a pUNcH tO thE heAd....THEN HE PULLED A BIG KNIFE ON ME
How a random attack with a fist and a blade turned this streetwise urbanite into a pussyfooting wreck.
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I told the police, I’d never seen him before in my life. I hoped to God I’d never see him again. But then, there he was, just a few yards from where he’d punched me in the head, eight months previously, then pulled out a huge knife and jabbed its blade point at me like a pirate.
A complete stranger.
An unprovoked, random action.
In broad daylight.
I’ll never forget it - screaming, frenzy, dolly-zoom intensity. Nothing disperses a crowd, stops traffic, creates chaos and induces absolute panic, quite like the flash of a 10” blade.
During the subsequent weeks and months since that incident, I have walked down the very same streets, always slightly wary, scanning the wide pavements, praying that I wouldn’t bump into the man with the big knife again. But almost inevitably, for a fleeting moment one morning, there he was in front of me again, twenty feet away, coming out of a store.
Same clothes, same crazed eyes.
I saw him. He didn’t see me. I crossed the street, looked back and he was gone again. Shivers.
It’s now a year since I was attacked.
I wrote this just after it happened.
In big cities like London people often talk about “random attacks”. The local news in Manchester and Birmingham and Glasgow publishes horror stories of unprovoked acts of violence perpetrated on the streets, in open air and in plain sight. You’ll see - almost nightly - TV news reports of shocking ferocity and terror, driven by no apparent motive; no noisy and aggressive, incidental ramp, confrontation or argument leading to their ugly and murderous flashpoint. Not even the simple gain of phone robbery or wallet mugging. Just bloody, brute force, for the thrill and heck of it. A butcher-grade kitchen knife or, increasingly, the hunter’s machete, being the modern, random assailant’s weapon of choice.
Random knife attacks happen all over the capital (all over the country, actually) sometimes in rough neighbourhoods but also in posh, monied locales. Often in quiet, leafy areas.
Earlier this year (2023), an unprovoked attack on a 60-year-old man who was violently assaulted by a stranger while walking with his family in broad daylight on a street in Richmond, West London - the victim suffering a bleed on the brain and in need of hospital treatment “for the foreseeable future”.
On the last May bank holiday Monday (2023) a 31 year old woman stabbed to death on a Brixton street, from behind, by a man, at random, as she returned home after buying a gift for her mother’s birthday.
A good friend of mine, sitting on a west London tube train, opposite a teenager, was surprised by the coach’s sudden invasion by five, stab vest-clad police officers. The cops grabbed the kid, cuffed him and held him down before removing a foot-long machete from down the back of his jeans.
Back in January, on busy Oxford Street, 27 year old Tedi Fanta, visiting London’s West End on a day trip from his home in Swansea, jumped retired civil servant (and total stranger) Stephen Dempsey from behind, outside the Microsoft store. A ferocious knife attack ensued - Fanta eventually being restrained by brave passers-by. Stephen Dempsey suffered four stab wounds and died in hospital later that night from chest injuries. News reports told how Fanta had made the trip up from Wales with the specific intent to knife someone.
Shamefully, as a streetwise and savvy, big city resident, one becomes almost anaesthetised to these scary, grim and gory reports, which have become as much a part of daily news as the weather forecast and the latest inflation figures.
Yes, you make notes-to-self to be more vigilant, steer clear of the dodgier areas, avoid eye contact with strangers, to not flash expensive smartphones / luggage / sneakers / wrist-watches etc. To be aware that your nice shiny bicycle, or your car’s open window and your possessions sitting on the passenger seat, might make you a target. Most of all, to warn your children and loved ones to be extra careful.
But really, honestly and very, very stupidly, you think that this kind of thing happens to other people, in different parts of town. You kid yourself that knife attacks are mainly gangland vendettas or rare but terrifying terrorist sprees, perpetrated by crazies and fundamentalist whack jobs. Who on earth would want to randomly attack “male, pale and stale” you, of all people?
Then, one day, without warning, you see the flash of a blade. And suddenly it is happening to you.
I had left my office at 5.30pm on a sunny, August afternoon, walking from Gloucester Terrace, just near Paddington railway station, intending to wiggle my way through some side streets, through Bayswater and Queensway and before heading up to Notting Hill Gate.
