John Butleron a vicious introduction to power struggles.
I was 11 when I bought my first lethal weapon. I purchased it for self-defence, and I regret nothing. I was a boy scout. I had to be prepared. Back then scouting was less about woggles and carving wood and more about inflicting pain on others and smoking crafty fags.
Our troop had taken the ferry to Liverpool, the train to Leeds and the bus to Skipton. We were dumped beside a country fair in this no-nonsense Yorkshire town, in the rain. Thirty scouts of various sizes and two addled leaders stood waiting for a farmer to arrive with our transport for the final leg of our journey to scout camp: a horsebox on the back of his truck.
After a while some of us were let off to explore the fair. When they returned, with sphinx-like smiles and objects concealed under their jumpers, others in the troop were set free. When they returned, grinning to themselves with something under their jumpers, I was let off.
I wandered through the fair, searching for something. It couldn't just have been cigarettes; everyone who smoked had stocked up on the ferry. I walked around in growing panic until, finally, I found the cause of those gnomic smiles. There, pitched in the far corner of the fair, was a khaki camouflage tent selling weaponry: machetes, air rifles, knives and ninja stars. For any boy scout this was the bearded lady. I stepped inside.
A withered crone in a headscarf stepped from the recesses, drawing a tattooed arm in front of her, to indicate the glass cases. Peering into one, I fogged the glass with breath, transfixed by the destructive potential of guns and knives and catapults.
"Did any scouts buy stuff here?" I asked.
She replied in a gravelly whisper. "Are you going to be telling on 'em?"
"No. I need to get what they got or else they'll get me with it."
She coughed, smiling. "Fighting fire with fire. They bought a couple of air guns, a bunch of pellets. One boy got a Diablo."
"How much are the air guns?"
"Fifteen."
"The Diablo?
"Ten. Want to hold one?"
Now she sounded decorous and courtly, opening the case with a key on a chain to present a black catapult with arm stabilisers. She looked at me coyly. I was at the edge of power. The Diablo was sexy, but it was out of my price range, so I shook my head and set it on the glass counter, spying beneath it the Diablo's younger sister, the Black Widow. She was cheap and looked evil, an implement that enterprising fast-food vendors could use to transform a rat problem into delicious chicken nuggets.
I palmed over a note and left with a box under my jumper. As the horsebox trundled towards Appletreewick we looked into the whites of each others' eyes, and nobody spoke. It was the height of the cold war.
The leaders hadn't noticed rifle butts and ammunition stowed away in rucksacks, and, although we had heard about the moors murders, we were terrified of each other. We had armed and counterarmed ourselves to the gills, and, in the parlance of wrestling commentators, it was on.
An uneasy peace reigned over the first week of camp. I remember it fondly as the time I first heard Lola by the Kinks. I was taught how to break-dance and spent my money on Scary Monsters by David Bowie, although we had no record player. Many of us wore T-shirts with "Relax" emblazoned across the fronts, and after a long hike we drank Coke in the pub on a Saturday afternoon. Bedenimed rockers held the pool table, and we played space invaders. I remember hitching a ride home in a pick-up truck with a boy who is dead now, and him losing his shoe off the back of it forever.
The honeymoon ended with a fork. Some local girls had infiltrated the camp; they were sitting by the fire when someone decided to make an impression. A guy called David was shot in the back with an air rifle, from all of 10 metres. He jumped up and swung around, howling with pain, and when he saw his attacker smiling he flung his fork at him, embedding it deep in his thigh. The gunman dropped his gun, screaming, and someone tried to remove the fork. David pounced, stealing the rifle and scuttling away to higher ground.
The age of innocence was over. Now everything was scored with the pop of a catapult released or a gun fired, and adolescent screeches. Sweet taxes were imposed on younger scouts - at air-gunpoint - by the older contingent. The Black Widow came out after we had built a rope swing out over the river and, at the apex of my swing, I had been shot in the back of the skull, falling wounded into the river.
I was pretty sure it had been Brian, and he had gone to post a letter. I took the Widow and crept into town, hiding behind a red telephone box across the road from the post office. I waited until he came out. He had his back to me and was clearly unarmed. He started to walk away. I stepped into view, drawing back the moulded rubber sling.
"Brian!" He wouldn't turn around, so I walked up to find his face. He turned away, but I saw he was crying. He wouldn't say what was wrong, but I suspected he was homesick. Two boys had already gone home early, both since the war broke out. We went into the field adjacent to our campsite and shot pellets at the cows. How funny it was to watch them scuttle into the ditch on the far side of the field, lowing in pain. How great it was to have some power.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com