Spring Tide

¹² Rage

On that particular morning I’d travelled down to London by train from Cambridge, where I’d been participating in a conference on problems of governance in emerging economies, and had stayed overnight with some friends. I arrived at King’s Cross at 8.15 or thereabouts. I stood in a queue at a food stall for a couple of minutes, meaning to buy myself a croissant and a cappuccino, then decided that I really didn’t need them. I’d already had one breakfast and I was, and still am, over two stone overweight. So I abandoned the queue and headed down to the southbound Piccadilly Line in order to travel to the Holborn offices of a certain NGO, small, but highly regarded in the field, which funds experimental agricultural projects in southern Africa. They’d commissioned me and an old colleague of mine called Emily to do an evaluation of one of their projects, and we were due to present our provisional findings at 9.30.

There was a train waiting at the platform. I climbed onto it near the front and, although of course it was pretty full at that time of the morning, I was lucky enough to find myself a seat. On the way up from Cambridge, I’d gone over our provisional report and jotted down some key points. Now, as the train moved off, I went back over the notes I’d written to make sure I’d got them clear in my mind. I was keen to make a good impression because I wanted to pick up more commissions from this particular outfit. They paid well and I needed the work. My wife and I had recently separated, so we had two houses to pay for instead of one, and my daughter Jasmine was about to start at university.

The doors closed. The train picked up speed and plunged into the southbound tunnel. I looked up for a moment at my travelling companions: Londoners – black, white, brown – reading, playing with their phones, listening to music, or just quietly sitting or standing in that little capsule of air and electric light and thinking their private thoughts as they hurtled through concrete and clay. People sometimes talk about the loneliness and alienation of big cities but I felt a surge of affection for these city folk, who every single day encounter many times more human beings than they could hope to get to know in an entire lifetime. How many other species would sit quietly and harmoniously in such a confined space with so many fellow creatures they’d never met?

I arrived at the office in time to get a cup of coffee before the meeting, and have a quick word with Emily, who’d travelled up from Brighton. Two more people arrived, Peter and Amina – we knew both of them pretty well: the overseas development community is a small world – and the four of us went through into the meeting room to wait for the most important person, Sue, who as head of the NGO’s research section, had commissioned our work.

Sue arrived late, looking very agitated.

‘Haven’t you heard the news? There’s been a whole series of bomb attacks in the Underground. The whole tube system has shut down.’

We put off the start of the meeting. Amina set up her laptop on the table so we could watch the unfolding story, both to figure out its immediate implications for our day and to process it in a more general sense. There were suggestions at first that as many as six bombs had gone off, but the reports gradually settled on three: three different trains, one at Aldgate, one at Edgware Road and one at Russell Square. But then, just when that seemed to have been clarified, another bomb went off on a bus. How many more would there be?

I don’t remember the timing of it all, but at some point I figured out that the train bombed at Russell Square was on the southbound Piccadilly Line and must have followed directly after the one I travelled on. I looked back at my peaceful space capsule, hurtling through the earth, and imagined another one just like it, another collection of ordinary London people – white, black, brown – reading, listening to music, or just thinking their own thoughts, as they followed my train into that same dark tunnel. But, in their case, this familiar scene had been abruptly torn away like some flimsy canvas backdrop. Some of them would have been buried under corpses, or trapped by bits of train, or impaled by other people’s bones. Some would have been blown to pieces. Some would just be terrified. I imagined a second or two of silence and then screaming voices everywhere, from up and down the train, like the voices of the damned in hell.

‘My feeble attempt at dieting hasn’t succeeded in reducing my weight,’ I told the others, my voice wobbly, ‘but it may quite possibly have saved my life. If I’d bought that croissant, I’d have missed the train I came on, and caught the one after.’

I was pretty shaken for many days afterwards, but I didn’t suffer the survivor guilt that some people report after a close shave of that kind. I guess one day I may eat these words, but I’ve never really got that ‘Why me?’ stuff. The answer, it seems to me, is quite simple: I didn’t buy the croissant. What more do people expect? How exactly do they imagine this universe is arranged?

And as to the question of why anyone could feel justified in killing and maiming people who he or she didn’t even know, well, that wasn’t a mystery to me either.

