I was raised in a house of suspicion and superstition. We knew that the world was out to get us and took every precaution to protect ourselves. The front door of the house had never had a lock but it did have a chair jammed under the brass doorknob of a night. My mother slept with a rolling pin under her pillow and my father a crowbar. Or perhaps it was the other way around?
As children, we had mantras, fractured commandments, drilled into us on a daily basis. I would not have been more than four years of age when one of my uncles schooled me that I should never sign a police statement. My father, a retired boxer, provided me with a handwritten list of survival skills on my first day of school. His guiding principle for a safe life was “hit before you get hit”. He lived by the rule and had the scars to show for the failure of his particular brand of street philosophy.
