Step by Step

by Simon Reeve

  I already had poor vision in one eye, and reasonable vision in the other that just about compensated. The brick, of course, hit my good eye. After the bandages came off I tried to hide the fact that suddenly I couldn’t really see, but after a month or two I had to admit reality and went for specs. Nothing designer, there was no money for that. It all happened at the worst possible moment. Testosterone was kicking in. I was suddenly gangly and awkward. My body didn’t fit my clothes. Things were terrible at home. I’d revealed, to myself if nobody else, that I was still a silly little boy. And suddenly I had to put two thick bottle tops on my face in a pair of hideously uncool specs.

  Then I suffered just about the grandest humiliation an adolescent boy can endure. It was ridiculous, ludicrous, but life-changing. After school one day I was trudging towards home in Acton past a bus stop on the other side of the road that was packed with perhaps 150 kids from the school waiting to head back west towards Ealing. I was wandering along, trying not to look self-conscious, when I spotted a girl I really fancied waiting near the front of the group.

  ‘Adie!’ I called out. She turned. I nodded to her and smiled awkwardly. ‘All right?’ I said, pointlessly. She shrugged sweetly.

  I had no idea of the disaster, the catastrophe, that was about to befall me. Think of the prom scene in Carrie. That comes close. My attention was completely fixed on Adie across the road. I smiled gormlessly back at her, and then walked slap bang straight into a colossal lamp-post. It was a powerful impact. My face connected first, and I went down straight like a tree. My glasses buckled and landed nearby. I found myself sprawled on the pavement, feeling like a frog that had been whacked with a frying pan. I scrambled around to find my specs, and then became aware of the laughter. The entire bus stop of kids was having hysterics at my plight.

  Thinking about this now, I feel sorry for the young me. A stronger, more confident, funnier kid could have styled it out. They might have stood up, laughed uproariously at themselves, bowed with style and sauntered off, smoothing themselves down. I did none of that. I struggled hopelessly to get my glasses back on, faffed around on the ground trying to pick up my bag and books, looked in utter horror at the kids opposite, some of whom were bent double at the funniest sight they had ever witnessed, and finally slunk away. It might be amusing now, but it was hideous at the time. Simple little moments in life can have profound consequences.

  I was never a star pupil. School had not been going well for me for a while. I was uninspired and deeply uninspiring. I couldn’t concentrate and I often struggled in lessons. I don’t blame my teachers. They were all caring and thoughtful. Several were charismatic and keen. If there was any failing it was mine. I never really understood, at least until much later, that each of us has to choose life and decide to get involved and active. Rarely can anyone make us. I was too confused, stubborn and perhaps a bit lazy. I just fell through the cracks.

  But one book really sparked my interest. Hilary Belden, my brilliant and passionate English teacher, gave our class Schindler’s Ark to read, by Thomas Keneally.

  ‘There is a chance,’ she said, as she placed the books carefully on each table in front of us, ‘that this book might just change your life.’

  She was right. I didn’t entirely realise it at the time, but the book and its story lodged in my mind. Oskar Schindler was a womanising factory owner and Nazi party member who directly saved 1,200 Jews from concentration camps and extermination in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen during the Second World War. Calling it an extraordinary story doesn’t begin to do it justice. Based on fact and meticulous research, the book gave me a window into the most devastating and intense period of pure human evil. Every page shocked and surprised, yet it was very readable, even as Keneally described the full brutality of the Nazis. It won the Booker Prize and was turned into the movie Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg, itself a life-changing film for many viewers.