Nowadays, when white British folk like me hear the word terrorist we think of some fanatical Islamist dreaming of martyrdom and paradise, his beliefs utterly alien to our own. My neighbour George, for instance, is a philosophy lecturer who is irritated to distraction by anything that isn’t logical, and he blames the whole phenomenon, firstly on the backwardness of the Islamic religion, and secondly, and more generally, on religion itself. If only these people could be weaned off their medieval belief in a superior being and persuaded to embrace secular, scientific, progressive modernity, then, in George’s view, this irrational and ugly behaviour would cease.

But George is very young, and I’ve reached the age when even philosophers look like kids. I remember the terrorists of the sixties and seventies: the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Basques and the IRA. None of them were motivated by religion, and most of them, including even the Arabs, were Marxists: which is to say that they subscribed to an ideology that saw itself precisely as secular, scientific and progressive. What’s more, the European terrorists often came from very similar backgrounds to my neighbour George and myself. Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, for instance, both came from middle class academic families, just like the family I grew up in, or George’s family now.

So, yes, in these present times, it is young Muslims who are being drawn to the possibilities of random murder as a way of making a political or moral point. But in my teenage years that particular pressure wave was passing through a different medium, and was much closer to my own world and my own experience. And, sequestered though I was in the bubble-like environment of a private boarding school, I myself felt its pull.

I fancied myself as a writer back then and I remember writing a story when I was fifteen or so, which contrasted two figures. One of them was a kind of Christian guru, a bit like Mother Teresa, to whom the famous and powerful came for spiritual guidance; the other was a greasy-haired loner who built bombs in his mouldy bedsit and threw them randomly into crowds. The point of the story was that it was the terrorist who was the truly good person, even though he had a crappy personality and everyone hated him. The guru bolstered an unjust world by making the powerful feel good, but the terrorist, by making everyone feel bad, was driving the world towards change.

The school was called Shotsford House and its main building was a former stately home, surrounded by woodland and chalky hills. It saw itself as progressive – no fagging, for instance, no cane and no cold showers, though these were all still common at that time – and it had a sort of Christian humanist ethos of a kind that was more widespread in those days than it is now.

Here, for instance, is the headmaster, standing at his podium at morning assembly. His name is Mr Frobisher. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ he booms out, ‘for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ He pauses for several seconds, his great head bowed over the book, wind whistling in and out of his nostrils. Christ, that man could ham it up! Then suddenly he looks up at us with fiery and accusing eyes. ‘Blessed are the poor – in – spirit,’ he repeats, and begins to speak with passionate intensity of the selfishness, greed and crass materialism of the modern world. ‘Grab what you can,’ he hisses, clawing at the air, his whole face distorted by the ugliness he wants to convey. ‘Grab what you can by whatever means you can get away with, and to hell with everyone else.’ The country is in the middle of a railway strike – large industrial strikes were pretty frequent occurrences back then – and Mr Frobisher uses this as an illustration of his point. The railwaymen, he says, are ‘opportunists of the worst kind, holding the whole community to ransom, not for the sake of some great cause, but for colour television sets and bigger cars.’ He almost spits out the words.

Now comes the pause again, the bowing of the head, the whistling wind. ‘You are very privileged,’ he concludes in a new soft voice. ‘You will have many opportunities. You could very easily use those opportunities for purely personal gain. But I beg you, I beg all of you, to make them into opportunities to serve.’

After another silence, he lifts his head, and becomes suddenly brisk and business-like as he turns to the more mundane everyday business, of which we all of us must take our share. He makes various announcements. And finally he issues one of his regular reminders that ‘decorum and courtesy’ are expected at all times when potential pupils are being shown round the school with their parents.

These people might arrive in brand new Jaguars, the tense-faced little boys in the uniforms of expensive preparatory schools, the mothers in furs, the fathers with heavy Rolexes on their wrists, but their crass materialism will never in any circumstances be pointed out.

I planned a terror attack with my best friend Jules. We’d recently seen the Lindsay Anderson film if… and it almost perfectly encapsulated our mood.

‘We could do something like that,’ said Jules.

