Steven

My father, Steven Hostettler. Armed robber. Known for escaping from custody. The nickname “Armed Gobber” attached itself to him in certain circles and never fully left. Reputation is a kind of weather. It travels ahead of the man and stays after he is gone.

In 1991 he escaped from Wandsworth Prison. While at large he robbed a fishing-tackle and trainer shop. He gave me the best Nikes and the best fishing tackle he could steal. That is one of the clearer memories of him: the gear appearing, the knowledge of where it had come from, the short window before he was taken back inside. The Nikes were too good for the life I was living. They stood out. The fishing tackle was better than anything I had held before. Both carried the same message: this is what he can still do even when the system thinks it has him. For a short time I had something that came from him and was better than the surroundings. Then the window closed again.

His total sentence ran to twenty-one years. He was notorious and dangerous. He loved the art of armed robbery and the art of getting out of custody. Those were the two skills that defined him in the stories that travelled. The family stories around him never quite matched the public record or each other. The “childhood sweethearts” version of how he and my mother came together later proved false. Contradictions sat inside the official narrative the same way they sat inside every other official narrative that touched my life. He was a presence and an absence at the same time. The reputation travelled further than the man. When people spoke about him they spoke about the escapes and the robberies. When I think about him I think about the Nikes and the short window of time they existed in my hands before everything closed over again.

Frederick Dennis Hostettler sits further back in the same bloodline. Military side. Colchester. Army prison records that do not surface easily in open searches. Place of birth and next of kin details locked behind the usual Ministry of Defence walls. The respectable military stock on one side of the family and the firm on the other. A child placed at the intersection with protection from neither. That intersection is the real geography of the early life. Not a single house. A fault line.