  Up until I read the book my only real knowledge of the war had been gleaned from the pages of Commando comics where Tommies fought the Jerries. What I read in Schindler’s Ark hit me in a way I’d never experienced before. It was an apocalyptic time and the story was uniquely gripping, because the reality of the book was infinitely more powerful and upsetting than any of the young-adult fiction I had read before. It was life, death, survival, and it was brutal, honest, affecting and horrifically emotional. I sobbed. I put the book down. I bit my nails. I picked it up again. Every tragedy I have witnessed around the world as an adult, every desperate act, every wicked demonstration of corruption or abuse is benchmarked against that book. Much later, whenever I worried how futile and pathetic my work was as an adult, I would remember the lives in the book, and feel humbled. Then I recall the moment when Schindler is chastising himself for not saving more of his workers. His accountant, Itzhak Stern, who Schindler protected, consoled him by quoting the Jewish Talmud: ‘He who saves one life, saves the World entire.’ It said to me then, and still says to me today, that even when we can’t do everything, we can still do something.

  The book itself was exceptional, and the story behind it was fascinating, even for me, even as a teenager. Keneally was an Australian writer on a book tour in the US, nearly four decades after the end of the war. He popped into a shop in Beverly Hills to ask about a briefcase in the window. The owner of the store, a Holocaust survivor, heard that Keneally was a novelist and bent his ear trying to persuade him to take the story of Schindler and turn it into a book. The entire astonishing tale had never been told. Only a chance encounter set it free.

  Within six years of reading Schindler’s Ark I would be writing a book of my own. Keneally made me realise that truth and our collective, hidden stories could be not just stranger than fiction, but infinitely more moving and powerful. Yet I cannot say that Keneally’s masterpiece inspired me to write as a teenager, or that the dark tragedy of the book encouraged me to accept the privilege of my simple world in my mid-teens and embrace education. I finished the book and my focus shifted quickly back to my own problems.

  Life for me felt like it was taking a quick turn for the worse. Dad and I were continually at odds. I had been caught destroying the wall, then nearly lost an eye, and had been humiliated in front of the school. I was also desperate for a girlfriend, but I had completely lost my social confidence. It was maddening. As a young kid I had always been great with girls. When I was in first school I was so naughty I was moved from the table where I sat with my friends and onto a table with three girls who were supposed to keep me in order. It was some sort of punishment, but I thought they were great. It was one of my happiest years at school, and gave me a self-assurance around girls that many other boys envied. In my early teens I was still able to chat happily with girls at school and on holiday. By my mid-teens, though, when I needed it most, my confidence was completely and utterly shot.

  I remember going to the annual school disco when I was fifteen or sixteen, and was so low I should have stayed at home. There is surely nothing like a teenage party to broadcast inadequacies and then amplify and ram them back down your own throat. Everyone but me appeared to be dancing. Everyone but me appeared to be snogging in a dark corner. When the music was really blaring my limbs wouldn’t move to the tunes. When the slow songs came on I couldn’t summon the courage to ask anyone to dance. It’s weird and actually a little frightening how that evening is still seared into my mind. I’ve been around the world, three times, but I can still recall the cheesy 1980s tunes, the crappy striped shirt I was wearing, and how desperately I wanted to chat up a girl called Lisa. I am one of millions scarred by a school disco and that evening I decided dancing was not for me. By the time I resolved my issues and fixed my mind it was a little too late. To this day I do not dance. If there’s a party I’m the guy getting the drinks in at the bar, or sitting at a table maybe tapping just one foot. I’ve faced many fears and been on Celebrity Bake Off, but Strictly? Forget it.

  To add a final layer of topping to my social
shame, my parents decided to buy a mustard-coloured Reliant Kitten, the tiny four-wheel fibreglass version of the van driven by Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses.

  ‘I mean, come on,’ I shouted at them, ‘who would inflict a car like that on their children?’

  Of course, much of my downward spiral was self-inflicted and self-indulgent. Pathetic, even. I have since met people around the planet who have suffered, endured and survived astonishing tragedy. I knew that terrible things were happening in the world, and I had only just read Schindler’s Ark. But everything is relative. I was a fifteen-year-old adolescent with raging hormones and a confused mind, and in just a few short months of bad luck my confidence dripped away.

