Growing up in the North of England, I think I was about nine years old when a girl of about the same age whom I had never previously met approached me in her parent’s living room and said quite out of the blue in a loud voice,  “I am going to kill you”. I am not making this up. Neither as it turned out was she! Obviously she was unsuccessful. She had been ‘poking’ the coal fire in the living room we were sitting in using a hand held metal ‘poker’ typically used in those long ago days to help keep coal fires burning, not always an easy task. Suddenly she brandished the heavy metallic and red hot poker she had been using above her head lining it up seemingly in order to have it crash down on my head. Her mother who was sitting close to me leaped to her feet, basically rugby tackled her most bizarre and apparently murderous young daughter and in no uncertain terms grabbed the poker from her hands. Speechless she then proceeded to quickly drag her off to an adjacent room and immediately locked her in it! Clearly her mother, fearing the worst (and rightly so as it had turned out) made good and sure her daughter did not kill or even so much as lightly harm me or for that matter conceivably anyone else present and within ‘poker range’. I initially thought that I was witnessing a joke albeit a bad and to say the least rather silly one. I was not. Oy Vey!

My grandfather on my mother’s side of the family had taken me with him on a visit to friends of his presumably thinking that the eight year old me might like to meet a girl of similar age. I was an only child – for the record not recommended. It turned out so was she. I thought then and still do, that the raising of an only child should be illegal. I ultimately elected to raise zero children as in ‘the more things change the more they are the same’. Children need other children close by not just adults – least of all  adults in particular not getting along with each other as unfortunately was the case with my parents. 

No doubt thinking it was the right thing to do, which indeed it was, my grandfather quickly said his goodbyes to his friends and the two of us made a very hasty beeline retreat. I never did hear any more about what might easily have translated into my incipient demise. Who would expect that a young child, least of all a female one, would even think about killing someone with a heavy metal poker let alone apparently willing and seemingly desirous even of carrying it out in broad daylight in front of a number of adults including her mother? Life can at times be strange, dangerous, tenuous and challenging.