(To be published in 2nd Edition © Eric Leclere 2006, All rights reserved)

A while back, someone asked me why I wrote A Place of Gardens and Lilies. I thought about it for a few months and ended up writing what follows.

The man and woman, sharp suited strangers come into the twilight of my great-grandmother’s concierge lodge on the Champs-Elysées to take me away in their car, followed the road out of France and into Belgium to a busy Brussels nightclub where, having branded me a friend’s son to staff and clientele made curious by the sight of my having a late meal at a table by the bar, the woman led the way to an upstairs room, handed me some clean pyjamas and tucked me into bed. I was four or maybe five years old, can’t be sure, wore short pants, had seen my first cow and meadow on the road trip earlier and found sleep at once, yielding to gravity, too jaded to worry about where I was, what morning would bring, for how long or why. Besides, it wasn’t bad to lie alone in the dark with the sound of people living it up one storey below – made a change from sharing my great-grandmother’s bed shrouded in her lumbering breaths – and the room around me was neat, straight lines and soft furnishing, better than what I knew, and the woman who’d brought me there, who went by the name of Françoise – the man was called Michel – looked and smiled and smelled fine. It felt safe, I was safe, and the way things were, when required – though I’d yet to put this impulse into words inside my head – I already knew not to dwell on things I lost or did not have, reminding myself instead of things that I didn’t want that I didn’t have. As good a way as any to bring colour into grey, I guess, some childish play on relativity conjured from having no one to talk to in a world of gold sparkling unsteadily on account of matters I knew nothing about happening among grown-ups.

“How about the three of us playing a game till we get to where we’re going, eh kid? Ever play the Pretend Game? You know, when you pretend you and the folks around are different from who you really are? It’s fun.”
Outside, lines of wind-blown trees sailed past the car window, ashen clouds dragged down the sky, with wispier lighter ones racing across beneath. Autumn was turning into winter and the light was fading.
“How would you like to pretend me and Françoise here are your mum and dad, huh? And we’ll pretend you’re our son, that your name is Bruno, and that we’re all heading back home to Brussels from visiting your great-grandma in Paris. Do you think you could do that? You think you could call us Mum and Dad if we call you Bruno?”

I’d never heard of this game, failed to see the fun of it, but as they went on to say it would be particularly important to act our parts well if stopped by guards at the French-Belgian border, I figured I’d better go along with it. In the event, we made our way across the border unhindered, in the dark along an empty country lane, and the game was called off with my being handed a toy gun as a reward for having been a good sport – a plastic six-shooter in a cardboard box with a picture of a cowboy which I kept silently on my lap for the rest of the trip. There was no point in asking questions. For one thing, it was plain this ride would go on no matter what; for another, I was too shy to ask questions, which was just as well since – I wouldn’t be told this the next morning, only some years later – it turned out that on that day these two were smuggling me out of France to save me from being taken into care by the Paris Social Services. Still, at the time such a piece of information would probably have left me cold, counted as worthless knowledge, most certainly never have led to my pondering weighty matters such as whether it meant I was now some kind of fugitive or outlaw or refugee in Belgium. Or they my kidnappers.

My great-grandmother had said “These folks have been sent by your dad to take you to some place better for you”, handed them a bag with my things and sent me on my way. And I’d left as if it was the only thing to do, never asking where for or whether “dad” would be there, even though – or maybe because – I’d never met “dad”. By then “dad” was a far-off stranger who for some reason cared to send me the odd toy by way of parcel post. It wasn’t much to go on, but the way I figured, anyone who sent me toys had to be all right. To be sure, he couldn’t be bad, or worse than anyone I’d already come across. So life was likely to be better with him than without him. And anyone who knew him had to be all right too. There’s no denying it, the man’s brown-paper parcels had steered my mind a long way towards being well disposed towards their sender.

I’ve heard it said that each life is a journey, that some inherit first-class passes, that junkyard campfires sustain stowaways, and paying through the nose for a cut-price front seat is no guarantee against tripping on barbed wire. Maybe all or some of this is true, and so the law being an ass is no real issue, merely another hurdle to skip over along the way.

In France some years back, though this may well still be the case nowadays, the law stated that children born out of wedlock were illegitimate, had to bear their mother’s name, and made it so that the mother was also their sole legal guardian, thus stripping the father of all rights over the child’s affairs. In my head, life began at my mother’s parents’, two low-ceilinged rooms off a corridor up high in the eaves of an old block of flats a stone’s throw from the Champs-Elysées. One of the rooms was everything the other, a bedroom filled with beds, wasn’t, and five of us lived there: my grandparents, my mother’s teenage sister, her younger brother and me. My mother’s sister had shiny black hair and crimson lips and nails, and my grandfather smelled of wine and was known to go off into drunken fits during which he let rip through everyone and everything that moved but me, who he never spoke to, struck or even looked at. As he also often ran out of wine, I was almost as often sent down the shop to get more, as a result spending a great deal of my conscious time there holding onto a string bag going down and then coming back up the long unlit stairwell between our top corridor and the building courtyard. I never really understood who I was to these people, what my place among them was. They must have told me what their relation to me was, but as I didn’t know my mother it didn’t mean much. What was plain though was that I was work to them, a responsibility or duty or both, that some kind of price was being paid for my being there. But I was well-looked after, kept from hunger, the cold and danger, and now and again my mother’s sister would take me along for the short distance to the department store across the Champs-Elysées where she worked before sending me back home with a few sweets.

I had no complaints. I was safe. Had I been asked I’d have stayed there, made it the only home I ever needed to know, but nobody asked and then one day I was taken to hospital with the measles not to be allowed back when I got better. I don’t recall being sad, or any out-of-the-ordinary feeling, when a woman with black hair and sunglasses turned up at the hospital one afternoon with a “I suppose you don’t remember me” before announcing she was my mother and then leaving never to be seen again, but I remember liking it when her sister showed up some time later to take me to her grandmother’s a few blocks down the Champs-Elysées from her department store. She left me there promising to visit often, having explained that, owing to my grandfather’s fits, the old place was no longer good for me. I’m not sure I understood what she meant by this, but seeing that it seemed like the only thing to do, I took her word for it. Be that as it may, this was a goodbye for good.

