I WAS IN THE LIVING ROOM AT MY CHILDHOOD HOME IN SLADE GREEN. My mum had moved the furniture around. She was sitting on the sofa. I sat down at the piano. My sister got upset because she wanted to listen to some music on the record player. I told her she couldn’t because I had got up early to play the piano. My mum told me my piano playing wasn’t very good but I ignored her. As I started playing, I noticed I couldn’t hear the music because my mum had started ironing some clothes and kept pressing the noisy steam button. I told her to stop but then I noticed she was touching the hot iron. She appeared to be “frozen”, not moving at all. That’s when I noticed she was having a seizure and her hand was burning on the iron. I shouted at my sister to take my mum to the kitchen and run her hand under cold water for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, I got two bags of peas from the freezer and placed them on my mum’s hands. Then I went to my first aid box and got some burn dressings.
After giving first aid to my mum I told her I didn’t want to go to school that day. She told me I had to but I said, “No, I don’t. I’m over 16 now!” She insisted I go to school but I told her I wouldn’t. Instead, I was going to go to work. I walked out of the back door into the yard where I had two cars—a Yugo and a Ford Escort—both red. Just as I was about to get into the Yugo it rolled back into the road behind our house and crashed into a yellow digger. The digger driver was angry and used his shovel to flip the Yugo onto its roof. I gave the driver the middle finger which only served to make him angrier. He started smashing my Yugo up with his digger and then moved onto my Escort.
I took my phone out and began recording what was happening. I asked the digger driver what the hell he thought he was doing and he replied, “I’ve got paperwork to take these cars away!” Then a flatbed truck turned up and the cars were lifted onto it. At that point, the digger driver and I seemed to become friends. He was apologetic that he had to take the cars away, telling me they had been reported as insurance write-offs by the police.
The flatbed truck drove off with my cars and I jumped into the man’s digger. As we drove along behind the truck, the digger driver let me take control of the digger. I crashed into a few cars and lorries along the way but he told me it was no big deal. Eventually, we reached a garage where my cars were unloaded from the flatbed. I phoned the police to see if they could help me regain possession of my cars but they weren’t interested. I was told by the garage that an insurance adjuster was coming out to review the damage to the cars. Meanwhile, I started removing a number of things from of my cars—a yellow toolbox, an orange first aid box, a red ski jacket and gloves, and a brown leather cap. Everything was covered in mud. I calculated the value of the cars and the items to be £20,000. When the insurance adjuster arrived I told him I wanted to be compensated for the cars and the items that were now ruined.