Being visible as black and out as a lesbian at Stirling, JK attracted malevolent attention from the British Movement (which later changed its name for some time to the British National Socialist Movement before having its ideological territory taken over by the equally hateful British National Party in 1982). A poster went up in multiple copies around the university which read in part: Would you be seen with that Irish Catholic wog called Jackie Kay? and which had razor-blades attached behind it, presumably to injure anybody who tried taking it down. JK was badly shaken. She had already encountered incidents of verbal taunts and worse from the time she started school (at six). In those days her brother would protect her and sort out her enemies. Just as adult racism was worse than children's racism, so racism among the privileged was worse than among the deprived. In a London underground station in summer 1981, a bunch of thugs menaced JK and some of her friends with broken bottles and when the youngest friend, a girl of sixteen, retaliated, she got her face smashed. Worse even than this was that a couple of well-dressed businessmen to whom JK appealed for help said: No, we support them.

Maria De Camp (later MTK ) was the object of a drunken sexual assault by the leading actor John Philip Kemble (whose brother she later married).

It is impossible to tell at this distance of time how John Kempe would have seen his threat of raping his wife.

The brother-in-laws' quarrel was vicious: Kipling had Balestier arrested for threatening violence. When the story emerged, Kipling was savaged in the press and embarrassed in the courtroom by losing his case.

LCL later described to Sydney Morgan the episode which she called my fracas with the page, which made such noise,and which she regarded as a crucial step towards her eventual legal separation from her husband. She was, she wrote, playing ball indoors with this page, who had a mischievous habit of throwing squibs or firecrackers into the fire. When he did this during their game, she threw the ball at his head, and hit him. He began to bleed, and cried out, Oh, my lady, you have killed me! Out of my senses, I flew into the hall, and screamed, Oh God, I have murdered the page! Though her account does not make it appear that any serious injury was caused, this led her husband to say he would no longer live with her. Still, their separation on this occasion was only temporary.

In a quarrel involving a girl living in their household as her apprentice, Mary Lamb fatally stabbed her mother (who had apparently come between her and the apprentice), with a sharp knife.

Her adolescence was powerfully marked by the second world war. She lived through the deaths of many boys whom she knew, and tried to enlist in the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service (which, however, stopped recruiting just too early for her).

This schoolgirl grabbed CL 's hand while, according to her sister Emily 's memoir, she said: you little fairy, I could squeeze you to death, you are so small; and as to your little hand, I could crush it to atoms. The hand was in fact severely injured, and narrowly escaped amputation. It was not fully functional for the rest of CL 's life.

When DL was five, her father Norman Levy was taken away by members of the security police.

In the Irish political disturbances of the late eighteenth century, the Wilkinson family home was forced in the night and plundered of arms in 1795.

He was credibly charged with attempted murder, as well as extortion, theft, rape, cattle rustling, robbery of the local abbey, and deer stealing and enormous damage to property.

In the midst of these events, KM 's lesbian relationship with Ellen Hewett ended painfully. Hewett, who had begun to support KM financially, spoke with another woman about her unhappiness and in a quarrel soon afterwards Marsden struck and injured her. Hewett then returned to New Zealand.

MLM 's husband was always inclined to spend more money than the family possessed. As time went on he developed personality problems in the form of violent bouts of rage. These were attributed to a wound in the head in the Crimea, six years before his marriage, which had left him with pieces of shrapnel in the brain.

Palazzi had accompanied her from Lovere to Gottolengo a couple of months earlier, and effectively prevented her from going further. She now had a hired carriage broken and her journey interrupted by a thug with a firearm. She made the discovery that all her property deeds had been stolen and blank paper left in their place. She was urged, under implicit threat of violence, to sign a disclaimer exonerating Palazzi from any wrong-doing. At her absolute refusal to sign, Palazzi backed down, perhaps owing to the influence of his aunt, who seems to have sided with Lady Mary against her nephew.

He thought it prudent to sign, to save my barns from conflagration.

Shortly before they left St Andrews, they experienced the town's only bombing. The last bomb the German plane dropped on the city grazed their front door, splintering the wood but amazingly leaving the house undamaged and its occupants unhurt.

During the war of independence she and her mother more than once fled from their home, moving inland because of the attraction of sea ports as targets of naval bombardment.

Arrested for her political activity, she endured great hardships in prison, where she went by a name she used in her life as a Communist: Theresa Landale. After another arrest her trial resulted in a hung jury and her eventual release.