They'll Never Take Me Alive
I'm doing my bit for Â鶹Éç Radio Scotland's Crime Season by sharing a few personal stories, mostly involving run-ins with the law. You see, I've spent my life running from the police. That fact dawned on me today when, in the kind of idle moment I would usually devote to the excavation of ear-wax, I decided to list my various encounters with the 'Boys in Blue'. I now know my destiny lies behind bars, protesting my innocence to an uncaring world. Let's examine the evidence.
My career as a fugitive from injustice started early. Picture a school playground in Easterhouse at seven o'clock on a chilly November evening. I was nine years old and standing outside the entrance to the school hall alongside two friends. We usually loitered as a quartet, but our fourth member was inside the school attending a Boys' Brigade meeting. As a trio we had pooled our imagination and decided that the best way to kill time would be to stand around doing nothing until our friend returned. Yes, we were an inventive bunch.
The trouble started when another group of boys -older than us, taller too and more deranged - arrived in the same location armed with pyrotechnics. They were the kind of headcases who used the safety leaflet inside every box of fireworks as a kind of terrorists' training manual. All you had to do was reverse the logic of the advice. Why leave roman candles to burn, spark and fizz when they could be much more potent propelled through the air like grenades? Light the blue touch-paper and chuck.
The school janitor, a portly man with a head like a gnarly neep, was having none of this, but he was too much of a coward to confront the banger-boys himself. Instead he called the police. The blue and white panda car arrived ten minutes later with the screech of tyres on tarmac, the slamming of doors and the rapid slap-slap of size ten feet running across the playground. It was at this point I decided to run. Don't ask me why. Just the sight of those looming uniforms made me feel guilty. Anyway, I ran and, as I ran, I squeaked my denials into the chill winter night.
"It wisnae me! It wisnae me!"
Of course, as we all know, innocent people don't run from the law. Only the guilty have anything to fear. We also know that the truth will out and justice is blind. Well, maybe it's just Jannies who are blind because when the cops dragged me back to the school's reception office the janitor had no problems in fingering me as one of the firework fiends.
"Aye, he's one of them."
Well I'd love to tell you that I became a cause celebre, that this story continued with an epic court case and that I became the Easterhouse equivalent of the . That's not what happened. Instead my friends rushed up the street to fetch my Mother who hurtled down to the school as fast as her carpet slippers could carry her. Voices were raised, the janitor recanted and my liberty was restored.
But to this day, whenever I hear a police car, I start to run.
