Learning From a Broom Handle.

When I was around ten or eleven my parents knew a husband and wife who kept a pub, and one night they agreed to serve behind the bar to enable their friends to go out for the evening. These friends had a son who was the same age as me, and they left him behind because they knew that I’d provide him with company for a few hours.

At first he was friendly and personable, but then he underwent a total change and became – for want of a better expression – a maniac. He picked up a broom handle and began hitting me with it quite viciously. Well, I was a strong lad and eventually I wrestled it off him, at which point he became calm again, apologised, and asked for his broom handle back.

You have to understand at this point that I had always been a naturally trusting person. It was a fundamental part of my nature, so I gave him the broom handle. Within seconds he turned into a lunatic again and repeated the assault. I wrestled it off him a second time, and again he apologised, and again I gave the weapon back to him.

Now, you might find it hard to believe that this happened four times before I was reluctantly forced to conclude that this strange creature’s apparent contrition was a duplicitous ruse. My trusting nature was so deeply ingrained that I hadn’t been able to see beyond it. Eventually I did, and after the fourth betrayal I kept possession of the broom handle until his parents returned and we went home. That was the point in my life when a gaping hole was rent in my wall of trust.

But this remains one of my conflicts to this day. My first inclination is still to trust people – to believe that they will do what they say they will do, even though I know that no one is 100% trustworthy, not even me. And many times since that night I have been reminded that the hole in the wall has a right to be there.

But it can cause difficulties because it has a tendency to encourage the onset of suspicion in inappropriate circumstances. When somebody asks ‘don’t you trust me, or something?’ it doesn’t help much to reply ‘of course I don’t trust you. I don’t trust anybody. A broom handle taught me that when I was eleven.’ The warm water in which association bathes can suddenly turn cold.

And yet mistrust still has to be allowed its place, simply to counterbalance the innate tendency to trust too easily. And as with all psychological difficulties, there’s an element of reflection involved, realisation of which is of no help whatsoever. In the end it all comes down to accepting the fact of being different, and making the best of a life among strangers.