I'd like to be a rebel

I'd like to be a rebel. I really would. And I was. Once.

It was back in the early nineties. I should remember the date, but I don't. I don't even remember the year. Some things are best forgotten. Some things, you try to forget, but can't. I'd forget the whole episode if it weren't for my few seconds of glory, the few seconds I felt in control.

I was involved in an armed robbery at my place of work, a building society. A customer came in several times throughout the day and finally made an appointment to see one of us about a mortgage and savings plan, He came in at four o'clock and went through to the back office with one of my colleagues. It was a routine affair and should have taken no longer than fifteen minutes. At half past four, I started to get worried, so made some lame excuse to go through the interview room, just to see what was going on. My colleague and the customer were talking over basics, the same basic things I'd heard them discussing ten minutes previously. Another ten minutes went by. I stood at the door to listen. They were still talking about a mortgage application. I guessed he was nothing but a timewaster...

At five o'clock, the guy was still in the back office with my pal. It was time for us to go home. I bagged up the cash in the tills, locked the front door and turned the lights off in the banking hall. Next, I took the money bags through into the interview room to put them in the safe.

As I passed the customer, he stood up, put a knife to my throat and bent me over the safe.

I heard a sound and thought my colleague had passed out. She hadn't. She'd just dropped her coffee cup.

This was no standard armed robbery. They usually shout and it's all over in less than two minutes.

This went on for an hour. He was very calm and collected. He knew exactly what he was doing.

I'm still bent over the safe and can feel his erect penis against me. The very thought of it still makes me feel like vomiting. I'm told that a lot of men get erections in very acute situations. It doesn't mean they're sexually excited. I wasn't to know that at the time. I thought he was going to rape me. This thought was exacerbated by the fact that he then told us both to remove our clothes.

No rape took place.

We were made to remove our clothing in order to give him more time in his escape. We were hardly in a position to chase him down the street without a stitch on.

He told me to take all the money out of the safe, which I did, and put it in his hold-all. Bizarrely, he took a compliments slip from the desk and popped that in his bag, too.

Get the video tape out of the machine and give it to me," he instruced.
"Please!" I said.
"Please," came his response.

That was my moment of glory, my moment of power. He'd walked all over me and made me feel like nothing, but this was mine. He certainly didn't take everything from me. Without this, I'd have given up a long time ago. He didn't take all of me. I stood up to him. And he knew it.

You might think that this is something and nothing. But it was a huge deal to me. I'm crap and standing up to people at the best of times, but in this situation, it was nothing short of a miracle.

The guy got away, we called the police and he was soon apprehended. He didn't have a getaway car. He was going to go on the bus. He was opening a bundle of fifty pound notes when the police found him. I expect he was hoping the bus driver would have change.