Simon Bill - British Light Cavalry Sabre

 

This is something that happened a bit more than three years ago. It happened in 2013, in July. I was sitting at home in my big Victorian house in Sheffield. It was a warm night, and the windows were open and I was at home with my daughter who was asleep. It was late at night and I was thinking of going to bed myself. I'd been hearing percussive sounds coming from outside. Well, they sounded close, but there's a thing that hot weather does where far things sound close. So, I thought it's that sort of thing. 

 

I was about to go to bed when I heard that unmistakable sound of somebody booting a door, my back door. I looked out the bedroom window. The bedroom window is over the back door to the house, which goes into the kitchen. There's a man booting the door repeatedly. So, I said, “Oi.” [audience laughter] And he said, “What?” [audience laughter] And I said, “Well, fuck off.” [audience laughter] And he said, “Come down and meet me if you can.” So, I knew at this stage, I was going to have trouble with this man. [audience laughter] 

 

So, I ran downstairs, went to the living room where I got the phone, the landline, picked it up, dialed 999 and raced into the kitchen, which is where he was at the door he was going to come through and made a 999 call where I was looking at him through the window of the back door, repeatedly ramming the door. For some reason, they always picked very slow speaking people to answer 999 calls. [audience laughter] So, it was “Which service do you require?” and the call proceeded. 

 

I was about to give my address and the frame of the door splintered completely. And I thought, right, he's in with the next one. So, I said, “Too late, he's in.” I dropped the phone on the kitchen table and I thought, I need something. So, I ran to the covered under the stairs where we keep garden tools and stuff. I looked at the shovels and the spades and the rake. The spade could have been very handy, because a spade makes a reasonable weapon if you're hit on the head with it. But I used to collect Victorian swords. I lost interest in it as a hobby [audience laughter] and I'd sold most of them. But I still had the 1796 British light cavalry saber, [audience laughter] which is a fearsome looking thing. 

 

Even if I don't use it from a psychological perspective, it's what I need right now. Not now, but Google it later. The 1796 British light cavalry has a very broad, very wide curved blade. It looks awesome. So, I grabbed it. I rushed back into the kitchen. Oh, the other thing about it is that in movies when people draw swords it goes swing. And real swords mostly don't, but this one does because it has a steel scabbard. So, as I'm entering the kitchen, I'm drawing the sword and it goes schwing. [audience laughter] So, we enter the kitchen from both directions simultaneously, me and the burglar. He walks almost through the door. This guy is off his nut. His eyes are blue and red. Because of the red, the white of his eyes is completely bloodshot and he's got a cudgel or club. 

 

Basically, it's a thing, the size and the shape of a baseball bat that he's holding, ready to hit someone with it. So, he's ready and I'm ready. I see him register the sword, the sabre, and he bolts. I think, brilliant. It's worked perfectly. What I want to do at this stage is lock the back door, but I can't because it's in bits. So, I need to make sure he's off the property. And so, I run out into the back garden. At this point, he changed his mind about being frightened of the sword and decided he wasn't frightened at all anymore. 

 

He ran at me and he started trying to hit me with this length of timber, this club and then ensued quite a long fight. It was a fight in which he was trying to hurt me, but for all sorts of reasons, which I'll go into in a second, I was trying to look, not hurt him, but look as if I was going to, because I needed to get him off the property. So, yeah, why wasn't I trying to actually hurt him since he was obviously so intent on doing it to me? Well, there is the moral thing, but partly it was because I seemed to be thinking a lot during this violent episode [audience laughter] was that my daughter was or had been asleep upstairs. I thought, she's got to have heard that. Sound of a man booting a door in was immense. 

 

I had this mental image of her coming downstairs. If I had hit him with the sabre, of her coming out and saying, “Daddy, what's all that?” And seeing me standing over this twitching corpse of a burglar [audience laughter] with blood everywhere. So, I thought, well, that can't happen. So, I had to get him off the premises. So, there was this long, long fight during which he was swinging at me with his club and I was ducking and blocking, and I was swinging at him with a sword and he was backing off, as you would when a chunky piece of metal keeps going by your face a lot. So, we're back around the side of the house. 

