Just before his eighth birthday, Daniel’s father tried to kill him. It was a family tradition. Five o’clock one vindictive October morning his father wordlessly ushered him from the sanctuary of his bed and drove him down to the Thames at Kingston.
Daniel sat on the dank towpath sheltering under an umbrella whilst his father, M, inflated an alarmingly ragged dinghy that had been hidden under the morass of ‘kit’ he stored in the rear of the family car.
‘Here we are,’ said M, standing back to admire his efforts, his remaining strands of hair billowing in the icy wind, raindrops strafing his pate.
‘Where are we?’ asked Daniel.
‘I am here,’ M replied, lugging the dinghy awkwardly over and into the water where it landed with a splat. ‘And you,’ he led Daniel over to the dinghy and helped him in, ‘you are in there.’
Daniel took stock for a moment. The dinghy teetered on the jagged waves, taking in an alarming quantity of water. He was dressed in his school uniform – no surprise really, since he spent every waking moment of his childhood in that uniform – it was the middle of winter, and he had no oars.
Daniel looked up at his father tearfully as he was cast out into the deluge by a single prod of M’s favoured forefinger. ‘I have no oars, Dad. The boat’s all leaky.’
‘Far too much emphasis is placed on issues such as aquatic propulsion and buoyancy,’ his father bellowed. ‘Be a man, Daniel.’
But Daniel did not want to be a man. He wanted to experience the kind of life normal children lived – to be pursued by a swarm of killer bees across the veld or sewing up footballs until his fingers bled in a huge windowless factory. Instead, he found himself clinging to the sides of a sinking dinghy, borne along the Thames by a racing current, soaked to the bone, unable to differentiate between river and rain.
He must have swallowed at least half his body weight in water before washing up at the lock, about half a mile downstream. The lock-keeper plucked Daniel out of the maelstrom with his spade-like hands and pumped life back into his stuttering lungs. An ambulance retrieved him and placed him, quivering, into the festering belly of Kingston Hospital where he was studiously neglected. A staff nurse who had discovered him sitting on the floor in a corridor called his father who had only just returned home, presumably to plan his funeral and thus he was repaired and restored, unquestioningly, to the care of M.
Daniel could tell immediately by his face that he had disappointed M yet again. It was not his fault, no one had shown him how to be murdered – it was no wonder that he wasn’t good at it.
The incident hardened Daniel in many ways. His father spoke of further river-based experiences with great enthusiasm and even at this tender age Daniel could see that he intended to try to kill him again. On his eighth birthday Daniel gathered together his few monetary assets and made his first and perhaps wisest investment. The next time M knocked on his bedroom door on a Sunday morning, Daniel emerged already fully dressed and wearing his very own second-hand Royal Navy life vest.