Soldier Of The Queen Read Online Free PDF

a useless watch. Paul said that I had found it at work and given it to him earlier. The policeman asked where I was and Paul told him. Hence, his dramatic arrival at the sports hall.
    I was completely embarrassed and bewildered when in front of my friends he put my arm behind my back and frogmarched me to his van. He put me in the front seat beside him. As we drove towards the police station he kept asking me where I had got the watch and I kept telling him the truth. He shouted that I was a liar, then slapped me in the mouth with his glove. I felt frightened because I did not know what I had done to justify this treatment. I leant over and grabbed the steering wheel, forcing him to slam on the brakes. The van skidded and struck the kerb before stopping. He hit me a few times while I shouted that I wasn't going to the police station without my mother. Eventually he agreed and drove to my house. He picked up my mother and drove to the station where I was charged with "theft by finding". At court a magistrate gave me another lecture on morality and fined me £35.
    Before I encountered the police I was already hurtling downwards, but far from diverting me to safety, their ludicrous petty-mindedness helped turn my descent into a kamikaze nose-dive. In my adolescent mind all I could see was that the forces of law and order could hound a boy for petty irrelevancies, but could not intervene to prevent a man from nearly killing his wife. Rage and resentment stewed inside me: school was a farce, the law was a farce, life was a farce, but I was not going to take their shit. Unlike my mother, I was going to hit back.
    One evening I was walking home from school with a group of seven others. The school coach stopped at a set of traffic lights. It contained around 50 children who lived in outlying areas. They started making faces at us. We all picked up handfuls of dirt and threw them at the coach as it set off. One
    of us must have picked up a stone in the dirt because the coach's back window suddenly disintegrated. The next day the headmaster gathered together the children who had been on the coach. He gave them each a piece of paper and told them to write down the name of the person they thought had smashed the window: their anonymity would be guaranteed. Almost everyone wrote down my name. On that basis alone I was found guilty and ordered to pay the £100 cost of replacing the window.
    I was enraged: no-one knew, or could have known, who had broken the window. I said I wouldn't pay and walked out of the school. Later that day a truancy officer called and told my father to bring me into school the next day for a meeting with the headmaster. At that meeting I explained that eight boys had thrown dirt at the coach and none of us knew whose handful had contained the stone; surely as we were all in the wrong the cost ought to be divided equally between us? Furthermore, how could most of the children - who were not even looking out of the coach window at the time - know for sure who had thrown the stone? My father told me to be quiet, apologised to the headmaster for my behaviour and said that of course I would pay the full cost. They agreed I would pay so much a week. So for 14 weeks I had to hand over everything I earned from my two jobs. I despised them and I despised their justice, just as I despised the woman who would slide back the hatch at the school office and take my hard-earned money. For the first six weeks she said the same thing: "Oh, you ought to be putting this in the bank, O'Mahoney. Maybe next time you'll think before you act. Do you want a receipt?" Then she would smile sarcastically as she slammed the hatch shut. I could imagine the poisonous bitch going home to her slipper-wearing husband and the two of them laughing at her reports of her witticisms.
    One night I crept into the school grounds and hurled a crate of empty milk bottles through the headmaster's window. Then I sprayed blue paint over the school coach. I was