This is the London W2 area, predominantly Victorian buildings and mostly affluent, with a transient population - lots of cheap hotels, phone shops, convenience stores and vape vendors, mixed in with the big, six million quid houses. Like much of well-to-do London, west two is a multi-racial, socio-economic mix of wealthy and poor. Its grand, wide streets punctuated with tree-shaded garden squares and housing estates share a postcode that Claudia Winkleman and Tony Blair call home.
On this day, straight after the August bank holiday, a strange, hungover/partied-out atmosphere pervaded. The famous Notting Hill Carnival, a celebration of West London’s multiculturalism, had taken place only the day before. Barriers stacked up, streets quiet, recently swept of carnival-related detritus and street food garbage. Even in the early, back-to-work day’s evening, it seemed as if most people might be in bed, still sleeping-off the long weekend. A warm, dull, nothing sort of day. Two and half hours away from sunset.
After almost 40 years of incident-free living in and around this area, my demeanour has always been trusting and almost naturally, confrontationally averse. I always considered myself as a sort of benign, non-target; insignificant, invisible and therefore invincible, but also stealthily, tonally alert, switched on and tuned in to any potential trouble.
So, yes the fellow headed straight for me - albeit in a deranged zig-zag, with a crazy look in his eye, one step alternatively on the pavement, one on the road, like a naughty child - was someone to be very definitely, widely berthed. Even with five or six other pedestrians within a few feet of us, and still two and half hours from sunset.
Ergo, I strode out of his way, swerving purposefully but subtly, but also making a fatal error; I caught his eye, gazing directly at him for a moment. Did I get away with it? He seemed to pass close but peacefully.
Then, in another split second, from behind and without warning, a massive whack on the temple. He’d punched me, knocking me sideways and off-balance with a juddering, sucker-punch blow. Then he ran away. Fast.
Being belted on the head is bad enough at the best of times. A fight situation - not that I’ve been in one since I was a kid - is a face to face conflict. You are in battle and expect to get hurt, bracing for that first whack. But when the punch comes from behind and out of sight, a strike is shocking, jarring and disorientating. Oof.
My immediate reaction, as I felt my head for blood (there is none) was red-misted, foolhardy and dumbly ill-advised. Something in me said, ‘I’m not going to let you get away with that.’ and I went after him, shouting obscenities as I sprinted. What an idiot.
Temple stinging and vision blurry, my plan was to catch up with him, tackle him, wrestle him to the ground, maybe punch him back once or twice, then try to reason with him, make some sense of his outrageous behaviour “Why did you do that?” Of course, none of this would happen.
Instead, he pulled a knife on me.
The man, having been chased for around 100 metres, suddenly stopped running away. Now bent over and releasing himself from his rucksack straps, he produced a ten inch kitchen knife, unsheathing it from its place in the backpack in one swift motion; a sword from its synthetic scabbard. Close enough to see the weapon’s black and waxy handle, and guess at its provenance as probably culinary - the metal triangle pointed upwards and glinted in the afternoon sun. It was a bizarrely cinematic moment. A shuddering, needle-drop / freeze-frame image of panic and horror.
Nothing disperses a crowd, stops traffic, creates chaos and induces absolute panic quite like a big blade. On the tree-lined street, cars came screeching to a halt, pedestrians scattered in all directions, some screaming. The man - 35 to 40 years old? Hooded and wild-eyed and suddenly in charge of the situation - brought the knife up to chin height and waved it in the air.
Then, direct eye contact. He jabbed it. In my direction. Right at me. A few threatening, staccato steps forward, feigned evil intent. Any closer, I thought, and he is going to cut me.
I recoiled, backing off, sight unseen, right into the busy traffic, almost getting knocked down by a taxi…which slammed on its brakes, the driver shouting “get in” from behind his wheel.
I opened the door and fell in, and we gave chase again - London cabbie knowledge versus maniacal running man - down the Bishops Bridge Road, a large Waitrose store on one side, a council estate on the other. The man disappeared down some steps and into the warren of garden areas, parking lots and housing blocks. We have lost him.
“Thing is, mate,” offered my cab driver, sagely, as we stopped. “What are you going to do if you do catch him.” Shaking now, red mist lifting and mild PTSD taking hold, I agreed that he has a good point.
