“Eh,” he shouted. We carried on walking.

“Eh,” he said again. We were getting further away from him.

He ran alongside us and shouted, “Hey! I’ve got a knife in my pocket. Give me your money.”

I looked him up and I looked him down and, with the arrogance and refusal to be impressed of a fourteen-year-old boy, I told him, “You have not got a knife in your pocket.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You don’t.”

“Do.”

“You have not got a knife in your pocket.” I mean, he didn’t have a knife. I was almost certain that he didn’t have a knife.

“I do.”

“No, you don’t. Show it to me. If you’ve got a knife, let’s see it.”

I started to suspect that I was going to win this particular argument. At any rate, he said, “Look, whether or not I’ve got a knife in my pocket, give me your money.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” I said flatly, “it’s my money. Not yours. Now go away.”

And he seemed ready to leave, when Dave Dickson, who was quite terrified (and who had, remember, hurt his foot), stammered out the first thing he had said during the whole mugging. He said, “How much do you want?”

And our mugger turned back to me and said, “How much have you got?”

I thought about this. I had forty English pounds on me: money I had saved up over the whole term, saved for this end-of-term comics-buying blowout. More money than I had ever had on me at one time in my whole fourteen-year-old life. (It would probably have been equivalent to about a hundred 1975 dollars.)

“I’ve got twenty pence on me,” I told him, grudgingly. “But I need ten pence for the bus home.”

“Give me ten pence then,” said the mugger.

So I did, and he went away. “You weren’t a lot of help,” I told Dave.

“I hurt my leg,” he said. “So I couldn’t run away. It was all right for you. You could have run away.”

When we got to the basement comic shop, it was closed. We knocked on the door until it was opened.

“Go away,” said Alan Austin. “We’re closed.”

“But,” I said, “we came all the way here from Croydon, and we got mugged and I’ve got all my money for the whole term with me!”

I think it was the mugging that impressed them, more than the money. Anyway, they let us in. I bought lots of old comics, but all I remember now is Sandman #1, Creepy #1, and The Spirit #2. We read them on the bus, on the way home. I thought The Spirit was the coolest thing in the whole world.

“I’m Plaster of Paris, the toast of Montmartre, I stick to my man until death us do part!” That was one of the stories in there. I had no idea that the stories I was reading were over-thirty-year-old reprints: they were as up-to-date and immediate as anything I had ever read.