  I went from puffing on light cigarettes to smoking Capstan Full Strength, cancer sticks that carried a picture of a salty sea dog on the front, clearly trying to kill himself as an alternative to the loneliness of the ocean. I began drinking more, sometimes slipping out of school at lunchtime. Being tall, if baby-faced, I could get away with buying booze in off-licences, and I could drink in a few pubs in Acton back then while wearing school uniform, even a stone’s throw from the police station. I went with friends, but I’d always drink more, and as a complete lightweight I often went back into school worse for wear. There’s a photo somewhere of me slumped and slurring in the corner of a classroom. Once I fell asleep drunk in the school library, and some of the kids painted my glasses with Tipp-Ex. When I woke up I thought I had gone blind.

  I fell further and further behind at school. Then came exams. I struggled, panicked, and refused to take some of the papers. I scraped a single GCSE, I think, and was somehow accepted to take A-levels. But I rarely appeared for lessons.

  Then Mum noticed my fingers were starting to turn blue. I went for tests, had a tube stuck into my heart and iodine pumped through my body so my arteries would show-up on an X-ray, and was eventually told smoking was furring the veins in my neck. If I didn’t stop puffing away I would lose my hands. It was all too much for me. I became depressed and withdrawn.

  I had already been going for weekly counselling for a year or so at a children’s mental health clinic in South Acton. Our GP was concerned about me. On his advice my sessions were upped to two a week. I went for counselling for almost three years from the age of fourteen, with a series of NHS mental health professionals who helped to keep me going and relatively stable just by listening and giving me the space to open up about my feelings and fears. But the counsellors and their centre were woefully underfunded. The building itself was dilapidated concrete, with a dark interior, and grim, grey, empty, dank rooms, like something out of Orwell’s 1984. My heart and spirits sank every time I stepped inside. The staff themselves were stretched. My therapist once broke down in tears as we talked, and I had to comfort them with a pat, a chat, and a box of tissues.

  One of my teachers could see I was falling behind. She called me into an office. Far from chastising me, she wanted to know what was wrong. I didn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t begin to articulate it myself. She reached out, extending a hand of friendship.

  ‘I can see you’re in a bad way. I know things aren’t easy for you at home,’ she said. ‘I’ve met your father. I know he can be very . . .’ she paused meaningfully, ‘. . . difficult.’

  I had started to blub. But now I just looked at her. I was shocked that she could see through me. But at the same time I was also angry with her for talking about my dad behind his back. He wasn’t the only one in the family at fault. He was far from perfect, but he was still mine. He was my dad.

  If even the teachers knew I was having a tough time, that felt like final proof everyone knew. With the self-regard you only have as a teenager, I thought I must be the butt of every joke. With my specs and the lamp-post disaster, the fact I was getting drunk and stoned on dope – far from making me seem cool – just made me feel even more pathetic. I vaguely remember a school coach trip where I was so spaced out I did nothing as the boy in the seat behind flicked my earlobe every mile of the way.

  My final months at school are a bit of a blur. I wasn’t studying or preparing for the exams. The thought of sitting down to take tests terrified me, and I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my life afterwards.

  ‘What are you doing to do when we leave, just sit in the pub?’ one of the lads in my class asked with a sneer.

  Going to university never entered my head. Other kids were lining up college and jobs, working in a trade with their father. My only ambition was still to get a job as a delivery driver. But to me even that seemed unlikely. I was becoming seriously depressed and sinking into self-pity and despair. Looking back now I can track how it all happened. A run of apparently insignificant events can turn a life upside down, to the point where you become a shadow of the person you were, and a fraction of the person you should be. My bad luck had left me feeling completely inadequate. One minor perceived humiliation followed another, coming at me from all directions. I started thinking I couldn’t go on.

  I managed to hold out at school until my final exams but dropped one of the subjects with weeks to go. By the time the actual papers came around I was having panic attacks and I didn’t show up to take a couple of exams. I made it into the hall for another one but when I sat down and stared at the questions panic started to well. I was in a complete state. The room began to spin, my mouth flooded with saliva and I knew I was going to be violently sick. I pushed the table away and stood up.

