The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  After reports on firearms training following the disastrous Stephen Waldorf {Check spell} affair where a young transvestite was shot and pistol-whipped by police officers who had mistaken him for a suspect in an armed robbery, and another on the policing of pickets at Orgreave {Check spell} during the miners’ strike in 1984, {Check} Winnicott was asked by the Commissioner to write Principles of Policing {Check}. This document was finally published in 1985 {Check} in an attempt to lay down organisational and ethical standards to deal with sagging morale and poor behaviour amongst officers. Those who defended his appointment to the Fraud Secretariat could point to its thoughtful analysis of the relationship between structural coherence and ethical behaviour. Unfortunately, as was often the case with Winnicott’s work, the report was admired but largely ignored. Its fate was foreshadowed by the fact that while the document warned against membership of the Masons, within two weeks of publication its most important lodge moved into new premises directly opposite Scotland Yard.

  In 1989 {Check} he joined the Anti-Terrorist Squad as Deputy and within two years he was in charge, when ill-health caused the retirement of its then head, Chief Superintendent Allan Willby {Check spell}. It was a difficult period for the squad and for Winnicott as there was some resistance amongst its members to the new approach he brought to dealing with terrorism. Hard-working and meticulous in his approach to planning and organisation, he was always a diffident man and many who knew his reputation were surprised, on meeting him, at his reticence. There was criticism that this distanced him from those around him and as a result his management team suffered from the lack of leadership and coherence he had so often singled out in his own reports.

  His hand was strengthened, however, when the defects he had outlined in procedures were revealed in the discovery that despite repeated searches by the squad of a suspect’s flat, the subsequent tenant later found a passport hidden under the carpet and a list of targets secreted behind a ventilation duct.

  During the next two years terrorist activity fell dramatically as Winnicott’s meticulous marshalling of intelligence and planning seemed to turn the tide. Even the spectacular bombing of the Baltic Exchange in 1993 {Check} that caused several hundred million pounds’ worth of damage resulted in only a temporary loss of reputation. Seeing the IRA had discovered that by attacking the financial centre of the UK it could inflict profound economic damage, his solution was as simple as it was uncharacteristically dramatic. He devised an audacious plan to guard the City twenty-four hours a day through an encircling ring of permanent roadblocks.

  Born in Chesterfield in 1952 {Check}, he was educated at the Sonning School in Reading where he damaged his hand in a laboratory prank that went wrong. He never entirely recaptured the use of his right thumb and when tired was prone to drop cups of tea throughout the rest of his life. He read law at Bristol University {Check} where he gained a solid second, joining the police on graduating.

  Whether as Director of the Fraud Secretariat George Winnicott would have been able to save the City a second time, on this occasion from itself, must remain a matter for speculation. He fell seriously ill shortly after joining and was never in a position to impose his personality on this much criticised organisation. It is a sad irony that his reputation, which had been at its height when he left the Anti-Terrorist Squad, is now being eclipsed as it becomes clear that much of the reduction in Nationalist activity for which he had been given so much credit was due to the change in IRA strategy which saw politics rather than the bomb as the most effective means of pursuing their aims.

  He is survived by his wife and daughter. {Check}

  George Winnicott b. 1952 {Check}. Died?

  Hendrix was uncomfortably aware of the uneasy emotions that hung in the bedroom, thickening the atmosphere so that it felt like being in the middle of one of those novelty table-lamps where different kinds of coloured liquid wrapped themselves around each other without ever mixing. The Winnicotts’ house was a strange place, perfectly normal in almost every way, but it was this very quality that made it so odd. It was as if a terrible human drama of unfathomable intensity had been played out there: a sense of something enormous being nursed, of weeping, and of teeth grinding in anger and loss. Yet he felt with absolute certainty that there was nothing here that you could actually uncover, no particular dark secret, just the familiar stuff of failed marriages. But here, somehow, it was amplified into a sense of foreboding befitting a Greek tragedy. Hendrix felt as one of the royal flunkeys might have on being the first outsider to enter the palace after Clytemnestra had murdered her husband for sacrificing their daughter on the way to Troy. Only in this semi-detached in Harrow-on-the-Hill the great drama was unperformed, left hanging in the air. He sometimes felt, at the end of yet another week of sessions full of domestic misery, that every other house in England was the unacted House of Atreus. But only in very few was there the murderous deed, the simple downward strike, the blood upon the floor, the one great crime to be avenged. But here in Harrow there was also pity and anxiety, a desperate fear of loss. And a confused love, hovering above it all like a ghost.