I loved that boy. He was never still. He thought three times as quickly as anyone else, talked three times faster, laughed and raged three times as often, burning up so much nervous energy that he always looked half-starved, like some beautiful, penniless Romantic poet. He was constantly thinking of new ways in which he and I could step out of the dreary consensual world and into the forbidden brightness beyond. It was him who decided one night we should walk right round the stone cornice of the main school building, four storeys up in the dark. It was him who got hold of those two tabs of LSD, the first of many, which we took one October day on top of a hill and watched the whole red pile of Shotsford House below us reveal itself to be nothing larger or more significant than a gaudy cake, iced in vulgar pink and white, and crawling inside with maggots. And it was him now who was proposing we become terrorists.

He suggested it on a Sunday afternoon, when we’d driven down to the coast in a beaten up old car the two of us had managed to acquire for a few quid from an elderly local. We’d stopped at a pub and were sitting outside in the sun. Gulls were wheeling above us. The forbidden beer was pure ambrosia, our forbidden white Cortina a celestial chariot that would carry us between the stars.

‘We should do something like that,’ Jules said. ‘Get some guns and shoot the place up. Think of the impact! The whole rotten system would shake in its fucking boots.’

Shotsford House had a rifle range, and we knew that guns were stored in a metal cupboard in the basement corridor. Things were much more casual in those days. Nowadays an expensive boarding school like Shotsford has a whole team of uniformed security guards equipped with vehicles and radios, and each pupil has an individual room, complete with en suite shower. But we washed in communal bathrooms and slept on sagging mattresses in chilly dormitories, while the entire security of the great dark building around us was entrusted to a single elderly man from a local village who wandered round the place with a torch. His name was Eliot, and, for strategic reasons, Jules and I had made a friend of him.

So now, sitting there in the pub with seagulls wheeling above us, and our chariot waiting for our return, we made a plan. In the early hours of the last day of term, Jules would meet Eliot near the science block, some distance from the main building, and engage him in conversation long enough for me to saw through the padlock and get out the guns. Eliot was very fond of talking and didn’t see school discipline as being part of his job. On the basis of previous experience, we could be quite confident that, at the end of their conversation, he’d just tell Jules to go to bed and carry on with his rounds. Jules would then meet me in a hiding place of ours under the roof: a disused storeroom with a tiny window which we normally used for smoking out of, but from which it was possible, with a bit of effort, to squeeze out onto that high stone cornice. In the morning, when the parents came purring up the drive in their Jaguars and Rovers to pick up their darling boys, we’d be up there to greet them. Our backs against the sky, we’d fire down on them like avenging angels.

‘Are we just talking here, Jules, or are we serious?’ I asked, coming back from the bar with two more pints, and a new packet of rolling tobacco.

Jules was beautiful in my eyes, and I in his and we ached with desire for one another. We never expressed that desire in words, let alone through actual sex, and maybe I’m just repressed but I don’t think I would even have wanted that. But every touch was a delight, and when we were together, it was as if we lit up the whole world.

Jules grabbed the tobacco and ripped off the cellophane, and we each tugged out a moist bundle of treacly strands. That stuff was especially delicious when it was completely new.

‘Let’s do it,’ he said, as he exhaled his first rich cloud of smoke. ‘Come on, let’s really do it. I mean, why not? Apart from fear, what reason is there to hold back?’

Various answers do now suggest themselves to me – the desire not to kill people who had done us no harm, just to pluck a for-instance from the air – but at the time his question was rhetorical, and the moral objections carried so little weight that we didn’t even speak of them. The following week I stole a hacksaw from the metalwork room and experimented with it on various pieces of iron-mongery to see how much time I’d need and how much noise I’d make.

But then Jules got talking to someone in the gun club and discovered that it was actually only air rifles that were stored in that metal cupboard, and that there was no ammunition there at all. Everything suddenly became rather dreary and complicated, and the whole project simply petered out.

I guess we wouldn’t really have done it anyway. Neither of us were psychopaths. On the contrary, we were both in our own way the kind of people who have a strong need to do good. When I was expelled a year later, I went to work in a school in Africa and, from that starting point, gradually built up a career in international development. Jules, always more radical and daring than me, rebelled against rebellion itself, finding God, and celibacy, and submission to authority. He trained for the Catholic priesthood, fighting heroically all the time against doubts and forbidden longings. He was working in a dismal council estate in Liverpool when his ferocious inner struggle finally became too much for him, and he killed himself at the age of 28.