  ‘Simon, are you OK?’ shouted one of the teachers in concern. I ignored her, grabbed my bag, rushed through a side door and threw up all over the floor. I walked out of school right then, and I never went back.

  My heart breaks for other kids who slip through the net and don’t get career or life guidance. Leaving school was an exceptionally difficult time for me. With nothing to do I spent most of my time skulking in my room, watching a tiny, tinny black-and-white TV and ignoring my family when they knocked on the door to check on me. They had no idea how low I was falling. I would get out of bed and wander to the shops to pick up a few cans of Special Brew, then sit in my bedroom alone drinking booze strong enough to stand a spoon in. I felt I had nothing. No education, no girlfriend, and nowhere to go. Within just weeks of fleeing school my thoughts of suicide grew and transformed from passing thoughts to a stronger desire.

  Today, the single biggest cause of death among younger men in the UK is suicide. Thousands are killing themselves every year, the equivalent of perhaps sixteen a day. Men aged twenty to forty-nine are more likely to die at their own hand than from road accidents, heart disease or cancer. If any other, more obvious issue caused such tragedy, surely we would be researching it more, studying it harder, and talking about it more openly. We are experiencing a mental health crisis, and we need to spend more time discussing the causes and consequences. Personally I think suicide needs to be thought of like a virus. It can infect through emotions, ego, or as a result of bereavement, failure or loss. Men and lads like me, who are known to the mental health system, are obviously at risk, but so are those with no contact with therapists or a counsellor. Confident, tougher blokes are often less likely to open up when life takes a downwards turn. Women suffer as well, of course, but suicide kills three times as many British men as it does women. Nothing completely explains why. But we know that young men are shockingly vulnerable.

  In my case I felt depressed, helpless and hopeless. My family were reaching out to me, but negative feelings and a sense of pessimism about my future were overwhelming. It felt as if a dark weight was hanging around my shoulders, physically holding me down and taunting my mind. Nothing could get through to me and convince me I had a future.

  Just a few streets from my house was a footbridge across the Western Avenue, an endlessly busy artery in and out of Central London. For twenty-four hours a day traffic thundered along four lanes. The bridge had been a feature of my life as long as I could remember, a link across what was effectively a dividing motorway
. Occasionally we would troop up there as a family at night to watch fireworks over Central London. I would grip the railings as the whole bridge shook when heavy articulated lorries rumbled past below. From when I was a young child my mum had warned my brother and me about playing up by the road and made us swear we would never muck about on the bridge itself.

  There was no single moment of disaster that pushed me to the edge. No catastrophe. Just a nudge here and there can shift some of us from what passes for stability to a state of maddening despair.

  I thought for weeks about using a kitchen knife on myself, about taking handfuls of pills. I thought about stepping in front of a train, or a tube. Then I thought about falling in front of a lorry. One night I found myself wandering towards the bridge. It was familiar, comforting somehow. I climbed the steps, hopped the railing and shuffled along until I was facing out of London, above traffic heading towards the suburbs. It was windy, noisy. There were no pedestrians to talk me out of it. I looked at the sky. I remember teetering slightly, like a diver on a high board. I was serious, but scared. I looked down just as a heavy lorry passed underneath and a huge horn sounded. Had he seen me from behind? I will never know. It jerked me out of my moment. I started to wonder whether dropping from this low height onto the road would really work. Would I be able to time it so I landed in front of a lorry? Yet the thought of what a heavy vehicle would do to my body was horrific. It was reality, and that might have saved me. In that instant I started to fear the pain of dying more than life. I gripped tightly, nervously. I shuffled back along the side of the bridge and hopped back to safety, shaking with fear. I was choosing life.

  It was a turning point for me, of course, but at first nothing changed. There was no euphoria, there wasn’t even a sense of relief. I just climbed back over the rail and stood there feeling almost as wretched as I had before. I went home, crept indoors, slipped into bed and had a cry. I had no money, no job and no prospect of getting one either. I’d screwed up my schooling and walked away from my education. I still had no girlfriend; I could see no future. It all looked bleak.