Whispered shadows, cobweb skin, creased morning sheets, fairytales from a small radio high up on a chest of drawers. My great-grandmother’s place also counted two rooms: one her living quarters, the other her concierge lodge where she dozed away the hours in between handing out mail and trading small talk with fleeting faces looking in from the building’s echoing entrance hall. As she hardly ever ventured out of her slippers or opened any doors, and wouldn’t allow me out on my own, time there became a matter of sitting on the floor killing the days playing with my toys – dad’s as well as, by now, a few more donated by some of her building’s residents. I don’t know how long the two of us shared our lives for – no less than a month, no more than a couple of years – but it was never meant to last. Even then, even to my uncritical eyes, the arrangement had the feel of an unnatural affair. Like dusk to dawn, she was shade where fruits ought to ripen, shut in where space ought to unfurl. Too old and fast getting older to look after a four or five-year-old. Had I been asked, sought to remain there – had she been keen – the chances are it could never have happened. The way things turned out though, the end came in much the same way the beginning had begun: without warning and without my being asked anything. One day the strangers named Michel and Françoise had showed up to take me “to a place better for you” and the old woman had given me the last kiss her withered lips would ever offer me and sent me on my way. And I’d gone as if it was the only thing to do, as if there was nothing to refuse, readily made for the life on the other side of the front door, unaware and unconcerned that it would be some years before the grown-ups would let on enough to enable me to give sense to this story, and learn whose child I was.

As far as the chain of events which led to my being shipped to Belgium goes, the links would follow a straightforward enough course. Soon after my birth in Paris my father was sentenced to several years in a German prison. Remaining in France, my mother tried single-motherhood until, a couple of years into doing what she was supposed to, she left me at her parents’ to set off for a new life in the United States. At this point, it may well be that had grandpa taken a chance on his wayward daughter’s love child, or been better off or less partial to drink or prone to letting rip, I may never have been sent away to my great-grandmother’s. But I was, and eventually someone other than myself must have felt this arrangement to be unnatural. One day great-grandma had written to dad in his German prison to warn him that Paris Social Services were about to come to take me away, and he in turn had sent Belgian friends of his to spirit me away out of reach of the French authorities. Since he and my mother had never married, the law wouldn’t have allowed for him to appoint a guardian to look after me while he was in prison, never mind accepting him as my legal guardian once he’d served his time, so, short of leaving me to my fate, he did the only thing he could. Up in Belgium, I didn’t exist, had never been born, would not be the subject of a search, could be anybody’s child, like, for instance, one Bruno, son of Michel and Françoise on their way back home to Brussels from visiting great-grandma in Paris.

I never became Michel and Françoise’s son though, slept in the neat room above their nightclub only a few nights. They already had a son about the same age as me by the name of Bruno, which, in fact, was the reason they’d been chosen to collect me; in the event that we’d been stopped at the Franco-Belgian border, they conveniently held bona fide documents supporting our pretend family story. Still, thinking about this now, I wonder what would have occurred if we had met with a border patrol and, say, I’d stupidly given the game away. Then again, knowing what I now know, it’s likely that they were ready for such a contingency. For sure, they wouldn’t have stood by the side of the road not knowing what to do. After all, this wasn’t a dream.

Some years later, seated on the front passenger seat of an Alfa Romeo convertible, I once again crossed the Franco-Belgian border. Like the time before, it happened on a quiet country lane, though on this occasion heading in the opposite direction, from Belgium into France. Next to me at the wheel sat my father. He was taking us to Southern Spain for the summer holiday, I was eleven, he was forty-three. We’d spent the previous night at a nearby hotel, woken at dawn, found the road across the border open. Then, a short way into France, the rising sun was in my eyes and his were on the road, my father reached for my knee, squeezed and whispered loudly enough for my ears to catch above the car’s engine: “We did it again, son.”

Probably, this remark was nothing special to him, a way to let off some tension once safely across the border; a “phew” with a quick glance at the rearview mirror. To me though, it changed things. For the first time that I can recall, it allowed me to feel like I belonged, that more than the moment I was in mattered.

Experience – one time, while high, a junkie who’d just been quizzing me about my life after I let him stay at my place with some friends when I was fifteen asked how come I didn’t think my father a “bastard”; years later, commenting on a story involving my father and I that I wrote, a film director declared “I know it’s true, but it doesn’t sound like truth”; and there would also be those couple of girls who would charge me with trying to play them – experience taught me that there are risks involved in venturing to convey unfamiliar realities. So, any attempt at explaining what this “We did it again, son” meant to me on that morning is maybe doomed. Now and again though, some things can get through. Sometimes, some things play right into the soul. And these few words did just that for me on that morning. Their inclusiveness, their implied affirmation of triumph, of togetherness, opened me up. Certainly, the world outside carried on sparkling just as unsteadily as it had before, but for the first time, I saw it no longer as if through a keyhole, boxed-in visions of strangers to cooperate with or be wary of, presenting no reason or direction to look further than the present. “We did it again, son”. I asked no questions, didn’t squint away from the sun. Seated next to my father in that car coasting through the open French countryside, it wouldn’t be far from the truth – even if it doesn’t sound like the truth – it wouldn’t be far from the truth to say that the atoms spinning the air around me loosened and swelled with whatever it is that is within that line of Elton John’s song that goes “how wonderful life is now you’re in the world”.

For the first time I can recall, I found myself happy to accept there were possibilities, could be better days to come.

My grandparents and Paris were almost illusions by then. Things had happened, the grown-ups let on enough to allow me to get a good idea of whose child I was. Why I was living in Brussels was no longer a mystery. I knew mother had gone and father had a gun and was a gangster or bandit or outlaw – it all meant the same to me. I’d first met him three years earlier, in a prison visiting room shortly before his release. He’d served eight years and I was eight. I remember thinking about this, him being locked up everyday of my life, and reckoned those eight years must have been for him like what it would have been for me if I’d stayed at my great-grandmother’s for all that time. In the three years between landing in Brussels and my father coming out of prison – when I moved in with him – I’d stayed in so many places with so many faces I never actually caught some of their names. Most belonged to women though, the types some call bad girls; I think they took turns looking after me. Some of it was hard, some taken for granted, none of it ever ugly. At some point during this period I’d also started school, where I lied about my name, address and almost everything else, when asked about home saying I stayed at my aunt’s on account of mother convalescing in Switzerland and father being away on business. I must have made a good liar, no one ever challenged my stories, but again I was told what to say. Understanding safety to rest on such deceit, I took to lying like a bird to a wire. Besides, as I’d never done anything bad – or come to that been accused of doing anything bad, not as far as I knew anyhow – I was never going to imagine it wrong or bad of me to lie. Rather, my having to hide the truth simply to be free to stay with the folks who looked out for me suggested that it was they who had to be lied to who were bad. They plainly didn’t wish me good things. And if anything, in this respect, instead of softening, this need to be on guard hardened when my father landed on my horizon.

