Colin To The Rescue

One day, I was walking back from Elizabeth West Shopping Centre with Colin, when we were approached by two boys, one of whom deliberately collided with me as we tried to skirt past them.

“Hey, watch it!” I protested, whereupon he slowly twisted his face into a sardonic grin, sidled up to me, and with his nose almost touching mine said, “Gunner make me, Pommie?”

He was about the same height as me, or perhaps slightly shorter, but with acres of puppy-fat. Both he and his mate, a gangly, angular-looking boy, who was staring in what he presumably thought was a menacing way at Colin, had crew-cuts. The short, thick-set one pushed me hard in the chest and said, “Why doncha go home, Pommie?”

“That’s just where I was going,” I replied, manifesting a brazenness I certainly did not feel, “at least till you got in the way.”

Clearly my response was not to his liking, for he grabbed the neck of my T-shirt and forced me up against a nearby garden fence. Meanwhile, just out of my line of sight, I heard a scuffle break out between Colin and the other boy.

“Why doncha stay in yer own fuckin’ country where they don’t mind the smell?” hissed my assailant, at which point, to my surprise as much as his, I kneed him in the vitals as hard as I could. Even as I was doing it, I was questioning my own wisdom, but I was determined not to suffer the same indignity as I had at the hands of Stevo’ and his chums. As it happened, fortune was smiling on me that day, for as I wriggled clear in what I fully expected would be a futile attempt to avoid the horrendous beating that lay in store for me, I saw to my surprise that the second of our assailants was already out of commission. He was crouching on the grass verge between the pavement and the road with his hands covering his face. He may have been moaning slightly. A couple of trickles of blood were beginning to ooze out between his fingers. The next thing I knew, Fatso was hurtling past me, and had collided, stomach first, with the garden fence. He barely had time to let out a gasp before Colin had seized him by the neck, somehow forced him down onto all fours, and rammed his face down hard against one of his, Colin’s, own knees, which he had been simultaneously thrusting sharply upwards. Fatso gurgled and whimpered, covering his badly wrecked nose with his hands. Colin flung him disdainfully aside and, turning to me, said, “OK, Shrimp?”

I nodded, feeling out of breath, but exhilarated.

“Let’s scoot then,” he proposed. “I feel a sudden need to wash me mits.”

Needless to say, I was more in awe of Colin than ever after that. I begged him to show me how to defend myself properly, and he agreed. Although I realised that I would not have lasted ten seconds in a serious fight with someone as brutally effective as Colin, I nevertheless managed to master at least the rudiments of ‘fighting dirty’, and this not only bolstered my confidence, it also came in practically useful on more than one future occasion. To my shame, however, I only rarely utilised my new-found skills purely for self-protection, for as the years went by I acquired an arrogance that tended to be fuelled and reinforced by imposing my will on others, either by means of direct acts of violence, or the threat of such. There was something addictively alluring about having direct control over the experiences and destiny of another human being, however briefly. It was much better to be a schoolboy than a caterpillar.