My second story about Stranger Danger comes from when I was a few years older, attending high school, but still vulnerable to the evils of the encroaching adult world. High school was a different world to the idyllic country village junior school I mentioned in the last post, though arguably I'd been prepared for it by multiple series of Grange Hill.
The school itself, which I'm sure I'll write about again, was a former Grammar School turned Comprehensive, five miles from home. This meant a daily commute on board the dreaded school bus, which made its final stop over the other side of the hill from our farm, a good 20 minute walk away. Mostly my parents would drop me off and pick me up, but occasionally I'd have to walk over that hill on my own, and on more than one occasion, a stranger stopped to offer me a lift.
I was always ready with a polite "no, thank you": Charlie had taught me well. Except for that one time. The time it was raining and my parents were nowhere to be seen. Not just raining - tipping it down. Cats and dogs and all manner of domestic fowl. I'd only been walking five minutes when a kindly old gent in a little red car stopped to offer me a lift. And even though I could hear Charlie's warning ringing in my ears, I have to admit: I was tempted.
"Come on, lad, you're getting soaked out there. Hop in and we'll get you home."
He certainly didn't look like a paedophile. What would it hurt? I wasn't familiar with Blanche DuBois at the time, but her mantra seemed apt: "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers". I almost got in that car...
Until...
Until I happened to glance in the back seat.
Do you know what I saw there?
A skull.
Not a drawing or a seat decoration, but an actual human skull (or, at least, it looked real enough), sitting there on the back seat of his crimson Volvo.
In retrospect, it seems unlikely that a serial killer would drive around advertising his profession so blatantly. Probably the man was a scientist or a teacher and the skull was cheap plastic. Occam's razor: the simplest solution is most likely the right one. But I didn't accept a ride and I arrived home dripping.
Would you have climbed in?
This isn't the most appropriate tune, but I couldn't go with The Ides of March twice in a row. Still, it always makes me think of that old guy with the skull on his back seat...
If you had taken that lift, you might not have been able to post that story today. I'd probably have taken the lift, but only if the driver offered me sweeties.
ReplyDeleteI like to think that I wouldn't have taken that lift, but, as my old Mum would sometimes say, '...you haven't got the sense you were born with...'
ReplyDeleteI'm very glad you lived to tell such a great tale! Would like to think he was a kindly science (or art) teacher as you say but our heads are filled with stories from the Pan Book of Horror and mad axemen thoughts are never far from our minds. I'm still the same now..
ReplyDeleteIt was only about 10 years ago that I was walking nonchalantly home from my Sunday job at the local library on a chilly wet afternoon when a car spotted me, double backed and went out of its way to offer me a ride - a very polite, friendly young man who tried perhaps a little too hard to persuade me. I refused (I was nearly home anyway). Not that long after that a number of reports came out about a young man who'd been operating in exactly the same way in the next county - and then raping his victims. Aargh.
That's Volvo drivers for you.
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