  Having exchanged such pleasantries as were possible between a dying man, his wife and his two analysts, there was a pause in the conversation for which the word awkward was entirely inadequate. Not only was Hendrix ill at ease with the atmosphere of the house but part of his discomfort was due to his feeling distinctly queasy about the propriety of their conducting hypnosis under such circumstances. Given that Winnicott was dying it could hardly be said to be for his benefit. ‘It won’t do him any harm, will it?’ argued Haynes, and Hendrix had allowed himself to be persuaded. Haynes at least had the honesty to pursue his own interests, whereas Hendrix was wringing his hands yet still going along with it. ‘Don’t make such a fuss,’ said Haynes finally. ‘He’s agreed, so let him do something useful for science before he dies.’

  ‘Useful for Eddy Haynes, you mean.’

  ‘In this instance, what’s for the good of mankind and what’s for the good of Eddy Haynes are the same thing.’

  The silence in the bedroom continued. Deeply worried that this provided an opportunity for a decision to abandon the session, Haynes attempted light-hearted conversation. ‘David claims he’s on the verge of a breakthrough on that crossword clue you gave him.’

  Winnicott turned to his wife. ‘Michael McCarthy gave me a clue which he’d been told was the most difficult ever devised. I passed it on to Mr Hendrix here. I’m impressed. I’m afraid I got absolutely nowhere.’

  Hendrix looked awkward. Asking NEMO to give him the solution had turned out to be a pointless act of cheating for more than moral reasons. NEMO had come up with an answer but it had not solved it. It had found the reference to the solution in a newspaper archive database. The reference had only claimed the answer was “Senselessness”. But it had not explained why and he’d had no luck at all in working it out himself. ‘Actually, I think my confidence is probably misplaced,’ said Hendrix. ‘I thought I nearly had it but . . .’

  Winnicott nodded sympathetically. ‘Well, if you do get anywhere, let me know. I probably couldn’t have cracked it anyway. These days I can’t even think of simple words sometimes.’

  This produced another awkward silence, which was finally broken by Alice. ‘Should I leave you to it?’

  The question was asked in a tone that was both poignant with her desire to be asked to stay and chilly in its expectation that she would not. Even Haynes was not sufficiently insensitive to answer. Winnicott smiled. She stood up and was gone. Hendrix watched the door shut and turned back guiltily to Winnicott. To his surprise, the smile had been replaced by a look of concern.

  ‘Do you think I seemed rude?’ he asked. ‘I just thought that she might find it upsetting, hearing me speak in another voice.’ He smiled sadly. ‘I find the idea upsetting myself. I almost called you to cancel.’

  The two men nodded as if they understood entirely while both avoided replying, neither wanting to say anything t
hat might ease his way to changing his mind. ‘I mean, you agree,’ continued Winnicott, looking at them as if scanning for dissent, ‘that this is not a mental breakdown. You agree that this is physical, that these hallucinations arose simply out of a physical response, my brain attempting to make sense of things caused by a physical illness.’

  It was Haynes who replied, to Hendrix’s profoundly guilty relief. ‘I think both David and I have had to rethink our position on what’s been happening to you. Clearly neither of us can take the view any more that your case is a conventional question of what you reasonably enough call mental breakdown. Neither of us, to be honest, really knows what to think. But obviously the more information we have, the better the opportunity to come up with some kind of hypothesis. I’ll be honest with you,’ continued Haynes, and Hendrix winced internally. ‘We believe your case is unique. We could learn a great deal from your experience.’