Eight years in prison hadn’t brought riches. Money had to be made and he made it the best way he knew how. I wasn’t exactly kept informed of what he was up to, but kids have eyes and ears, so, wise that careless words could put his freedom at risk again, it became even more important for me to feed strangers a script. It wasn’t hard though. Having met the man, though I’d go on calling him Monsieur in confusion and shyness for some time, and he never tamed me, I soon enough realized that I much preferred life with him in it. To be sure, he didn’t do only good things, he even did some bad things, I guess, but he was “dad”, the brown-paper parcel man, he who from prison had saved me from the orphanage, got people to protect me, now was there in full and in colour to care and give me time that I’d never received before. I don’t believe I ever stopped to think about the nature of his occupation. Other than inciting storms of worries that he may be put back in prison or shot down, it had no meaning. Of course, there’d be times in years to come when I would hold it against him, and others when I would admire him for being prepared to risk his life and freedom to bring home food and keep us warm, but not yet. Those were early-shared days, our wary honeymoon, timid time feeling ways. Everything was new and dissolved into a big newness, and of the many things I learnt about the man during our first three years together, only one stirred enough swirling thoughts and emotions to stand out above the rest.

My father was Hungarian, not, as I’d taken for granted, French like me – though he no longer could claim Hungarian citizenship given that his only official identity document was a grey sheet of paper identifying him as a stateless United Nations Refugee. The reason for this was that he was also born a Jew, and for that had seen the inside of Auschwitz and Dachau during WW2, had had his entire family killed in there, and once freed and recovered from typhus had decided against heading back home, in part because he had no home to go back to, in part because to an eighteen year old who’d gone through what he’d gone through it hardly made sense to go backwards.

At the time of finding out about this, I only knew the word Jew as a mild insult, an easy term of abuse shared between kids in Brussels school playgrounds. As to Auschwitz and Dachau, a kid would have had to go out of his way not to hear mention of concentration and extermination camps, but I believed they weren’t real, merely scary places belonging to grim tales of weird beings, like stories about cannibals or Cyclops, not part of the life from which I was born. To learn they were a part of that was unsettling. Never made it onto the worthless knowledge pile. To learn that my father belonged to a tribe other tribes wanted to destroy led to my asking for reasons and explanations, and when I accepted that a Jew is not a monster, and it became clear that my father had not even been a gangster or anything like that when they’d come to take him away to kill him, that like me maybe he hadn’t done anything to deserve being hurt, I swear, sitting alone on my bed one night I swore that I too would have a gun one day, and, in the meantime, if it could be helped, that none of those strangers who needed lying to should ever intrude in our life.

For the time being though, I could stop wondering why the man, like me again, had come without a family of his own. And how come his fine shoes, sharp suits and easy smile never quite concealed his tired eyes, even if, I swear to this too, he never complained or raged about anything or against anyone. Except once perhaps.

I was still illegally in Belgium, missing in France and, for want of ID documents, unable to travel or normalize my situation with the Belgians. The only place to go to try to sort things out was the French Consulate in Brussels. It was a dangerous thing to do. With me being a minor and he being wanted by the French police as well as still having no legal rights over me, the risk that we’d both be held once inside the Consulate walls was real. But, seeing that it is a legal requirement for all French citizens to hold valid ID papers, he’d decided to hope that on hearing what he had to say about my mother being gone and him being in prison and the mess I was in, they would not only let us go but also take enough pity on me to issue me with the documents I needed.

He never stood a chance. The best he got out of the fine woman across the desk of the elegant office we’d been shown into was what he already knew: any proceedings on my behalf required my mother’s sanction. I’d never seen the man plead, beg and bang his fist and stamp his feet. “Why are you punishing the boy for our sins?” I don’t know what was going on in the woman’s head, but I remember her red shirt, pearl brooch and drop earrings, and the glint in her eyes when she said “On this occasion we won’t take the child or arrest you. But this won’t be an option if you show up here again. If you’re so set on sorting out the child’s status, I suggest you go through the courts to get custody from his mother.”

We were well on our way home when my father gave me a “I’m sorry, son”, and then went on “Still, you must not judge what you are not.” I failed to understand what he was offering, but could see from his knitted brows that he was a raging battle inside.
For myself, there was nothing like that. I was glad to be heading back home. The well-mannered cruelty of the suggestion that a wanted man with a criminal record could win custody of his son through the courts never hit me. Nor could I imagine that I’d remain ID-less for some years to come, only be able to travel using false passports – in the event, the Belgians would also order me out of the country before my sixteenth birthday; I would return to France to hide in Paris for a while, and then move on before being called on to perform my citizen’s duty in the French military, and be declared insoumi (and all that entails) for not running to enroll.

After all these years I still remember the fine woman in the red shirt. That time spent with her is the only time I saw my father frantic. Thinking about it afterwards, the glint in her eyes, her words, I’d decided that she’d scared him, reckoned that her holding our freedom in her hands and not helping had brought back to his mind memories of the time they’d taken him and his kin in broad daylight and no one had been there to help. That’s what I figured then. But many crazy patterns and stepping-stones and hazy outcomes on, I recognize that it was only me who was scared. Him, he was finding it tough, that’s all.
I hope she got what she deserved.

That is how far I’d traveled by that morning when, safely across the border into France, my father reached for my knee and whispered “We did it again, son.” The car was an Alfa Romeo. The road open country lane. We were heading south for the summer and the sun was in my eyes. I was eleven, he forty-three. But I don’t recall the names in our passports, whether they made us father and son. There would be more trips and border posts and the names would all get lost. But the man’s words, they’re still there. Before, only the present mattered; after, it was much better. Their inclusiveness, implied affirmation of triumph and togetherness, made me less scared. Helped me face the possibility of better days to come.
That’s why I wrote A Place of Gardens and Lilies, came up with Al Winston, a loser for a Godless world. Because of those times of hope, and those other times when to give them up seems like the easy road. Because the ruin of many of us often stems from our inability to become as corrupt as our leading few.

