PINS - Rule Forty-eight: Panic

(He left his man-bag on the roof of the car and drove off!)

We’ve covered morale in previous posts of PINS, but what of outright panic? Units could miss the bus in a recurring dream and get left behind in a town they hate, or have to get away from some lads standing by a fire in a street chucking bricks, or have no money for food or the rent. Some long standing members of units could imbue panic in others by reminding them, on a family trip to a famous cave in Derbyshire, that some of their family were once buried alive in a mining disaster, or, during a visit to a motorway service station, had to spend time in a Bolton police station when they reported their lost man-bag. PINS details some instances of panic below, and has a number of solutions for such scenarios.

Cover the bed in drawings of the True Cross. That will mean the malignant old man won’t come out of the wardrobe again and grip your legs. His hands are colder than anything you can think of. And damp. Mum says she’s had a word with him to leave you alone. That’s as maybe but you don’t want to get panicked out of your bed again.

Then there’s your father. Keep your voice down, now he’s gone out of the room, I’ll tell you. He’s always dreaming of running away from something. “Urgh, urgh,” he goes, all night, then he wakes up. He kicks me awake and so I thump him awake back, and he’s panicking when he wakes up. He doesn’t know where he is. I think it’s to do with his work, or the memory of his poor sister.

Your feet are nearly off the ground and you’re against a fence; and the coppers are laughing at you from the other side of it.  You get escorted down a ginnel and, propelled by the crowd of lads and men you’re in, you are virtually carried down another side street with police mounted on huge horses at both ends. You hope you can get home; after all there’s no way you can tell anyone what’s going on, not for hours, this was supposed to be a trip out to a different city to watch a game on a Saturday with your pals. The thing is to stay upright and not to panic. Hang on to that bloke’s sleeve. And hope when you get back to the train it’s not full of gangs.

The poor teacher we had, pet; we could make him cry by banging our desk lids up and down all together, and then he would curl up in a ball under his desk, he would be trembling and we couldn’t continue the lesson. Oh, we were cruel, he must have suffered very badly in the Great War.

You are sitting in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle. There is no driver. You are crying and can’t find a way to stop. You’re just seven years old and the boy you are sat with, well, he may only have one working kidney but he’s laughing at you, but you can’t help it, as this all reminds you of something terrible, a terrible situation, a situation that will only get worse as people leave you - again - and maybe don’t come back. And then you will be no-one and no-one will help you or want you, and it will be dark again. This moment right now may be the start of the end of all things. You can’t control these thoughts so you are helpless to the tears. This is something that happens a lot when people go away from you, or there is no person you can trust in charge; it’s to do “with the awful time you were away in hospital,” and no-one tells you anything more apart from your mother, who says, “we thought you were dead.”

The thing is not to be worried about tomorrow, the blood tests won’t take long.

The thing is to stare at the wall behind your dad’s head as he goes off on one because you’ve been caught truanting again. He’s always saying how hard his life was when he was young and why can’t you shape up? He had to. You see his mouth, moving, open but with no sound coming out, as he tries to hold back gusts of anger. You hear his high-pitched, strained voice downstairs as he lets all his frustration out to your mum while she’s cooking. Then he’s calm and he’ll say sorry to you, and stuff like “another day is another day.” But how do you explain the ice-cold panic of going, of being surrounded by other boys your age? That just can’t be done. Can’t.

Not to panic means the following:

• Clean and polish your shoes until you can see your face in them.

• Thinking about what you need to do if things do go really wrong and people don’t come back when they said they would. 

• And how you have to smile and be polite. Best picking who you’d have to tell the bad news to first, probably your next door neighbour. They’ve always been nice. Only then do you tell the police.

• Keeping your voice together as you pluck up courage to ask the duty sister, which ward? Be polite at all times, that is your station in life.

Panic dreams mean:

• Running away from groups of men with guns (your dad has the same dreams! That’s what mum says). This scenario happens when you've run out of ammunition, you’ve now made yourself a target by firing indiscriminately at the people you hate.

• Seeing the red demonic eyes in the next door attic. Something unspeakably cruel lives there. 

• Missing a bus and being stuck in a place like Rossendale until dawn.

• Pushing the car up and down the winding roads of East Lancashire as the land turns to ploughed mush and the soil turns blue and sickly yellow.

Eeh, I remember them, the whole family all sitting round a scrapbook with figures in it, and counting the same pile of coins over and over again and saying; “What shall we do?” And one would start up a heap of nonsense about being thrown out and wandering the streets. It was a bit pathetic, they loved the whole drama of it! 

This bloke had better get his hand off my knee. He’s well dressed and very polite. You are instructed to look at the sheet music. This is not the time to panic as you’re in a cathedral.

Let’s play whist for buttons, that’ll settle everyone down. Go and get the button box! 

An accompanying post to this Rule, with relevant illustrations, can be found in the Museum of Photocopies.