STOP, THIEF! A HUE AND CRY OF INTELLECTUALS

AT the end of one of my half-term holidays, Dad had a go at taking the law into his own hands.

He’d dragged me along to the cinema to see an unwatchable French art film — and just as we filed out, a woman across the road screamed: ‘Help! I’ve been mugged!’

When I looked back, Dad had vanished. Then I caught sight of him chasing two very dangerous-looking boys, who were holding the woman’s handbag triumphantly over their heads.

My only thought was: ‘Oh my God, he’s going to get killed!’ So I took off after him — along with a disorderly group of intellectual cinema-goers. When we caught up with Dad, he’d picked up a plastic pallet from the pavement and was waving it over his head.

At the same time, he was shouting abusive lines about how he was going to rip various body parts out of the muggers.

While he was bellowing words like ‘spleen’, ‘oesophagus’ and ‘thyroid’, a small man with tortoiseshell glasses managed to get shoulder-to-shoulder with him. ‘I think we met once at [American literary critic] Susan Sontag’s,’ the man yelled in his ear.

For a split second Dad stopped screeching. ‘That’s interesting,’ he said. ‘Was it in New York or London?’

Then he carried on yelling at the thugs, one of whom had now produced a baseball bat from under his coat. Dropping the pallet, Dad threw up his fists like a boxer and yelled: ‘Come on, then, I’ll have you both!’ I knew this had gone too far, so I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him back while the boys made their escape.

The arty corduroys were patting Dad on the back when he turned around and accused me of being a coward. I was upset.

From my time at Pimlico comprehensive, I was more than familiar with thugs, and acutely aware of what they were capable of. But, for Dad, it was all just as harmless as a scene from one of his plays. If I hadn’t dragged him away, I know those boys would have cracked his head open like a coconut.