‘I don’t know what I believe in any more, Matt,’ he said to me in a letter shortly before he died. ‘I know I don’t believe in God or the church. I think I believe in trying to make things better. But if you don’t know what this world is or how it works, how can you make things better? How can you be sure you’re not making things worse? It’s like there’s this huge machine towering over us, sucking people in, mangling them and spitting them out, and I know I’m part of it, I know I’m tainted by what it’s doing, and I badly want to make it stop, but I’ve no idea which are the levers that turn it off and which make it go faster still. And the hardest part is that even my own motives are unclear to me, my own levers. I don’t trust my impulses. I don’t trust my judgement. Whatever I decide to do, I find myself wondering: who am I really doing this for?’

I know what he meant. Flying between international development conferences around the world, or hurrying from one meeting to the next along third-world roads in air-conditioned SUVs, I too often ask myself who it is I’m really helping. I too worry that my work may be perpetuating the very problems that it is supposedly there to solve.

We were seeking purity back then at Shotsford. We saw and loathed the blatant hypocrisy of our own class, its smug self-righteousness, the way it wallowed snout-deep in the trough of privilege even while it flattered itself it was the humble servant of the greater good, and we wanted to root that out from inside ourselves. You couldn’t have it both ways, that was our view, and I think deep down it’s my view still. (Sometimes, I swear, sitting at some middle class dinner table and listening to the conversation move from tongue-clucking at the xenophobia of ordinary English voters, to talk about how to get our kids into the schools where the middle class kids do well, my trigger finger still itches.) You couldn’t call yourself the enemy of capitalism if you remained one of its beneficiaries, that’s what Jules and I felt. You couldn’t be rich and enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

My parents and Jules’ were very comfortably off. They had big cars that purred, and big houses that women from small houses were paid to come in and clean. Self-centred teenagers though we were, we understood our complicity in all of that. We voluntarily attended the school they’d paid for. We bought our drugs and beer with the pocket money they provided. We lay dozing in our beds during the school holidays, while our parents’ cleaners hoovered the rooms around us. We knew the enemy was inside us as much as outside, and it seemed to us that only self-destructive violence was a powerful enough emetic to purge it. What better way was there of finally separating yourself from a thing than making it hate you, having it hunt you down and fling you into its prisons? We hadn’t heard of suicide bombing back then but, if we had, the thoroughness of the method would surely have appealed to us.

Purity was the thing. To destroy and to be pure. Anger is often a selfish emotion, the snarling of a dog that doesn’t want to share its bone, but our anger seemed to us to be selfless, for we would throw away everything to serve it: our futures, our place in society, the pride of our parents, material wealth, the respect of our fellow citizens.

It was mostly narcissism, of course. It was mostly our own oedipal anger, inflated to the size of the world by our adolescent egotism. I’ve seen the same thing in my daughter Jasmine, screaming into the faces of policemen on anti-capitalist marches, and then coming home to upgrade her smartphone and book herself one of those intercontinental holidays that she and her friends dignify as travelling.

A few years after the London bombings, I was driving a hired Range Rover across the Republic of Malawi in southern Africa. I’d been visiting a series of projects across the region and was now returning to Lilongwe, the capital, where I had a number of meetings scheduled with senior figures in various NGOs. After several weeks of lodging in sticky rooms with no air conditioning and only intermittent electric power, I was very much looking forward to a few nights in a hotel with regulated temperatures and proper beds before finishing my business in the country and returning to the UK.

The landscape I’d been driving through was flat, and not particular scenic. It was largely denuded of indigenous vegetation, and dotted untidily with sparse dry plots of maize and vegetables, and little clusters of huts, reminding me of a scalp from which the hair has not so much been cut or trimmed as pulled out in clumps. There were people everywhere. From the horizon behind me to the horizon ahead, a steady stream of pedestrians was trudging stoically along the edges of the road, often with bags of charcoal on their heads, or bundles of branches. Evidence of any kind of indigenous economic development was minimal. In the larger settlements I passed through, the most prominent buildings typically housed projects funded by international NGOs – Oxfam, Christian Aid, Médecins sans Frontières – whose logos succeeded one another on the signs by the roadside.

