2020

by Kenneth Steven

  *

  I WAS DRAFTED in for the White Rose protest. I’m in the police and it’s about keeping law and order, and at times you end up doing things you don’t particularly like. You can’t pick and choose, any more than a fireman can decide whether or not he likes the look of the blaze he’s been asked to put out. No, but my point is a serious one. You can’t argue with the uniform; you have to maintain a neutrality to the very best of your ability. If I’m absolutely pushed on a personal level I would say that I had been quite disgusted by what had been allowed to happen. I felt it had all spun out of control and it was time for some kind of order to be restored. I don’t mean that actually in terms of law and order—although inevitably that’s part of it—I mean it far more in respect of the politics. I think basically we had a weak Prime Minister. I felt that nothing had happened over Burroway except that we had decided to build a memorial garden. We hadn’t even attempted to get to the root cause of what was a major terrorist attack. Did we know why it had happened? Were we urgently seeking to ensure that such a thing was impossible in the future? And now Sudburgh was in danger of becoming an independent republic where extremists on both sides could effectively do what they liked. I was hardly alone in thinking there was something seriously wrong with the message that was being sent out by our so-called government. But I’m saying all this because I’m almost being forced to do so. And I am revealing my personal viewpoint precisely because of my anonymity here today. I simply would not do so otherwise. I think I’ve probably already said more than I should have done.

  On to facts. I think we expected perhaps ten thousand might march that Saturday, but of course after the fire-bombing of the White Rose building Eric Semple was abducted. No one saw that coming. And even though he wasn’t officially a representative of that organisation, he was very much singing from their hymn sheet. So that was underestimated and we did get it wrong. I don’t think it was a disaster, but I will admit that it could have been. There was a lot of blaming of the police in the post mortem and I simply feel a great deal of that blame is unjustified. You do not have an instruction manual given to you before such events. You work on your best instincts at the time and in the middle of developing situations you simply make decisions that feel justified. Of course you are acting at times out of a need for sheer self-preservation. We are police men and women out there; we are not machines! It is far too easy to become wise after the event. But I am admitting that mistakes were made, and sometimes those mistakes were serious. I do believe that lessons will have to be learned. Of course I do.

  *

  WE’RE LOOKING DOWN on the march from the helicopter and at this point it’s simply not possible for me to see the northern end of the numbers—the starting point of it all. There’s a sheer sea of White Rose insignias; many marchers are wearing armbands with the distinctive logo and there are quite a number of banners. Many are bearing the name of Terry Radcliffe, of course. But what has surprised me is the number of women. White Rose has often been characterised as a group for working-class men who don’t work. Here today you see the sheer volume of support there is across the spectrum. And I feel that if I were to be able to open one of the windows and shut out the roar of the helicopter blades, I’d be able to hear the chanting of Eric Semple’s name. Because this is perhaps as much and more about fury over the disappearance, the kidnapping, of the recently elected member of parliament as it is about the cause of White Rose—or indeed about the tragic death of Terry Radcliffe. Many banners bear the name of Eric Semple, and many display the names underneath of groups who’re marching today to remember him, to demand that even now he’s released unharmed.

  And it’s quite apparent that businesses owned by people, by ordinary men and women from the Pakistani and the wider Asian community, have been boarded up and even reinforced by whole walls of protective material. Now there, just below us, you can see that implements of various kinds are being taken to a less well-protected shop front. And someone is being dragged out; there are no fewer than four white men setting into the individual who came out to defend the property! He is being battered repeatedly and is down on the ground—and there is simply no evidence whatsoever of the police! Another window has been smashed and the shop front is being looted. White Rose issued a warning to its members early this morning to say in no uncertain terms… And the violence being meted out to that one man is quite sickening; the images will be clear for all to see. And more has broken out on the far side! It’s hard for me to make it out because of the glare, but some kind of barricade is being torn down and now we can see the wall of riot police. They are being attacked from that side by a hail of missiles. And this is the effective mid-point of the march, I would judge. Now some marchers are turning back—those who were already beyond the point of the first instance of violence and looting. The police are simply too few in number and there on the right you can see a group of officers that has been effectively cut off from the rest. They’re slashing with their batons and several people are down on the ground—it’s hard to tell which side they belong to. One is being jumped on and even from up here you can see the blood. This is quite sickening; this is what you feel was feared to an extent by both sides of the divide. The middle of the march has become little more than a battlefield. Order is going to have to be restored very quickly before this turns into nothing less than a bloodbath. And I’m just hearing … we’re being ordered out of the skies and will report again if and when that’s possible. It seems most unlikely and I will hand back now to the studio…

  *

  THE THING YOU had to realise was that Eric might not have been kidnapped by Asians to begin with. I think that fact was almost completely overlooked from the outset. The assumption always was that this is what it would have been, but there is absolutely no evidence to back that up.

