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Another Bad Parenting Tale
The story of the Armed Response Unit
I was baking a cake in the kitchen when all of a sudden, three of my children and an older, much taller friend, Thomas, came running up from the bottom of the garden, shot through the back door, and legged it upstairs. To hide.
A policeman followed in hot pursuit.
I went straight into the garden to meet him: “I am so sorry, have my children been up to mischief?” I had been taught to be honest with the police.
“No,” he said, “We are looking for teenagers.” I was a young Mum and clearly didn’t look old enough to have teenagers. I told him I had only seen my children. By this time, there was a helicopter circling above the house and an armed response unit at the front.
“How old are your children?” he asked when it was clear the miscreants they were looking for were nowhere to be found.
“Between three and eight,” I replied truthfully. “Would you like to see them?” He would. I went upstairs, hissed at Thomas to hide in a wardrobe, and marched my four downstairs. They stood sheepishly in front of him and the two colleagues, who had joined him in full riot gear with weapons to match.
They lined up, and one of the police officers asked them what they had been doing at the bottom of the garden…
