? But, digitally-speaking, 1982 was a whole world away. I found nothing.
And perhaps that’s for the best. My summer of 1982 can be left alone now, once an embarrassment to me, later inspiration for a novel.
On 14 June 1982, Argentine forces surrendered to the British in the Falkland Islands. Margaret Thatcher would go on to win the next two UK elections (’83 and ’87) despite presiding over the period of numerically greatest unemployment in British history. Grist Mill Road sold well.
*Not my next-door neighbor’s real name