  I’m a friend of the Semple family, have been for more years than I care to remember. There never was any political dimension, if you like, to that friendship. I was actually godfather to their son in the end, even though Eric always maintained stridently that he was an avowed atheist and neither needed nor wanted godparents. Trish was the one who was keen that both children should be baptised, and I’ll not inflict that long story on you—there’s no need. Suffice to say that our two families remained very close until and through the time of my divorce about eight years ago; they were a great support to me personally, and that would have been about the time Eric was becoming more engaged in political activities. But as I’ve made clear, this was never about that political world. Our friendship was much older than that, and it was just a very ordinary, solid connection.

  I came to the house probably about twelve hours after Eric had been taken. The place was crawling with police; it was just a horrible atmosphere. They were in and out of the front rooms and on the stairs; you could hear radio mikes round you and even the garden was being crawled over for any shred of evidence. I’m sure they were merely doing everything they had to do, but it was just a most unpleasant, nerve-racking atmosphere, and I simply brought Trish and her daughter in to one of the back rooms, which was a kind of refuge from the chaos at the front. We just sat down together and cried; we held on to each other for the next half-hour and wept. I should say that their son was still away at university at that point—my godson—so it was just the three of us. And I remember Trish pouring out this story about a dream she’d had, a nightmare, and that she’d known all along that this was going to happen. She was completely beside herself, and the only thing you can do in a moment like that is be there. You feel that anything you say is next to useless, but in point of fact what matters most is just being there.

  I don’t think we talked about the kidnapping at all; no, let me take that back, because inevitably we would have done. I’m not sure that I did much but listen; it was Trish who poured out what had happened the night before. It was all just very much at random and then she tried to get her daughter to speak about where she had been at the time and what she had s
een. It was clear the girl didn’t want to talk at all, wasn’t actually able to talk. At some point a policewoman came in to the room and talked to both of them; I have to say I was very impressed with the way that woman handled things. It wasn’t that she shoved me out of the way in the least; I remember she just sat down on the floor close to them and spoke softly, really tried to be there for them. I was over at the window at that point and I remember a helicopter going over, and I had never seen one so low. It suddenly hit me that Eric was really gone, that he might be dead already. Somehow the whole thing hadn’t been quite real before then and it just seemed to wash right over me at that point.

  The word I want to use is drenched; I somehow felt drenched with the reality of it and was quite emotional myself. I found myself thinking of all manner of things Eric and I had got up to over the years; he was the kind of guy who just inspired. He was somehow a leader; you wanted to be part of his world. I remember on one occasion when he and I broke into a table-tennis club in the middle of the night. I don’t even remember where it was. We were far from sober but there was no malevolence in what we did; it was just out of a sheer and crazy sense of adventure. He happened to know where this club was and we managed to get in the back door about three in the morning. Oh, Eric knew all about opening doors; he had years of experience! And we just played table tennis for the next couple of hours; we were both pretty good, and we played our hearts out. We shut the place up again about five in the morning and walked home having sobered ourselves up. That was the kind of thing we did. And it hit me then that I might never be able to laugh with him again about that kind of night. Then I looked over and saw Trish and her girl, and I thought how much worse it was for them.

  What I thought about Eric himself? I’m not sure I thought it back then, but perhaps even by that day I was beginning to think a lot about what he had done, what he had set in motion. I’ve said the whole political thing was never there; the two families were just friends on a very ordinary, human level. I don’t think I understood what all that meant to him. I think I felt he had put a hell of a lot on the line for the sake of his views. It just didn’t seem worth it; I think it all seemed very selfish. Yeah, I can even remember feeling angry about it. You go through a whole range of emotions and that was certainly one of them. What right had he to sacrifice his family for his beliefs, however important they might have been to him? And I do still find myself thinking that even now, from time to time, despite the fact it’s only one of many conflicting feelings, inevitably. I do struggle to understand what he was doing.

  *

  MY MEMORY OF that time in the basement is somewhat in slow motion, too. I felt in shock; I was just completely thrown by what was happening and by what I had been asked to do. You wonder afterwards why you didn’t act differently, and I can say only that I’ve done so countless times. On a number of occasions I’ve woken up in the middle of the night, gasping for breath and just sweating profusely, and the last frame, as it were, of my dream or nightmare, is of standing looking down at our prisoner lying there naked on the bench.

  Of course I’m familiar with the device; it was constructed so that it hugged the whole genital area. And I’ve already stated that it was fitted so as to give a maximum sense of constriction from the outset. The whole business is about fear, generating fear. I don’t actually believe—and I feel quite certain of this—that the device was tightened at any point during the interrogation, however long that lasted. I saw no evidence of that and I genuinely believe that that was going to happen only as a last resort. It was all about maximising fear. It comes down to whether or not you believe that to be acceptable.

