Bubblehammerblog

When I hear the phrase ‘I’m not a violent person...’, I often fail to restrain myself from saying, ‘Yes you are, you fucking deluded fool, you’re as violent as me and everyone else’. It’s almost universal among the English middle classes to fraudulently disavow their own human propensity to violence. This explains why their ritual displays of niceness grate so much on the rest of us.

The ethics of personal violence are not straightforward. A few days ago one of Snorri’s teachers took me aside to tell me that he’d received a red card for punching another boy in the tummy. Snorri was at our feet, arranging some coloured wooden blocks on a shelf. The teacher was expecting me to say something to Snorri to make him feel ashamed, but I was reluctant since she hadn’t elaborated on the details of the incident. I mumbled something that sounded disapproving, while Snorri looked up at me, struggling to dissemble the appropriately solemn look on his face.

On our way out of the classroom I asked him why he’d punched the lad. ‘He snatched a book off me’, he said.

‘You can’t go brawling in the classroom, Snorri’, I told him sternly, 'getting yourself into trouble for no good reason. Upsetting everybody.’

You see how morality is often cobbled together on the hoof? Later I told him a partly true anecdote from my own boyhood.

I came home from school bawling because a lad called Cooky had beat me up for nothing, punched me in the face and bust my lip. Blood all over the place. My Old Feller said, ‘Stop blubbering, turn round and go back and find that Cooky and give him what he’s given you. And
don’t come back till you’ve done it.’

It was easy enought to find Cooky (David Cook), he lived just up our street. I saw through the window that he was sitting at the table having his tea with his three older brothers when I knocked at Cooky’s kitchen door. When he opened it I took a swing and it landed right on his lughole. Douf.

Then Cooky and his brothers punched and kicked me up and down their passageway for twenty minutes. When I got home I sneaked past the Old Feller and straight upstairs to my room.

A bit later he shouted up the stairs, ‘Turn out alright then, lad?’

‘Oh aye’, I shouted back, whincing from the pain in my ribs, ‘Smashin.’

Speaking of violence, formerly boys were expected to carry knives. Lads in the various youth militias, like the royalist Boy Scouts, carried 8 inch bladed sheath knives openly on their belts. Our local butcher’s lad, an amiable giant and simpleton, always had a two foot jungle machete hanging from his belt, even when making meat deliveries on his bike. I had a First World War British Army issue jack knife, with a thick 4 inch blade and a big spike for taking stones out of horse’s hooves.

The blades that the Glasgow razor gangs used to slash people’s faces could be bought at the better class of barbers, and the flick knives Teddy Boys stabbed each other with were sold as souvenirs of Bridlington.

Stabbings were rare because it was considered cowardly to fight with a knife. At the pictures it was always the one with the black stubble who pulled the knife, got booed, and lost. Fists, swords, and guns were suitable means to dispatch an enemy, but not stabbing with a knife. Knives were associated with foreigners, usually from southern or eastern Europe, and particularly with Arabs, who after lying to you and robbing you were liable to sneak up behind you and stab you in the back.

In a fair fight situation, if a combatant brings out a knife his adversary can without loss of face put up his hands, turn away, and refuse to continue the fight. Any spectators are expected to boo, or in some other way express their disapproval of the knife puller; and if the latter subsequently attempts a lunge at his opponent’s back, restrain and disarm him. All this would bring great dishonour to the one who pulled the knife.

Some months after the David Cook incident I waited for him as he made his way home from school, concealed, at the end of a gennel. When he turned the corner into the gennel I smashed a housebrick into the side of his face.

I don’t usually have much to say about Christopher Hitchens, other than that I used to flog Worker’s Fist outside Belsize Park tube station with his brother, but this is worth reading HERE

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