Torn shoes on the sidewalk. Twines of blood and broken dreams on the kerb. It’s a catastrophe. Sometime in June 2002, just before summer, some young guy with a grievance stepped into a packed bus and blew himself up. Set on destroying as many lives as possible, he slaughtered nineteen, maimed forty and, or so I’m told, for this selfless impiety of his reckoned he’d be heading straight to Heaven. Soon afterwards, with some moaning still to get under way, and the living still to be sorted from the dead, commenting on the affair from some charity do she was presiding over in London the wife of the British Prime Minister came up with “As long as young people feel that they have no hope but to blow themselves up, you are never going to make progress.” No words for the nineteen dead and forty wounded; whether they too were young, they too had had no hope, whether, if they did have hope, they’d just been cheated. And no words for those they left behind, who’d now have to learn to give them up. But the youth they never knew and who may well have seen the whites of their eyes before he blasted off to Heaven, well, he was young and presumed to have no hopes.

One year on and more moans and reaping reams of guilty crimes later, and some young woman with a grievance stepped into a crowded restaurant and blew herself up. Tearing through the autumn afternoon, set on ruining as many lives as possible, she slew nineteen, maimed sixty and, she figured, for this selfless desecration of hers would join the ranks of humanity’s martyrs. A few days later, with the charred ground still groaning, the Guardian Media Group printed through The Observer newspaper a piece headed “The Revenger’s Tragedy”, the revenger being she who’d just turned mass-murderer, the tragedy her story. One line told of her age and name and hopes, another of red ripening fruits and pomegranate trees, most spoke of her loves and wounds and trials and pain, and a couple of her ruby lips and the bashful blushes that claimed her cheeks as, the day before she set out to die, she announced on camera the wounds, trials and pain she was about to dispense. But of the tragedy of any of the strangers and diners she slew, maybe they never knew any, or if they did there was nothing there worth telling as, plainly, none had hurt enough to turn into ruby or cracked lipped mass-murderers before dying. They’d died celebrating the New Year though.

A few months on to the summer of 2004, more premeditated pre-recorded crowd ripping pomegranate tragedies later, and the good elected Mayor of the great open city of London, one Ken Livingstone, welcomed on behalf of all his town folk some much revered scholar. This distinguished man, who also happened to be a Trustee of Oxford University, declared he welcomed deaths such as the ruby-lipped revenger’s, styled her and all deaths such as hers martyrdoms in the eyes of God, dubbed her young body a weapon of the weak. And the good Mayor of London? Well, on behalf of each and all of his town folk he gallantly lauded the man’s moderate views and wisdom.

And at some point along the way while all this goodwill and understanding towards crowd-killers unrolled, an honorable member of the British Houses of Parliament obligingly disclosed that, had she been born braver and had she too felt despair such as that known by those who blow others away, she too may well have sought mass-murdering Heaven-seeking martyrdom. In the event, she was spared that road. Rather, for her contribution to humanity, they made her Baroness Tonge of Kew in The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, and she headed straight for the House of Lords.

Now, I understand about demographics and the way the wind blows. And that there isn’t much some wouldn’t do to get ahead. Newspaper editors need to keep their eyes on copy numbers, rabble-rousing politicians on disgruntled voters, and comely prime ministers’ spouses must be seen to foster charitable organisations for registered losers. It’s all for the love of thee and there’s no telling what tomorrow’s decreed crimes and virtues will be. But surely, with power and influence comes responsibility. Surely, it can be hard to get things right, but how hard can it be to get it all so wrong.

The exhibition of so much generosity and understanding expended on so much murder troubled me. Touched uncharted shadows and sent arrows across the sky. And the sky changed colours, thunder cracked, the waters billowed. It appeared that, like some pirate of the high sea, a proposition not known about before had been lurking beyond the horizon. According to some, given they had the right credentials, some others now held a special passport on their person. A special passport spawned of hardship, despair and unaddressed grievances. A special passport granting goodwill from influential men and women and express admission to Heaven from God to anyone willing to die in the act of killing. A special passport where I could see none.

And I started wondering what was going on. Pictured towns, deserts, rivers, oceans and islands. And peaks, caves, yards, bridges and burial grounds. And webs of trails winding and twisting in every direction. Bowed, hunched furrows. Dirt. Dead-ends pounded by aching feet. Bad fares and stationary queues. The sick, the poor and desperate. The cheated, scorned, spurned and maligned. The relatives of all who died trying, or died dying to die or died tired of living. The iron chains of the enslaved and shackled hands of the damned. The so hopelessly hurt and shy they ask no questions. The children without nations and the braves of defeated nations. The populations in need of being saved and the populations with nothing to save. And the sky erupted. What if tomorrow these untold armies of unsung soldiers of despair were to decide enough was enough? Having found the expressway to Heaven, determined to buckle-up and buckle down to blow the whole damn place to Kingdom come? And for a moment there, I swear, drowning in bitter waters, I asked myself how come my father had never thought of avenging the cold-blooded legal and organised slaughter of his people? Why, after Auschwitz and Dachau and before no one and nowhere to go, finding it so hard to smile at or pardon you, instead of grabbing a gun to hold up a jeweler and landing eight years in jail for stumbling while getting away, why he had not instead turned himself into a martyr and sought a crowd to ruin and burn? Why, instead of going on bearing it, he hadn’t given in to revenge when, having failed to take away his son, the French then did what they could to ensure the son would pay for sins that had nothing to do with him? Why, instead of taking the trouble to provide me shelter and false papers, instead of trying to be a father, to be a family, dad hadn’t primed the both of us and, one day, one other dark day, at that time of the year when the good people plan their holidays, why, having primed us, he’d not then walked us into a crowded French Consulate where, at the cost of some heat and the sun turning cold, he could have got us both passports to Heaven in one go? After all, the forecast for the future was grim. The report for the present filled with necessary lies. What if that summer morning in that Alfa Romeo, instead of being armed with false passports, he’d aimed for a busy border post and, with the sun in our eyes, instead of reaching for my knee with a soft “we did it again, son”, he’d held up some martyr passport and made straight for Heaven?

I swear, I did wonder about this. And whether, if such a catastrophe were to happen tomorrow, the British prime minister’s wife would talk of lack of hope and getting nowhere; and whether the Guardian Media Group would use one of its newspapers to publish our story as a revenger’s tragedy feature; and whether some much esteemed scholar would come forward to declare us martyrs in the eyes of God; and whether the good Mayor of the open city of London would then praise the man on behalf of all his town folk; and whether Baroness Tonge of Kew in The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames would suggest that, had she been more fearless and known my father’s life, well, she too may have done what he’d done.

