“My husband doesn’t mind living on the edge”

MY HUSBAND came home once and pinned a piece of paper on the kitchen wall when my children were younger.

It was a quote he’d printed off at work.

“I want everyone to read this,” he announced, calling the children.

They peeled themselves away from screens and stood in front of the wall. “What?” They asked, looking at the piece of paper and staring abstractedly.

“This is the way to live,” my husband enthused. “Just. Read. That.” So they read that ‘courage is not the absence of fear but resistance to fear and mastery of fear’, and also that ‘the brave do not live forever but the cautious do not live at all’.

His eyes shone. The children looked blank.

I looked at the bit of paper and pondered the wisdom of advising boys in their teens and girls close on their heels, to forget about caution. Had he forgotten coming home and walking into the kitchen to find one of our sons with singed cuffs and smoking trouser bottoms? The result of skateboarding through a puddle of lit petrol with his friends?

I jogged my husband’s memory. “But I think this will inspire the children,” he said.

“To do what?” I asked. “To take risks,” he said, “calculated risks I mean.”

“Our children can’t calculate anything,” I said, citing skateboard and petrol again. “I don’t want this bit of paper to inspire them.”

My husband doesn’t mind living on the edge. I like to live Very Far Away From The Edge With My Children Beside Me.

We have a photo, which accurately sums up our different approaches to physical courage. Our children are in mid-air, jumping off a bridge into the water, which is six million feet below. If you look closely, in the background my facial expression is exactly the one you’d find on the face of someone who’s just been told they have to saw their own head off. My husband isn’t in the picture. He’s in the water, shouting up his enthusiasm and fighting concussion.

The quote is still on the wall and over the years, it’s prompted me to wonder idly, what sort of courage would I find, if Put To The Test? On Tuesday, however, my days of wondering ended.

I was Put To The Test, while standing with my younger sister on the London Underground.

When two men, blasted drunk, lurch past us at the bottom of the Tube escalator and up-end a busker’s keyboard, I’m not thinking about tests of courage. When they kick his collection box across the floor and my sister shoots past me like an arrow, I’m still not thinking about them.

But when she picks up the keyboard and collection box and orders the men to leave the busker alone, I suddenly think about tests of courage: I stand behind her. She’s bigger than me.

I watch my sister hold tough while the men square up, shouting obscenities at her.

The men reel away, the busker thanks my sister and at this point I realise the test has come and gone and I’ve failed it. I start to babble, over the sound of my heart banging in my ears.

“Oh my God. Oh my God, you were so brave,” I say, scanning the platform (what if those men have a knife?).

“I mean, you just stood there ... They were scared of you.” I say, “I was scared of you …”

She says oh shut up, she’s not brave, she wasn’t scared and don’t be stupid.

“You’re much braver than me,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep in a house with a mouse,” and shudders violently before continuing. “Do you remember that night you felt a mouse running up the inside of your pyjama bottoms in bed?” She shudders again, more dramatically, “…you took them off, shook them out and went back to sleep?”

I find this profoundly depressing. Dispirited, I say, “you know that’s nothing like this. I’m not scared of mice.” “I’m not scared of drunks,” she says. I get the point but I’m distracted; maybe the men will reappear and chuck us both on the train tracks. She tells me to stop looking over my shoulder because they’ve gone. “If it makes you feel any better,” my sister says, “I wouldn’t save your life if it meant I had to deal with a mouse. In fact if there was a mouse within a hundred feet of you and you were drowning, you’d have to die.”

I think; she has the heart of a lion, I have the heart of a mouse (and what if those men have a knife?)