When I was ten my parents lived in a small modern house at the end of a terrace. My bedroom was really a box-room built above the stairs and so about a third of the floor area was occupied by a metre high platform that was actually the ceiling of the staircase below. Before the box-room became a bedroom my Dad had built his gun cupboard in the corner of the room above this platform.
I was ten, the cupboard contained guns. I don’t remember how long it took me to figure out a way of opening it but I was pretty pleased with myself when I finally did. There was a bolt-action .303 rifle in there and a semi-automatic pistol wrapped in a cloth. I knew how to work the rifle but the pistol was a seductive enigma. The safety catch was pretty obvious but I couldn’t figure out how to determine whether or not it was loaded. I didn’t know how to take the magazine out and I wasn’t really strong enough to pull back the slide and see if the chamber was empty. Also, although I was irresistibly drawn to it I was actually quite scared of that gun.
One day I was sitting on my bed fiddling with the pistol, wondering how to find out if it was loaded without actually firing it, when I noticed that I could slightly push in the knurled button on the front of the gun below the muzzle. I was holding the pistol between my knees with the barrel pointing straight at me and when I looked closely I could see that if I pushed the button in with my thumb it could be turned. I pushed it harder and suddenly there was a terrific crack and a terrible pain in my forehead. I fell backwards onto the floor.
I wasn’t dead. I felt my forehead and there was a sort of dent but no blood. I was very confused but when I looked at the gun I realised what had happened. There was a very powerful and oily spring behind the knurled button and it was now lying on the floor. It was the button itself that had hit me, not a bullet. Later on, when I looked in the mirror, I discovered that the button had made a very clear impression in the centre of my forehead. I was delighted and relieved to have survived, but terrified as it dawned on me that I had to find a way of getting that spring back into the gun and hiding the tell-tale injury when I went downstairs for tea.
I’m afraid that I can’t remember now how I accomplished either of those things but at the time I believed that I had got away with it. However, now that I’m a parent myself I realise that there are a great many things your children think you don’t know that you actually do, so maybe my parents decided not to do anything because they thought I had learned my lesson. I’m sorry to say that I hadn’t.
Note: The pistol in the picture above is the only one I could find with the view I wanted but it is of an American gun made by Union Switch & Signal. I think that my Dad’s gun was a rather lovely Star Model A Super pistol, made in Spain.