There was no need to wonder though. One day in July 2005 – one month after the publication of A Place of Gardens and Lilies – four young guys with grievances bought tickets to ride the London Public Transport system. Set on harming as many as possible, they blew themselves up, slaughtered dozens, maimed scores and, they must have thought, for this selfless sacrifice of theirs would be held as martyrs in the eyes of God, tragic revengers or, seeing as they weren’t that old, youths without hope. It is possible that, in some houses and societies anyway, they did end up thought of as one or all of these things. Only, no spouse of any British Prime or any other type of minister mentioned their youth or despair. And the Guardian Media Group newspapers never dignified their individual or collective story as tragedy, styled them revengers, or remarked on the colour of their lips or front yard trees. Nor did the distinguished scholar who was also a trustee of Oxford University; instead, this one let it be known that their death wasn’t welcomed as martyrdom in the eyes of God, so possibly shut them out of Paradise. As for the good Mayor of London, well, on behalf of each and all of his town folk, in a speech any politician would be proud of, he turned all the way round and unequivocally denounced the death and devastation they sowed. This left Baroness Tonge of Kew in The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, but although her thoughts on the event weren’t made public, I trust that on this occasion she too must be on record as condemning the four, and like the rest of the world expressed sympathy for the dead, the maimed, their families, their friends, colleagues, loved ones and the many of the rescue services. That her voice wasn’t heard was probably due to it being lost in the great chorus of politicians, newspapers editors, pundits and others with opinions to air who united to praise the public for standing together in the face of terrible adversity, most spelling out in the strongest of terms that there was no place at all for suicide bombers in the British context.

So, it turned out that these four with grievances, by aiming for martyrdom in the British context, had erred. They would not be elevated to Heaven, styled tragic revengers or regarded as prisoners of despair or youths without direction. These four were to blame. Every one of their murders could be pinned on them. These four were stupid, had failed to realize the danger that, in some minds, there are nuances when it comes to massacring commuters in cold blood. Nobody can say whether one or the four of them garnered the courage to do what they did from words they read or heard coming from our elected leaders, their spouses, newspaper editors or university professors, but to be sure, that the same act may be seen as Martyrdom in the eyes of God for taking place in one place and as plain slaughter for coming to pass in another seemed to have passed them by. Maybe these four, all primed to die as they were, had yet to grasp the meaning of double standards. What I’d like to know though is, had they, in the pursuit of Martyrdom, swapped the British context of London for the Israeli context of Tel Aviv or Haifa – just in case, the previous self-immolations mentioned here all took place in Israel – what legends would have been spun around their farewell, how much compassion would have rung from our timekeepers and trendsetters’ towers. How long would the minute of silence in honour of those they’d sent into the shadows have lasted? But maybe, charged with loaded dice, this better not be asked.

There are wild places of thunder where everyone can go wrong. Embarrassing scenes, bad stains, unholy gardens. Dark rolling spaces disagreeable to step into. Lethal doses. Perverse madness that make the skin crawl. And this business did just that: my skin crawled. That some mothers and fathers elect to understand cold-blooded mass-murderers is depressing. That educated folks should depict them as revengers with tragedies and cold-finger their victims is decidedly alarming. But to realize that all the goodwill and understanding for the horror and pain they deal out is contextual, subject to the nationality of the commuters murdered, well, this is seriously nauseating. It stabs. It’s enough to make you feel so sad and lonely you end up wondering what you’re doing here. If there’s a name for this take on life and death – could it be inverted morality, amorality, moral depravity? – I need to look it up in the dictionary. It’s the sort of thing I never thought I’d need to prepare for. The sort of thing nobody should ever be prepared for. The sort of thing you hope, if you really must go there one day, to meet on another day, but never today.

I only ever wondered for the blink of an eye why my father never resorted to turning his story into what, had he been who he wasn’t, the Guardian Media Group may well have branded a revenger’s tragedy. The truth is, it never entered his mind. Torn shoes on sidewalks and reams of broken dreams, there’s nothing to understand about folks who willfully set out to murder passers-by. Look around, roam past the guardians of opinions and, never mind what some may hold, being cheated, breathing despair, longing for decency or seeking revenge or reparation doesn’t make people turn their bodies and souls into wholesale killing machines. How many of us would be left if it did? The die-to-kill notion belongs to others, less desperate, less impressionable, more calculating, profiteers of grief and fear who have no scruple in steering weaker souls into doing their grim bidding; others with convictions, religion, personal ambitions to attend to. Aspiring to die killing strangers is not an act of desperation but of self-assertion. It is not defensive but aggressive. It is the ultimate pettiness. Total ruin. The loftiest fuck-you. The final snub from mediocrities too indifferent to compete or stand up. A cowardly shortcut to whatever awaits in the beyond. Anyone who thinks otherwise ought to, like Baroness Tonge of Kew in The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames convinced herself she did maybe, proceed there in spirit and imagine pushing that button. Or, next time it proves necessary, volunteer to pick up the pieces, find the bodies and see what ghosts come to haunt them.

Some nights, heeding to such horrors, overhearing all the madness engaged in understanding it, it’s hard not to take fright. To rage or cry at the dispatches. Some nights it drives to anger, on others to looking away, and some days to visions of getting used to it, anything to sidestep sinking into despair; give up, give in and learn to love death.

Sometime in 2004 I put aside a thriller I was working on – a story set in London’s film world that was going to be the second Lombard novel – and set out to write A Place of Gardens and Lilies. I needed to do something. To find a way to remind myself of that “we did it again, son” moment. I needed to go back there, to have the sun in my eyes, feel the air full of diamonds. And Al Winston turned up for the ride. He is a diamond, too rough to have certainties, too lost to do good, too scared to do well, but shining too bright to succumb to ugliness. He is water from a well, too healthy to subscribe to the proposition that context justifies everything, even that which cannot be seen. But maybe, while spinning out his wings, I failed in telling his journey, lacked clarity, took it too far or not far enough. Some way into writing the novel, hoping to get it properly published and distributed – unlike what had come about with my previous book, The Lost Son – I remember writing to about seventy British publishers and agents, offering to send an outline of the story together with the chapters I had already completed. The way these things go, I found just two takers, the others all declining even to take a look at the outline. Still, when a few months later I chased up these two, each passed citing their failure to identify with Al Winston or understand his motivation. I think I wrote back only to one of them, explained it hadn’t been my intention to write Al as a beast for all men and women to identify with; on the contrary, the idea was to ride an alienated good-for-nothing shooting star, to shine and burn with it. I never heard from him again though, but afterwards promised myself to spend more time reading the works of successful contemporary novelists. The likes of Nick Hornby, James Meek, Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, Louis De Bernieres, JM Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Sarah Waters, Salman Rushdie, Will Self, DBC Pierre. These guys clearly have their fingers on the pulse. They know their craft, how to sell their wares. It occurred to me that maybe I had much to learn, a lot of catching up to do, some way to go before reaching the heights they’re at. I figured I had better take a good look at what they were doing and how they were doing it before trying agents and publishers again.