  ‘So,’ said Winnicott softly, ‘I’m to become a famous case history.’

  Haynes smiled, and Hendrix was both appalled and relieved at how convincing the smile was. It spoke of an admission that, amid the genuine wish for the furtherance of human knowledge, there was an element of self-interest. The smile was eloquent concerning the inevitability of mixed motives but it also spoke convincingly, by virtue of such openness, that Haynes’ desire for understanding was neither diminished nor adulterated by this admission but rather in its frankness, in a paradoxical way, enhanced.

  Now that he was in Winnicott’s presence, Hendrix realised that his desire to find out everything he could about his patient’s alter ego had increased in intensity to such an extent that his conscience had reached the stage of hypocritical collusion: it was shaking its head at Haynes’ disgraceful performance while also keeping its mouth shut.

  Winnicott, however, seemed mostly, if not altogether, convinced. ‘Shall we get on?’

  Haynes pulled his seat close to Winnicott’s bed with the enthusiasm of a greedy boy finally given permission to eat as many cream buns as he liked. Within three minutes Winnicott had closed his eyes and his breathing was regular and relaxed. ‘Three, two, one,’ counted Haynes.

  Winnicott opened his eyes. He blinked and both men knew that Jean Smith had returned. There was no flirtatiousness now, none of the sexual confidence and warmth. She looked haunted and afraid.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Hendrix.

  She looked at him, her face filled with desperation and horror. ‘I’m going to die.’

  Neither said anything. They did not know what they felt at this most simple and terrible statement except that it included an astonished recognition: they felt as if a woman whom they liked and were attracted to had said the same thing. What they were feeling did not make sense and yet they knew they were feeling it. They also realised that it was entirely true. Whatever the origins of this extraordinary personality, it was now clear to them both that they had been unconsciously accepting her as a real person while still technically thinking of her as part of the split consciousness of a patient whose mental instability was now clearly of organic origin.

  ‘Can’t you just leave Winnicott?’ It was Haynes who spoke and whose self-interest seemed to have been shamed by the fear in her voice. She looked at him, and it was with the haunted expression he had seen many times before of someone facing the shock of premature death, an expression that was so oddly missing in Winnicott.

  ‘You don’t believe me – what I’ve told you. You’re just humouring me.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’ Haynes said this with such sincerity that it nearly brought tears to Hendrix’s eyes.

  Smith sighed. ‘What can you say?’ She breathed in deeply, composing herself. ‘I don’t know how long we have so I’ll try to tell you as much as I can.’

  There was dread in her eyes, as if she had something to tell which would change the lives of those listening for ever. ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.’ There was no humour in the way she said this, only compassionate dismay.

  ‘The Vanguard came here with a clear intention, one of which they were ashamed, but which was very precise: they wanted to create an intelligent species, and find a way to make them cooperate with one another in building a civilisation where all the forces that shape a complex society could be magnified and speeded up so that they could be clearly observed. They had a saying: “It’s only when something is broken that it yields up its true nature.” But in order for a civilisation to fail it has first to succeed. So they gradually developed a creature out of what was available to them here – reptiles and mammals – and mixed it with artificial genes and grafts from themselves. They needed an intelligent animal who would be able to live with others in a group . . . so they gave you great powers of cooperation, and the desire to live for others, and to begin great enterprises from which only generations born long after would benefit. And they needed swift answers to their problem. They needed these enterprises to grow to maturity with great speed, so they gave you longings for a perfect world, and with the heart and soul needed to endure terrible suffering, to sacrifice even your lives for an ideal.’ She was panting lightly, like an animal after a short run. ‘And so they could watch these great dreams disintegrate around you, they also made you self-obsessed and greedy, narrow-minded and vain. They gave you every virtue they could imagine, every quality of strength and purpose, inventiveness and ingenuity. And then they bound each one of them with every matching vice: kindness with malice, a relish of invention with a fear of change. Along with love of wife, children, and of family, they gave you a relentless desire for sex. They made you noble, merciful and good; and stupid, ignorant and full of spite. They gave you unfathomable self-belief, then poisoned you with doubt. They matched grace with boorishness, elegance with vulgarity, energy with sloth. For every impulse to build, invent and make, they gave you the drive to break and burn and devastate. All of this so they could see you rise up, disintegrate, rise and fall again. And so that in your swift ascent and dissolution they would understand the nature of the way things change, they shortened your lives by half so that you would need to work with desperate speed to make your mark before age and the diseases they had so carefully designed to make life hard could finish you.’ She looked at them both in turn. ‘It’s only when something is broken that it yields up its true nature,’ she repeated. ‘They made you so that you would break.’