  I can remember standing there with my colleague opposite me and our superior talking and talking to the prisoner about that basement chamber. He said that no one else knew we were there, that it was a place that was completely disused. He said it was completely sound-proofed, that no one would hear him screaming; no one would come to find him. He said that no one knew anyway that he was alive, that they believed all of the terrorists had been killed on the train. He did it well; he did it really well. I did not want to be there myself; I felt quite sick. I had to keep reminding myself that this guy there in front of me had been prepared to bomb a train, to kill and maim hundreds of totally innocent people. I had to tell myself that somehow what was being done now was justified because of the other lives it might save. I don’t know if I truly believed that; it’s what I told myself then, and not once but many times. All I can say is that I tried to believe it then. Somehow it wasn’t even a choice.

  Do I believe that no one else knew what was going on? I’ve also asked myself that question many times, and I reckon it must have been known about. I’ve thought about how the device was obtained and I’ve thought about this question of who actually did know the prisoner was still alive. And I’ve realised that it’s possible it wasn’t even my superior’s decision to carry out this interrogation—call it what you will. That it may have been sanctioned, it may have been ordered, much higher up the chain of command. Beyond that I know nothing, but of course I realise there is every possibility of that being the case.

  How long did the whole thing last? After all the years of training I’ve had and after however much experience, I’m ashamed to say that I simply don’t know. I am aware how that must come across and I’m sorry. But I say again that I felt I was somehow operating in slow motion; I was just aware of being there in that dark and breathless basement, watching this guy thrashing about on the bench below me. If you insist on some kind of answer, I’d say minutes. I said before that I reckoned it must have taken all of eight minutes to get from the interview room on the upper floor to the beginning of the interrogation in the basement. And then it was perhaps another five or ten minutes. Yes, it would have been as little as that.

  My superior was just quiet in the end; he simply stood there at the end of the bench and I remember he had his arms folded. The prisoner was gabbling; it was just a torrent of stuff I could hardly make out, about some idea or other that had to do with a base. He kept using the word base, but so much of what he said was just a mumbled torrent—he was barely coherent. Then my boss went and crouched beside him and said very quietly that he was going to tighten the device and the prisoner shrieked; he just jerked like a doll a single time and flipped over and fell off the bench. He must have had a seizure, some kind of massive seizure, and he just landed on the floor completely still.

  *

  I WON’T FORGET that afternoon as long as I live. I was twenty-four and had been working in casualty for only six months. I felt as if I was in some kind of war zone. I’d find myself thinking this wasn’t real, it was something invented by central government to give us training in some kind of nightmare pandemic scenario. I think the worst period would have been between two and three in the afternoon. Hideous injuries. A man whose face had been stamped to a pulp, and pretty much the rest of him jumped on too. A whole number of people with burns; they were easier to deal with, but they were in a great deal of pain, and I hadn’t really seen burns before. The place was simply chaos. You go into automatic pilot; I literally worked through into the small hours of the next day. I do feel the whole unit became a team that night, in a way it had never been before. I have thought of that subsequently, that I feel a kind of kinship with those who were working that day. But I have no earthly wish to idealise it now and forget just how hellish it was at the time. Of course there’s a danger of that. I don’t think that anything television can simulate can get close to the reality of a day like that. There were quite a number of White Rose supporters by then. I think by that stage the Asian community had had enough; as they saw it the time had come to defend themselves. I stress that is supposition on my part; I’m a doctor, and the politics at the back of all this simply makes me angry. You stand there and feel that none of this has to be. I do remember that at about four in the morning there was a bit of a lull; I went out for a cup of tea and a few minutes of air. There was a wo
man in the waiting area whose son was in intensive care; he’d been stabbed, but he was going to pull through all right. She was just beyond tiredness, sitting in one of those plastic seats all hunched in to herself and crying. Some people cry to attract attention; often children do that. But this was just a soft and slow crying that tore at your heart. I don’t think I’ve ever thought of crying as beautiful before, but I did at that moment. I stood there and thought that I’d done everything possible to try to help her son, that the only other thing I could do was to give her a hug. Of course, that’s probably breaking every single rule in the book, but sometimes you have to throw the book out of the window. I just sat beside her and gave her a hug, and I remember her looking out at the growing dawn. The sky was red and of course it made me think of blood, and I realised there would probably be more victims coming in before it was over. And just at that moment I felt like crying myself. I thought this was all so pointless and tragic, and that the only thing I could do was to try to put faces back together. Those were the words that came to me as I looked out at the dawn: the only thing I could do was to try to put faces back together. And it didn’t matter whose they were; it wasn’t for me to be on one side or the other. I was in the middle, seeing past badges and insignia and veils and the rest of it. I felt very helpless at that moment; I think I was just beyond myself, to be honest, but I somehow felt the pain of the whole situation. I think I had a sense too almost of anger, that politicians don’t have to carry the real weight of suffering. They had brought this into being, on both sides, but then they had walked away.