When I started this, I thought I’d write a few lines clarifying that A Place of Gardens and Lilies does not concern itself with the Israeli/Palestinian situation, or conflict, as some prefer to call it. That if the plight of these two peoples finds its way into its pages, in however much of a twisted way, it is only as a means to an end since the proper business of the novel is to concern itself solely with Alan Winston’s universe: his fears, his questions, his sense of alienation, and, eventually, in an awe-induced moment of clarity, his disastrous spur-of-the-moment decision to defer to the ugliness that repulses him as a way to win freedom from further fear, pain and responsibility. Again, the book is about hope, and losing it. Only, since all this ought to be obvious to anyone who’s read the book, and of no concern to anyone who hasn’t, I can no longer see the sense of going there.

Seeing as I also brought the presently elected good Mayor of London into all this – who some see as a cheeky chappie maverick of a man whose virtue cannot be doubted on account of the untold number of hand-picked good causes he champions; in fact, had God and sobriety found a way to his heart, there’d be little to distinguish him from the old thundering self-righteous missionary preachers of bygone days – I also thought I’d try being funny. Try irony even. Remark that, were he and my father to cross paths some day, at least there is one Jew he wouldn’t be able to liken to a concentration camp guard on account of his working for others for money – be it as a restaurant critic or well-remunerated politician. Or that, next time the fancy takes him to judge, or preach or speak on justice, human rights or dignity, he might do well to hang his head and remember his begging cap-in-hand charm-offensive trip to China. In the end though – having heard the man is also prone to slip into telling Jews he frowns on to go back where they came from – the good Mayor of London failed to inspire much laughter. After all, dubious wares and drunken politicians aren’t rare, new or funny, even if, at times, you’d think it ought to be a riot.

And finally, given whose child I am, I thought I’d end this with a few words for my father’s people, the Jews, and that country of theirs called Israel. The idea was that, armed with history, rich with truths gathered from days and nights spent exploring, analyzing and plain looking around the treasures of information and opinions available to all everywhere, I’d come up with at least a handful of salient killer sentences that would kindle the generosity of those who find it so easy to damn Israel, find it seemly to understand the slaughter of her people and question her right to self-determination, never mind her right to exist. After all, to wish to live and die with your head high is a universal desire. And every land meets the sun, the hottest and the iciest, and every nation needs a place to raise their children and bury their dead, and some place to shelter from nature and man-made storms. And where is the house ringed with enemies that keeps its doors unguarded? The cursed father who welcomes those set on murdering his children? And where are the nations, from China to Italy and the USA and Britain and Peru, which aren’t built on conquered land? The great cities and Londons and Jerusalems which aren’t sitting and thriving on vanquished soil, blood and bones? The nations, young and old, that know no sins? Why the Israeli exception?

I’d have liked to go there, come up with something salient, killing words sharp enough to ignite the generosity of they who damn Israel. But about this too I changed my mind. Those heights were never going to be mine. The days and nights looking around for treasures of information and opinions harvested everything I’d hoped for. And more. A lot more. So much more that it dawned on me that everything there is to be said about Israel has already been said. Many times over. It’s all there, everywhere, on the Internet, in books, newspapers, on TV, on some faces. Everything anyone needs to know about who and why. The nuts, the bolts, the good, the bad, the lies that ring true and the truths that don’t sound like truths. People can look at it all all of the time. Past distorted facts and twisted maps and diagrams. Past fears for sale and politicians’ mischief and games. Past selected effigies. It’s all there, a galloping stealing stallion, and, no matter how hard I’d work at it, there’s nothing for me to add. Or to deny. Or prove. What I realized is that, when it comes to Israel, history is adapted into theatres of illusions and reality spun into threads used to weave the sinister coats of new and ancient self-serving myths. The good is made bad, the bad exemplary. Some make wind and others bend with it. People are killed because of this, it should matter, but tomorrow, in the morning, or at half past three in the afternoon, next time some primed young guy or girl with a grievance decides to become a martyr in the Israeli context, it will signify nothing. Docile minds will already be made up, whatever those who shout the loudest say; soft minds will already have yielded, self-interest justifiably served; indignant minds already made out the guilty ones, the ones they like least. And some newspapers, TV news editors, politicians, pundits, novelists and self-styled historians and intellectuals will readily go on promoting the messages that sell best; increased congregation makes for increased circulation makes for increased remuneration. And increased influence. After all, there’s only ever been one game in town, and the winners have always been those who keep their eyes on the high numbers.

Today, in houses and courtyards all across the world, all sorts of wild rumours are spreading about Israel. Most are nasty. Easy-to-spread dirt, contagious lies, charges of ugliness, bargain basement scolding reports. Her contours are being chipped. Her body reviled. Zionism is a dirty word. Her children’s title to her land is questioned. Their need for it discredited and right to defend it the subject of dinner table conversations. Singled-out among nations, it’s also being suggested that her right to self-determination should be the subject of other nations’ “informed debates”. Half close your eyes, prick up your ears and, hisses drifting through a maze of haze, you might find yourself thinking that Israelis are not only neither saints nor martyrs, but bloodthirsty racist fiends. Devoid of humanity. That for sixty odd years now, they schemed to do to the Palestinian Arabs what was done unto them for two millennia? That for sixty odd years they also plotted to conquer vast swathes of land and keep millions of hostile neighbours on their toes just to feed their own children with wars and blood and have them build vast walls and barbed wire fences to live within. Their ancestors’ ordeals are past-history. Their cries for peace trickery. Their aim is world domination. Behind doors, blessed polite society speaks of boycott. Here she is labeled a cancer, there threatened with being wiped off the map. Her people are painted as unfeeling child killers, her friends as controlling the western media, and respected university professors pen papers alleging her supporters command the inner workings of the US of A’s political, economical and military machines, so, aside from everything else that is bad, also implicating her in many of the world’s troubles.

