Certain death is inside the house and heading for the stairs…ĭoes the plan smoothly kick in? Do we calmly head for the safe room and wait for the police? Do we heck!ĭesperate not to die cowering in bed, I jump up and start scrabbling blindly for trousers. Then, like a bucket of ice, reality hits me.
For a few seconds, my dozy brain struggles to identify the sudden awful noise. Until, a couple of months later, in the middle of the night, the burglar alarm goes off. We buy special lights and locks and designate a safe room to which we will retreat in an emergency. So instead of joining America's 80 million gun-owners, we make a plan. Until the police captain explained about the local burglars and their notoriously quick trigger fingers. In my view, guns belonged at work, not at home, and I intended to keep it that way. Anyway, I thought, what's the fuss? I had encountered plenty of weapons in my 15 years' military service plus another eight years around armed Royal bodyguards. There were more immediate dangers, such as navigating the 26-lane Katy freeway which for the first few weeks seemed by far the most likely cause of sudden death. They're part of everyday life in Texas and it's bad form to get excited about them, pro or anti, especially as a newcomer. We were settling in fast – the Lone Star State does everything big, especially warm welcomes – but there were some sizeable cultural adjustments to make, too. This was Texas a few years ago, where my wife and I were new arrivals from London. And he will kill you if you interfere.' The friendly police captain was answering my question about a flurry of home invasions nearby, in which a father had been shot dead, defending his family.
If you wake in the night and hear an intruder downstairs, you must assume he's armed.
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