I’m out playing with friend, Raymond Trask, while being looked after by my Nan, Daisy Goodland, whose house was 250 yards away, a two minute walk from, nearby, Westfield Crescent just down the road.
We’d been exploring a wild, overgrown environmental area where someone had built a hedgerow den adjacent to Raymond’s home nearby at Westfield Place, Yeovil, until, quite suddenly, our innocent play was interrupted and I find myself cornered and hemmed in, pinned to a tree and threatened with a sharp pointed knife blade an inch from the fleshy space between my chin and my neck.
“Take off your trousers – Take them down … NOW!
A teenager grips my collar with his left hand while pressing the knife blade into my throat.
Me? I have just two thoughts in my mind.
The first is … NO WAY … am I ever going to comply or obey this human being.
The second is a spatially aware self-acknowledgement as I realise the knife against my throat instantly distils my life down to a single frame where time, space and choice appears to be either suspended or beyond my control.
Sure. That’s my mature adult prose accurately reflecting my thoughts at the time but, if it needed translating, Dear reader, it equates to being a little boy trapped in a den in a field offering no means of escape while a guy threatens to intimately assault or harm me while holding a knife to my throat!
So what happened?
I’m not entirely sure.
Based on my own lived account of the horrific potential of the situation, I have only the following words to relate.
One moment, I’m in exactly the same despairing situation that thousands of similar victims of such a scenario may have experienced during their own assault or murder.
The next, as in my fortunate case, time, space and choice reappears – for just a brief split second – when Raymond Trask physically materialises in the middle of the den and, I presume, startles or interrupts my attacker.
In that finite microscopic sliver of time itself, the left hand releases its grip from my collar, the teenager spins around on hearing Raymond utter something or other, (He did. He did engage with the person), and in that moment, taking that singular opportunity to make my own move, I barge past the attacker and Raymond and I both ran back through the field to the road where Raymond headed North and home and I ran East the 250 yards back to Nan at Westfield Crescent where, within what seems like only minutes, I am relating my story in statement form to a police officer or detective.
A disturbed teenager named Antony A with a “history of such assaults” was later arrested and while I don’t and never did dwell on the incident, every now and again, (like right now), I have wondered why I have remembered that name all my life and also what that human being’s police record and ‘form’ looks like 60 years later.
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