A teenage boy last week was stabbed to death close to where we live here in south-east London. He was reported as saying, ‘I’m 15, don’t let me die,’ to the struggling brave 43-year-old woman attempting to make a tourniquet out of a bed sheet. The young stranger in the pool of blood had been set upon by a group from a car.
When I was 15 I was more worried about love bites. In London, the number of recorded knife or ‘sharp instrument’ offences jumped in 2023/24 to 15,016, compared with 12,786 the previous year, which means it more than doubled in five years. Mail order zombie knives are usually to blame and junior machismo seems measured in blades these days. Unbelievably, due to an obstructive loophole, they were only made illegal last week.
My paternal Danish grandfather was from Northern Jutland. The one possession of his I carried was a small fruit knife. Few things I loved more than slicing apples beaded with rain. It was my way of being close to someone I never knew. One day, due to fly north to Aberdeen out of Stansted airport, I was halfway through security when I realised I still had the knife in my pocket. In minutes, it was confiscated from me. I was given a card and form and link, which since proved invalid. Despite repeated efforts, no one at the airport seems to know the whereabouts of my grandfather’s fruit knife. It was like our family hands had been successfully clenched across a roaring North Sea until one day the grip just relaxed and no longer held. Such, I suppose, are our excisions from the past.
The view south from our flat is long. I see wide and uneven clouds. Striking sunlight. Slanting rain. The occasional aircraft, or helicopter, glinting like a blade in the sky. The view stretches all the way to Biggin Hill. In World War One, German Zeppelin and Gotha bombers were targeted from there. In World War Two, with the city on a knife’s edge, German V-1s were monitored and attacked. The V-1 was known as the doodlebug or buzz bomb. It was an early German Wehrmacht cruise missile fired from the Dutch and French coastline. 9,521 were sent over in total. The very first would have been met with the same restiveness that presumably greeted last week’s first ever Qader 1 ballistic missile fired by Hezbollah towards Mossad’s headquarters near Tel Aviv at the same time as countless targeted strikes in the opposite direction. During the Battle of Britain, the skies over Biggin Hill were abuzz with Spitfires. Today, it is mostly private and business jets landing and taking off—taking off mostly, if a well informed contact is to be believed. ‘There is a huge drain of smart, successful people and money out of the country as never seen before,’ he keeps telling me, leaving me to wonder if their fruit knives are confiscated.
Of course, knives and daggers and swords have been favoured the world over for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians preferred the hooked khopesh. The inward curving kukri was—and is—the chosen tool and weapon in Nepal, not to mention standard issue for the British Army’s Brigade of Ghurkas. The falcata—curved and two-foot-long—was favoured by the Celtiberian fighters of ancient Spain. The Vikings had super-strong Ulfberht swords made of high-carbon crucible steel. (The fruit knives only coming later.) The bolo knife in the Philippines harvested crops before it became a machete-like death-blade for native guerillas. Everyone knows the image of the shining katana of the lone Japanese swordsman. The US of course had ‘Bowies’—so named after frontiersman Jim Bowie’s famed butcher-knife-fight near Natchez in Mississippi.
Why do they all have to be so violent? In Afghanistan, over 40 years ago, I had an old-fashioned Huntsman Swiss Army Pocket Knife. (No compact anti-tank rocket launcher for me.) I also had a Super-8 camera, a Walkman recorder, and small collection of pens and notebooks. My only use of the knife—during what little downtime I had—was to shave the occasional stick and cut patterns into the bark. This relaxed me, like the older commander’s worry beads relaxed him, and it helped take my mind off the deadly assault rifles, RPG-22s and DShKs. In North Wales, years later, visiting my parents-in-law in the gorgeous foothills of Snowdonia, I would still collect one of two sticks from time to time and peel off the bark and cut abstract patterns into the sticks. I also had paint in Wales, which was why the finished product looked more faux Native American than North Walian. Thinking of it now, in Afghanistan each customised stick was given a lethal tip. Did this concern the Afghans? Did they confiscate them? They did not.
CC O’Hanlon once listed in a brilliant short piece of his called ‘Shallows’ that he had ‘a stainless steel folding knife with shackle key and marlin spike’. As it happens, he and his wife Given are back on the North African coast and living on board their beloved boat Wrack. ‘The sheltered waters of the marina are windless, unruffled,’ CC posts at 4.30am: ‘In my bunk, in the (semi-)dark, it feels as if the boat is adrift in deep space.’ I was reminded of sailing into Tangiers by ferry after a long night with two Danes in Andalusia. I was 21 at the time and had just hitched a fourth time across Europe. (Normally this was to Italy.) CC also posted: ‘Our already meagre rations are reduced to a banana, half an avocado, and a fig each a day, and a couple of litres of water.’ They are cutting it thin, I was thinking. Which I could relate to. ‘Wake at sunrise to a single, plaintive note of a ship’s horn and this pale amber light between an empty sky and mirror-still waters,’ CC posts, his language always tight and poetic. @ccohanlon is very much someone to follow. Right now, he and Given need to repair Wrack as she is taking on water. ‘We’re canvassing boatyards for quotes to lift Wrack out of the water. We want to keep her ‘on the hard’ for a few months for essential maintenance. The problem is, where would we live?’
At the end of last week, the UK’s youngest ever knife murderers learned they could be free by the time they turn 20. This was on Friday when they were jailed for life but with a minimum of eight years and six months. They were only 12 when they stabbed 19 year old Shawn Seesahai through the heart. The blade was just under 17in (42.5cm) and the knife bought from an unnamed ‘friend of a friend’ for £40. Actor Idris Elba earlier this year accused politicians of failing to give knife crime the focus it deserves. London mayor Sadiq Khan is often blamed on social media. Knife crime in London is three times greater than in Greater Manchester or the West Midlands, and it is still far too early to judge the new legislation. There are also all sorts of platitudes we like to say about youth. We all know the George Bernard Shaw quote about it being wasted on the young. Edmund Burke said the arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth. Youth has no age, chipped in Picasso. But none of this, I am afraid, cuts like a knife.
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