  There was a moment’s silence and then Winnicott came out of the trance like someone emerging from an intense daydream. Hendrix wondered why Winnicott had never expressed any interest in what happened when he was under hypnosis. His attitude seemed to be that of a volunteer medical patient whose rare blood type was needed for arcane experiments for the good of mankind. It had suited Hendrix to leave things well enough alone until he could decide how to broach the issue with Winnicott, but he was amazed by his passivity and put it down to his unwillingness to confront anything about himself.

  This time Winnicott seemed to realise that the two men were disturbed by what had happened. The atmosphere was uneasy. Hendrix was unsure what he would say if Winnicott asked directly what they had been doing with him all this time. But he did not ask them about the session. Instead he asked Haynes if he would mind if he talked to Hendrix on his own for a few minutes. Normally, Haynes’ personal vanity might have been ruffled by this but he seemed glad to get out of the room.

  There was a long pause while Winnicott stared out of the window as if at a distant but melancholy view. ‘You do find yourself thinking,’ he said at last, ‘thinking about . . . I have to say, what I’ve done. I mean I’ve had an interesting life in many ways. I can’t complain.’ He laughed softly. That’s a lie, of course. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Pointless, really, at this stage. I’ve found myself thinking about other men’s lives. Wondering, as I suppose is only to be expected, what I’ve achieved. So you compare. Or perhaps you don’t.’ He cleared his throat. ‘But that’s what I’ve been doing.’ He looked out o
f the window again. ‘It’s not a pleasant thing. I found myself wondering what people would say. My father used to do that when my mother sent me to him to be told off, and he’d always smile when he said it: So, young man, what do you have to say for yourself? And what I have to say is that I feel as if I’ve forgotten an important thing, something I was supposed to do.’ He looked at Hendrix and smiled. ‘And I know what it is. I overlooked the fact that I was supposed to live. And somehow I didn’t get around to doing it . . . living. I sort of knew that I really had to do it at some time, but it’s like those people who die without making a will and produce all sorts of trouble for those they leave, not bad people but they just didn’t get around to doing it and they caused enormous harm. And that’s what I’ve done and now it’s too late. And I think how unbelievably stupid. But the thing is I still don’t know, I still can’t tell you what it was I should have done. So it’s not like a will at all, is it? I should have done something really terribly, terribly important but I don’t know what it is. I don’t really know what it means to say that I haven’t lived.’ He looked at Hendrix and it was as if a grey horror had flushed through under the surface of his skin like some dread, colourless embarrassment. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it?’

  Hendrix did not reply, partly out of respect for what he’d been told and partly because he had been told it at all. It would be offensive to offer Winnicott the wrong kind of reassurance.

  ‘The thing is, George,’ it was the first time he had ever used his Christian name, ‘and please don’t misunderstand – you’re depressed.’ How lame it sounded. ‘A better word is . . . stricken. This is a terrible thing for anyone to face. You’re right to talk to me. To say these things. But even if what you’re feeling now is regret for all the things you’re going to lose or that you feel you’ve never had—’

  ‘Not feel I’ve never had,’ said Winnicott passionately, ‘I’ve never had them. At least I can be honest. At least I can face up to it fair and square.’