Undertakers looking for bodies, if you could gather all the crimes Israel is charged with, there wouldn’t be enough graveyards to bury them all. Still, year-by-year, month by month, martyrdom-by-martyrdom, like chapters from an inexorable prayer, as the temperature rises, instead of defending her or turning down the heat, many among the so-called Western liberal classes have been joining in the hysteria, capitulated to fear, numbers, easy-pickings and old habits. Writing from their unmade beds, looking away from their own wastelands, stitching it all with words about policies and using-too-much-force, they indict Israel for every calamity that befalls her. Heading for work, trying not to notice the badlands on all sides of their own conscience, they plough their heads to accuse her of complicity in crimes committed in far distant lands. In their offices, leaning out their windowsills gazing away from their own reflections, rather than crying for all the people drowning everywhere you and I don’t know about because their newspapers don’t care to look there, as if running out of poison with which to paint the present, they take to shouting across the street lists of Israeli wrongs from times gone by, and grim warnings of how much it’s all going to cost us. And then, if anyone asks why, ponders out loud whether the singling-out of one nation and vilification of its people may in some way account for the rising number of attacks against Jews around our streets, or findings such as that in today’s Britain almost forty percent of Muslims see all Jews as legitimate targets, they puff pious grins, smoke up the air with virtuous whiffs, tell you they give to the sick and poor, and, trying not to show you the door, pull out graphs proving the streets see more attacks against non-Jews than Jews. And if, instead of taking the door, you then (having let it slip by that the angry guys with grievances who killed thousands crashing planes in New York city in 2001 never said much about Israel or Palestine) you then let it be known that you find their graphs of questionable taste, that these things that are happening aren’t dreams and all they’re saying makes your ears ring with all sorts of madness, well, if they decide you’re still bearable company, they tell you you’re no good, and to prove it pull out yet more graphs, these showing that, actually, quite a few Jews are listed among their friends. That, as a matter of fact, they married one or two, and moreover, many even work with them and publicly share their views, so there’s no point in asking more questions, let alone making allegations. And if after that you still aren’t worried about making a nuisance of yourself, still want to get some answers, and again point to the questionable nature of what they just said, because, surely, Jews aren’t all the same, aren’t different from him or her, also count cowards, poets, opinionated fools, gifted ones with wings, souls looking for riches and informers who wind up traumatized among their number – as well as, feasibly, some minds who, seeking the spotlight or moved by a lofty desire to disprove the age-old rumours about clever, conniving Jews, could well have become determined to cunningly come up with all sorts of fatuous things about Israel to make their point (or is that too strange?) – presuming you get that far, and that someone’s still around when you get there, the chance is you’ll get an eye-full or another, be made as a Jew perhaps, or a Zionist apologist, for form’s sake be blamed for something else too, then told they understand and feel sorry for you.
If you’re still haunted with all sorts of madness ringing in your ears after that, or the ground begins to groan under your feet, don’t say another word. And if you can’t kid yourself that you don’t know, don’t let it get you down. Don’t fold with the evening. Try being a lover, reading a book, finding something gorgeous to look at. There’s nothing special going on. The story is old. The script much the same.

The angry marking out of one people among peoples happened before. In past times, the Jew was the mark, his alleged crimes the killing of Christ, ritual murders, usury, duplicity, world domination through the Elders of Zion, and cowardice, as in not fighting back when persecuted or herded to gas chambers. Today the mark is Israel, her alleged crimes the wanton killing of Muslims, land grab, duplicity, world control through the Zionist lobby, and cowardice, as in standing up for herself and exercising retribution when attacked or threatened with annihilation. Some folks reckon that no connection exist between old moods towards the Jew and new moods towards Israel. That it’s all some coincidence. It could be, but I’m not sure. Sometime during the first half of the twentieth century, one of the most advanced and enlightened nations in Western Europe took it upon itself to address what became known as the Jewish Question, moved on to talk of a final solution and, for “the better of humanity”, soon proceeded to exterminate millions of Jews. One of the slogans they used to soften their scruples at becoming mass-murderers was “Die Juden sind unser ungluck!” – “The Jews are our misfortune!”, a tag-line coined in the sixteenth century by Martin Luther, the German leader of the Protestant Reformation. Today, seventy odd years on, in a brand new millennia, some sections of Western Europe’s so-called liberal press and educated classes have taken it upon themselves to focus their attention on the Israeli/Palestinian question, moved on to devote heaps of angry space and time to it, progressed to making allusions to Israel’s cost to the international community and nefarious influence on world affairs. Of course, no “final solution” is being proposed yet – not as far as I know anyway – but, to be sure, Martin Luther’s old slogan, which I understand became the motto of a popular weekly Nazi magazine, wouldn’t be out of place today on some European liberal newspaper banner. Only it’d be re-worked as “Israel is the world’s misfortune”; altered wording for an altered reality. Different context. It’s all for the love of thee.

Some say nothing of the sort is ever going to happen. Not soon not here anyhow. There’s no telling, but I guess they may be right. There may be the likes of the good Mayor of London, but, nowadays, liberal Western Europeans are sophisticated animals. There are so many ways to write a tune, such frequencies of nuances, ways to play what’s good to do with life, user-friendly methods to dish dirt and treat what hurts, that a lot of time is spent hanging on the phone playing history-don’t-repeat-itself or hitting on new ways to explain blocked chimneys. I think it’s a shame. I think it’d be good to play it straight. To know where we all stand. Where we all belong. Or don’t belong. Many of Europe’s liberals would say I’m wrong, I know, but then they also say Tel Aviv’s really the root of New York 9/11, frame Israel alone for every dead Israeli and Palestinian, have already implicated her in the next martyrdom or disaster to befall us.

Surely, it can be hard to get things right, but how hard can it be to get it all so wrong. Not long after finding out whose child I was, I asked my father what could the Jew have done to win such venom from so many for so long. He didn’t know, he said, probably started with something to do with trusting in one God when the trend was to invest in multi-deities, but that was a long time ago. So I asked him about pogroms, what was done to him and his family. He spoke of fever. About the world now and again getting the fever, letting rip on the country-less Jews the way beggars and stray dogs get it when folks feel put out or helpless. Said something about taking the heat, about the worst bouts of that fever usually occurring just before or in concert with terrible calamities; like when a storm’s brewing, the air pressure builds up, the sky itself fills with a sense of foreboding and tempers flare and dogs get kicked. Someone or something’s got to pay or get the blame, always. I can’t say I understood what he was on about. A few years later we spent some time in Israel together, and I remember him looking around the bustling streets in wonder, all the young gun-bearing soldiers in their uniforms that were everywhere, and saying “They’ll never forgive us.” I asked what he meant and he just said “Jews bearing guns. The world will never forgive us.” I must say, I didn’t believe him.

