from The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

To limit the damage, for I've always loved fine glassware, I restricted myself, when they tried to take my drum away at night, even though it belonged in bed with me, to punishing one or more light bulbs from the fourfold effort of our living-room lamp. Thus on my fourth birthday, in early September nineteen twenty-eight, I plunged the entire assembled birthday company - my parents, the Bronskis, Grandmother Koljaiczek, the Schefflers, and the Greffs, who had given me everything under the sun: tin soldiers, a sailing ship, a fire engine, but no tin drum - plunged the whole lot of them, who wanted to waste my time playing with tin soldiers, with all this fire-engine nonsense, who begrudged me my battered but trusty drum, who planned to take it away and palm off on me instead a silly little ship with the top sails set all wrong, all those with eyes only to overlook me and my wishes - plunged them all, with an expanding circular scream that slew all four light bulbs of our hanging lamp into primeval darkness.

(translated by Breon Mitchell, Vintage Books, London, 2010, page 56)