 

It's quite a big house, this across the back garden around the side of the house where he'd got the thing he had actually was I'd been collecting some wood for the stove and I had some lengths of wooden handrails that thick timber. What I'd been hearing earlier was him snapping the end off a nine-foot length to make something more-handy to use as a weapon. So, the house is on a dual carriageway, but there's no one around. It's dead quiet. So, there's just two men swinging at each other with primitive weapons. [audience laughter] 

 

We go away up the dual carriageway. This battle's been going on for a minute which when you're really fighting like crazy is a long time. [audience laughter] I reached the point where I'm out of ideas and I've got no energy left. I think any second now, he's going to realize I'm not trying to hurt him and then what am I going to do? But at that point he gave up and he disappeared. I can't emphasize how quickly this man was moving. I don't know what he was on, but it was helping him to move around very quickly. He was just gone like that. It was like a spot on the horizon, like a genie evaporating. 

 

Then I turned and started walking back to the house. I was thinking how I was going to explain to my daughter Evelyn that daddy had been out. She's 10 at this time. What daddy was doing outside in the garden with a sword and why he looked all shattered. I was beginning to, “Oh, I can leave the sword by the door, I don't need to take it in.” I was just developing my strategy and I heard very fast footsteps behind me. He'd run away very quickly and he'd come back quicker. [audience laughter] I turned and he was almost on me with his arms raised above his head with his both about to hit me with the club. I took the blow. 

 

We hit each other simultaneously. I turned and swung the sword across my body, catching him on the chest at the same time as his club caught my forearm. Then he kept running. The sword actually is blunt. If it had been sharp, it would have been much, much more messy. I think I broke the skin, but I think he was basically not that badly injured. He was gone this time. He just bolted up the dual carriageway. I got back in the house. Evelyn had slept through the whole thing. She wasn't there. [audience laughter] So, I made another 999 phone call and the police turned up incredibly quickly afterwards. I said that was quick. And they said, “No, we were responding to the earlier one.” [audience laughter] 

 

They were so tall up, they had guns and armor and riot shields and stuff. Apparently, you can find out where a phone call is coming. They said, “Yeah. No, we heard a lot of it over the phone. We heard crash, bang, wallop.” And also, as luck would have it, the burglar had been running up the dual carriageway and he ran into this convoy of police vans full of heavily armed police, [audience laughter] and they caught him there and then they actually had him in the van. 

 

Well, obviously he was arrested very much. He was remanded in custody. It took a long time for it to come to court. Came to court in December, and I was very glad I didn't have to go to court, because he fessed up right at the last minute and he said, “Yeah, I did do it then.” He got three and a half years for aggravated burglary. Now, that's not quite the end of it. This story got into the Guardian magazine. It has a feature called Experience, which is real experiences. This article had a huge response online. It was like there was 15,000 shares and hundreds and hundreds of comments. Most of them were nice comments, people saying, “I'm glad you're okay, and that sounds horrible.” Some of them were actually, like, reviews. 

 

They were negative reviews of my performance [audience laughter] dealing with a violent intruder. A lot of them, these hostile reviews came from the United States, especially Texas. [audience laughter] I had no idea that people in Texas read the Guardian, but some do. What they felt was that where I'd gone wrong is I didn't kill him. [audience laughter] I didn't enter into-- Because you can't really have a serious conversation online about serious matters. So, I would have answered. I thought of answering online, but I didn't. So, I haven't actually spoken to any of those people. But what I would like to say to them if I got a chance to do it in a sensible context, is if it does ever happen to you that you have a violent intruder, and I know you're going, [unintelligible [00:27:15] please. Some people really want a violent intruder. 

 

If it does happen, and it almost certainly won't, the first thing you think of doing should not be that you start shooting guns in the house, because it's just going to go badly wrong from there on. I've told my daughter that it happened this year and she went, “Really?” It's three years on now, and she's old enough and enough time has elapsed. So, she was quite surprised that she'd slept through a thing that was that big in her own house. And that is the end. The burglar will be getting out, so anytime now. [audience laughter] I'm okay, my daughter's okay and I hope, even though I don't love the guy, I hope he's okay now too. Thank you.