More recently, by chance, I came across an old TV program on a Belgian satellite channel. For whatever reason, they were rerunning a 1960’s documentary about the perception of Jews in 1960’s Belgium. Near the end, they asked an old Belgian guy his thoughts about the place and role of the Jews in the world as it was then. He explained he’d been a submarine crewman in his youth and, as those were early days, they used to take birds down with them during dives as a means of warning of carbon dioxide build-up; the birds would flap their wings, grow agitated or distressed as the air became poisoned and the men would know to surface and open the hatch. That’s how he saw the Jews, he said. Like those birds. They’re the world’s warning system, start flapping their wings when poison builds up, like some kind of barometer that shows the world’s mood swings.

Thinking about it later, I feel that maybe I now understand a little better what my father was trying to say with his talk of fever. Yet, seeing the agitation in some Jews’ and non-Jews souls today, the flapping of arms, the stormy skies, I hope both he and that old Belgian guy were wrong. Otherwise, the way it all sounds and looks on the news, this submarine may well have sprung a leak and, this time, not get back up, drift to the bottom of the sea.

Morning light. Some are guilty for not taking sides; some side with lies or cover their eyes. As I’ve been living in Britain these past years, and have made much of the so-called “liberal” take on Israel above, I guess it would be right, before ending this, to mention The Guardian, the flagship publication of the Guardian Media Group, a prestigious, influential newspaper that I’m told was once hailed as a home of fine journalism – some still think it blessed that way. It may be wrong to single it out – with slight variations, it isn’t alone in Britain in its opinions, only, the way this goes down, it did play some part in A Place of Gardens and Lilies, proved a source of visions I had no idea existed. For that, it deserves its place in this nausea.

If I thought it mattered, could amount to doing someone a good turn, or unseat them from the monster they’re riding, I’d suggest gathering in one volume all of their reporters’ past six or seven years collective output on Israel and giving it to scan to anybody who’s never heard of Jews, Palestinians or the Levantine. In fact, to save time, the output of just a couple of Guardian experts on Israel might do – say Chris McGreal and Conal Urquhart – and no mention need be made of their industry being reprinted many times over in places hostile to the Hebrew state. It wouldn’t matter though. The chances are, long before reaching the end, our reader would find it hard not to see Israelis as mean and scheming stereotypical Jews (with guns), Palestinians as wretched revengers, the Levantine, pins and needles, as all of our troubles’ cradle. No doubt McGreal and Urquhart would say they’re reporting the truth; if you don’t like the message, find another paper. I think of what they do as something else though. The distortion of information, careful selection of facts, methodical badmouthing of one people and sugarcoating of the sins of another does not add up to telling the truth. They could call it taking sides, peddling propaganda, acting as Public Relations, serving self-interest, laughing at God even, but not reporting the truth. Even if they only do it for money, or, as their editor would have it, on account of “giving a voice to the voiceless”.

I don’t know much about The Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger. Only that, like any respected successful newspaper editor, he sits in a position of power and influence, and, I’m sure, for it gets the pick of the cherries. Still, I know that even in the bad places I come from, aside from sounding like a nice jingle, giving a voice to the voiceless means just that: giving a voice to the voiceless; not spreading dirt about or vilifying another people. The distinction might be something like the difference between papering your walls with figures of hatred instead of your heroes. And spending your days and night throwing darts and whatever else at them; and then, now and again, adding posters of their killers to the wall space left. How can anyone wish to create or live in such a place? There’s so much hatred going round already, you’d think anyone sane would think it senseless to add to it.

One thing I know about the Guardian editor though, is a newspaper piece he wrote back in 2001. It’s titled “Between Heaven and Hell”, concerns itself with the Israeli/Palestinian situation, can be found on the Guardian website. I read it a couple of times, not liking it, for a while not understanding why. Then I realized it exemplifies the current liberal take on Israel. It is terribly well written. Precise, lucid, superbly paced, as if beating to the swing of a metronome. The tone is rational, the thinking appears logical, hard facts and cold numbers are padded with all the right sounds about horror, violence and death. Yet, it is remarkable for much more than that. But to dissect it to show why would take a while and make for meaningless knowledge. So maybe it’s enough to say that it starts with a mention of a quote by TS Eliot about mankind not being able to bear too much reality, proceeds to drop lines about warplanes being used on civilian areas and infringements of human rights, describes one side of the two sides as “overwhelmingly innocent”, and ends with a notice to “Jews the world over” to “think deeply about the terrible cost of securing their necessary sanctuary”, underscoring the whole with just one more sentence letting it be known that it isn’t yet clear whether Israel knows how to use her power “humanely”.

Jews the world over, no less. Two thousand years of persecution, near annihilation at the whims of yesteryear’s refined and not so refined European societies, a mere seventy years trying self-determination ringed with millions of foes bent on "pushing you into the sea", and the great collective Jew the world over should already be brought together as one and be thinking deeply about the cost of securing their sanctuary. And Israel has yet to make it clear she can use her power humanely.

Israel’s first defeat will be her last. If it wasn’t pointless, I’d say Israel does the best she can, Mr Rusbridger. She’s got the sun in her eyes, stands on dangerous ground and wonders how many times she’ll have to “do it again” while the good people take to wondering aloud whether she should be burdened with more of a conscience than they themselves clearly possess. And, if I didn’t know better, I’d point out that it may not be appropriate for you or anyone else to tell the collective Jew the world over what he or she should do or think about – terrible echoes of terrible times. Is there really no foul wind blowing down closer to Kentish Town way? Couldn’t Anglo-Saxons the world over be asked to think deeply about the terrible cost of the wealth and power they secured – and continue to secure – for themselves over the centuries perhaps? Or, come to think of it, make it clear to the rest of the world how humanely they intend to use it all one day.

Sometimes things aren’t what they seem. Sometimes, things aren’t even really what they really are. TS Eliot, it’s true, did say “humanity cannot bear much reality”, but to be sure, he also said “half of the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.” Then again, could be this was never meant to be read or interpreted in the British context.

Early this morning, I took this further than I should. I stayed too long, and, instead of losing more of my ways and time before I’ll surely die, I shall remember my father’s offering not to “judge what you’re not”, draw a line under all this terrifying ugliness, think of all the things that I don’t want that I don’t have, and step outside. And, as the sky changes colour, “do it again” while it all shines.

Eric Leclere, London 2006