I was finding all this rather depressing. No doubt these projects were appreciated by the people that used them, and no doubt they provided a pretty good living to many people, including me, but the message they gave out was very clear: the people of this country cannot look after themselves. Back in the donor countries the message was the same: pathos-drenched fundraising ads depicted sweet but helpless Africans, waiting for rescue with big brown beseeching eyes. How many local initiatives had been stifled, I wondered, how much inward investment had been lost, by the steady drip-drip-drip of this message over the decades?

I pulled over at a petrol station by a crossroads, asked for my tank to be filled up and bought myself a Coke.

‘Mazungu! Mazungu!’ children called out excitedly, as I climbed out of my car.

I sighed. This is a generic name for white people that’s used across Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and the whole Great Lakes area. I’m told the word originally meant something like ‘aimless wanderer’ and, at that particular moment, this actually felt about right. I was an aimless wanderer. I knew the road to Lilongwe, and the address of my hotel. I knew the time of my flight back to Heathrow. I knew where to send my expenses form when I got home. But I’d lost all sense of the purpose of my life.

There was a white plastic table outside the petrol station, with white chairs around it of the kind that people sometimes have in their gardens back in England. I took my Coke over there so I could sit down to drink it, and I also took a book I was reading, though I knew this wasn’t the kind of place that a mazungu could expect to be left in peace. The children gathered in a group, about ten yards away from me. There were five of them aged about six or seven, two of whom were carrying baby siblings on their hips, and of course they were all very smiley and sweet. Now they watched me intently, beaming with anticipation, as if they thought I might at any moment grow wings and fly, or take water and turn it into wine. I waved and smiled to them, which made them squeal and laugh, running away for a few yards in pretence of being alarmed, and then creeping back again.

Presently a beggar approached me. He had wild red eyes, wore rags like some kind of mad John the Baptist, and was tightly clutching two live swallows. They dangled from his fist by their wings in a trance of terror and pain, while he waved them angrily in front of my face. Deciding that the birds were hostages rather than objects for sale, I gave him a few pence to take them away somewhere and let them go, and pretended to myself that I didn’t know their wings would be too badly crushed for them to be able to fly.

‘Mazungu! Mazungu!’ the children called out again, completely untroubled either by the beggar in his rags or the suffering of his tiny captives. I waved at them again, and once more they laughed and squealed and ran. We seemed to be playing a sort of reverse version of Grandmother’s Footsteps, in which they ran when I looked at them, and stood still when I didn’t.

Two young men came up to me, both wearing beautifully pressed white shirts and immaculate black trousers, and asked if I minded them joining me. Inwardly I sighed, for over the years I had been approached by many immaculately shirted young men in places like this. After a period of polite conversation, I knew, they would ask for my email address. And then, sometime later, I’d receive courteous requests from them for money, often couched in pious terms: ‘I pray to Almighty God that you will be able to assist me in my hour of need.’ But I couldn’t very well stop them sitting on the seats, so I told them they were welcome, and then opened my book in the hope of discouraging conversation.

‘Excuse me, sir, might I ask if you are from England?’ asked one of the young men, after a few seconds.

I glanced up at him. He was the chunkier one of the two, with big awkward limbs, and cheeks piebald with vitiligo.

‘That’s right,’ I said, and returned to my book.

The little children watched in fascinated silence.

‘God willing, I hope one day to study in England,’ the young man said wistfully.

I gave way to the inevitable and abandoned my attempt at reading. These young patronage-seekers were never anything other than polite, after all, and you could hardly blame them for trying to find a way out of a country with so little in the way of opportunities. I laid down my book, offered them both my hand, and asked them their names. The chunky one was called Godfrey. His more taciturn and more handsome friend was Joyous.

‘We both of us want to study in England,’ Godfrey went on. ‘Of course it’s very difficult for us, for until we’ve studied, how can we make money? It’s very difficult indeed.’ He sighed. ‘So we just hope that Almighty God will send help, and perhaps a friend in England, who might—’

‘May I ask what your book is about?’ asked Joyous. He seemed irritated by his companion’s fawning.