I thanked the driver profusely and got out, back on to pavement, later realising that he was one of the good guys - a taxi driver following a new initiative and carrying a stash of military-grade emergency bandages designed to stem serious blood loss in the first vital minutes following an accident or major incident. (Distributed by charity, Rapaid, the emergency pressure bar bandages also used by the British military, are designed for battlefield use and can apply up to 40lbs of direct pressure onto a serious bleed injury). I wouldn’t be needing bandages. “To be honest, you were lucky,” he said before driving off. He was right.
But I also felt nervously jacked up with vigilante rage, determined to get this danger to society off the street. Find some vindication and closure. Outside the Waitrose, I stood in the middle of a road traffic island, doing a slow rotation, looking for a police car, coming from any direction, to flag down.
The cops, normally omnipresent in west London, were now invisible and I didn’t see a single uniform or squad van during a long 20 minutes of hopeful observation. “Never around when you need ‘em,” a passer-by and incident witness says. “But I saw the guy who attacked you. He went down there….”
With nothing else for it, I started walking, passing the very estate where my assailant was probably still hiding, to my parked car. Again, I felt the side of my head for blood or the evidence of bruising, from the blow I took minutes ago. Shaken up, I quickened my pace to get away as fast as possible. I was, frankly, terrified.
Eventually, a full half hour after the attack, my heartbeat slowed down and the nervous sensations of a near-death experience kicked in, I called the emergency services. And the Police kindly came, picking me up half a mile away for the flashpoint to retrace my steps and re-live the drama. They looked for CCTV cameras that may have captured the incident but there were none.
After a fruitless 5mph cruise, the cops dropped me off. Then, three of them, in stab-proof vests, braved a look around the estate but found nothing. I received a politely efficient email from the Met the next day informing me that the case would now be closed. Disappointing, but what else could they do? After all, I was not injured or seriously hurt - as the cab driver said, I’d actually got off lucky - just very, very freaked out by the whole experience. Unwittingly, I had also become a grisly statistic.
There were approximately 12,786 knife or sharp instrument offences recorded by the police in London in 2022/23, prompting (then) PM Rishi Sunak to call for police and the courts to be given tougher powers to tackle so-called “zombie knives” and machetes. (Yes. machetes! The same hacking tools most commonly used for cutting and maintaining jungle trails, clearing brush, coppicing wood, now adapted for urban menace.)
According to a report by the Office for National Statistics the number of people killed with a knife in England and Wales in 2021/22 was the highest on record for 76 years, the increase driven by an 18% rise in the number of male victims, from 184 to 218, in the 12 months up to March 2022. In that year alone there were around 450,000 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument - that’s around 865 a week. The figures for 2023 are expected to be even worse. Knife-enabled threats to kill having increased by 24% (to 6,021 offences) in the year ending March 2023 compared with the year ending March 2020 (4,858 offences). Depressing reading.
I spent the rest of the evening and the following few days re-living the statistical madness of the hot moment, quietly gulping and gasping to myself at the horrific happenstance of the situation, my dreams wild with much worse versions of the real attack, and even closer encounters with the blade. I felt angry, jumpy, downbeat and sad - sad for my city and sad for my attacker.
What good could have come from his random behaviour? If he’d knifed me, and he’d been caught, he would’ve gone to prison for a long time. His life, over. My life, damaged and derailed. For nothing!
How and why would anyone be driven do that?
The other question I kept asking myself was, why me? What had I done? Why had I been picked on at random?
Was it just, wrong place, wrong time? Or did my tall, white, Viking-like stature represent something alien, offensive and therefore attack-deservant? Was the punch in the head actually a provocation? To get me to give chase and then murder me. What was his motive? I was a total stranger - and he definitely wasn’t a mugger. Did he have mental problems? Or was he just a thrill-seeker? What if he’d decided to knife me instead of punch me first? That could’ve happened. Easily.
And where was he now? Maybe having noticed the havoc he’d wreaked with a kitchen knife, was he now holed up somewhere, upping his blade game to a machete? Maybe preparing to come after me again on the same street and do a better job on me next time. Or on someone else?
In almost forty years as a Londoner, I’d never been frightened of walking the streets, in any area, at any time - day or night. Perhaps naively, I’d always trusted my life-learned instincts and street smarts, presuming good, rather than evil, in people I came across in shops, pubs, on buses and on the underground. Now?
I am not so sure.