I handed him the book. It was a popular introduction to the science of climate change, a subject which I’d decided I ought to know more about. Joyous studied the cover for a moment – there was a photo of a crop of wheat that had been killed off by drought – flipped it over to read the back, then opened it at random to sample the contents. He had long lean fingers and I could see that he was an entirely different proposition from his companion: sharp, focused, full of energy, and not in the least deferential.

‘Climate change,’ he said. He had the most beautiful glossy panther-like skin. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of this. The world is getting warmer.’

‘That’s it.’

‘What does the book say about what will happen in this part of Africa?’

I hesitated. Malawi is one of the poorest and most densely populated countries in the world, without the mineral wealth of many African countries, and with precious little in the way of industry. Many villages have no electricity: you drive through them in the night and there are people sitting there in total darkness. Most of the country’s population live by subsistence farming, and almost all of its meagre export income comes from agricultural products like tobacco and tea.

‘The news isn’t good, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘Global warming would probably mean a lot less rain round here, and a lot less certainty about when the rains will come.’

‘Then we’ll starve,’ Joyous stated flatly.

‘Why does God keep punishing us so much?’ Godfrey murmured. ‘I only wish we knew.’

‘Well, let’s just hope it doesn’t happen,’ I said.

Joyous flicked through pages, pausing to study pictures and diagrams.

‘And what does your book say is the cause of this problem?’ he asked, though it sounded to me as if he already knew.

‘Mainly the burning of oil and coal in the industrialised countries, over the last two centuries.’

I found a graph for him, showing the increase of CO₂ in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution in Europe, and the corresponding increase in average temperatures. Joyous laughed.

‘So you people come here from America and Europe to instruct us how to improve our lives, but at the same time you are slowly killing us. Is that correct?’

‘Well, certainly not deliberately, but—’

‘When was it discovered that burning these things would cause this problem?’

Joyous was smiling in the way that some people do when they’re very angry. Godfrey giggled nervously, trying to catch my eye so he could defuse his friend’s alarming hostility.

‘Oh a long time ago. I think it was in—’

‘So, excuse me, sir, I don’t wish to be rude, but why do you say you don’t do it on purpose, if you know quite well what it is you’re doing?’

‘I guess that’s a—’

‘And when we are starving, will your countries apologise, and welcome us in?’

Some chance, I thought! Of course they wouldn’t. Joyous surely knew that as well as I did. On the contrary, the harder things became around the world, the more the relatively well-off would protect their own, the more they would roll out the razor wire, the more they would turn their victims into enemies against whom they must defend themselves.

I looked at my watch, then picked up my Coke bottle to return it to the cashier. People are particular about bottles in Malawi. Moulded glass is too valuable to waste.

‘I think the best thing,’ I said lamely as I stood up, ‘would be if we tried to prevent the problem in the—’

‘Excuse me,’ Joyous interrupted, ‘I can see you need to go, but could you please answer just one more question for me. If you’re killing us on purpose, why shouldn’t we come to your countries and kill you?’

Godfrey gave a shout of appalled laughter. The watching children’s eyes darted anxiously between Joyous’s face and mine. They were no longer smiling. They didn’t understand English, but they could see the tension.

‘Take no notice of my friend, sir,’ said Godfrey, giving Joyous a hearty slap on the back. ‘He’s always playing jokes.’

But that Joyous wasn’t joking could hardly have been more obvious. He was accusing me, just as I once sought to accuse the Shotsford House parents as they purred up the drive in their expensive cars. Joyous’s rage was uncompromised, though, unlike my own adolescent anger. The thing he wanted to fight wasn’t inside him, but truly out there in the world. He had no need to declare war on himself.

As I continued along the road, I wondered if this was a portent of things to come, for when a person has a new idea, they are hardly ever the only one. I felt ashamed, knowing that in the eyes of Joyous, I epitomised precisely the kind of hypocrisy that I myself used to despise. But, more than anything else, I felt envy and grief. Envy for the purity of that young man’s rage. Grief for the fire that Jules and I had sought, but never really found.