The priest kindly let us take some general shots inside the church but asked us not to film during the mass. The family asked us not to go to the graveside. I didn’t really want to go back a second time to that cold, lonely place that we had visited earlier in the year.
We showed the boy the maximum respect. I felt less for his father and could only conclude that the parents had split because the mother had found out about the drug running. The boy actually lived in El Paso and went to school there on an American passport. He had no reason to be back in Ciudad Juárez other than to see his narcotic-peddling dad. That had cost him.
It was a strange day. And from there we left: one minute at a funeral, the next back at the airport. I was pleased to get out – in hindsight, our first visit had served as a fact-finder. This time we had got what our hunch had indicated and hadn’t really busted a gut. Murders, funerals, the mob, and prisons – inside three days, and all daily reminders of the self-destruction that was Ciudad Juárez. We walked straight into it. It was a great story but it was on a plate. And there was no stopping it. In Ciudad Juárez, it wasn’t really news at all.
DAD
It was February 2010, when Paul Easter became my boss. He had come straight from the Intelligence Corps, where he had been lieutenant colonel. Things were changing at the Beeb. Even though they were nominated for awards, trips like Ciudad Juárez would be more highly scrutinised than ever. Cost and manpower came to the heart of decision-making as never before; form-filling was rife, meetings relentless, and getting funding for stories was a process of self-justification that never ended. In the new leaner keener BBC, if you couldn’t do it on multi-platforms, forget it.
From the start, I didn’t get on with Easter. While we were fine socialising, I sensed I was being looked at with suspicion – a top-heavy cost who was away a lot, and who then came back with raucous tales of adventure and a massive expenses claim. I never failed though, Sex Trafficking the only time I missed out (narrowly) on delivering the goods.
Easter hadn’t been long on the job that time he had rung me in Baghdad, where I was covering the Iraqi elections with John and dealing with everything that brought, but was also in the process of spending a quarter of a million quid of BBC cash buying armoured cars from the States. My trip was scheduled for my return. He rang to cancel it. I was short with him, explaining that you didn’t just go and spend that kind of public money over the phone. The professional thing to do was to get out there and handle the deal yourself. Goodness, over the years I had inspected every vehicle as though my life depended on it, and as we had found with the dodgy motors that Hanif tried to flog me in Kabul, it was the right thing to do. Besides, I was on assignment. It was neither the time nor the place.
I felt the noose tightening. I wasn’t on his team. It had started when he mocked me early on for being in a photo on the wall with John. True, I wasn’t the face on TV. That didn’t mean I didn’t have my place in the great stories of the past decade, many of them with John.
My opinion was that he was the wrong man for the job. I didn’t think he understood the media. I was a guy at the coalface and he was destined for a desk. I was brought in to be the deployable security guy who got his hands dirty. That wasn’t his style. As good as the adventure had been, I knew my days were numbered or that my role would change. Though I had never been one for the money, I realised I had reached a ceiling in terms of pay and bonuses. The trips were my pocket money out of a fun BBC budget that I lived off but didn’t have direct access to. If they were drying up, then so was my appetite. I had started to think about an exit plan.
Then, on 1 April, my mum rang. ‘Your dad’s died,’ she said.
‘What?’ I was stunned.
‘Your dad’s died.’
I had spent much of the previous two months going back and forth to Spain where they now lived. Dad loved it out there, and Mum said she had done it for him. It wasn’t the typical 1970s and 1980s dream of that generation that made them go. It was actually my idea, one they had never even considered. Dad had never been happier.
Sadly, he had been seriously ill that February and had just recovered. Then we lost him. All the deaths that I had seen and, finally, one came along that ripped my soul in two. I knew several things were on a collision course. Nothing felt right any more. I would still do the World Cup in South Africa that summer but everything happens for a reason and Dad’s massive heart attack at the age of seventy-nine was a sign. My heart was no longer in it either.
He also had skin cancer, albeit under control, and he spent Christmas 2009 in hospital with pneumonia. He had begun to talk the odd bit of nonsense, slightly deliriously. I am bound to say, he had a good innings. After he had recovered from the illness in February, I had taken him out for some lunch. He was eating for the first time in ages, and there was some colour back in his cheeks. While I was at the bar ordering him a bitter shandy, he was telling Sue all about his childhood on the farm. Much of what he said was strange. It was classic preparing-for-death language, going deep into his past as his circle came round for the final time.
Back home, Mum asked me to take him up for a shower. He had been a strong old boy, but I could see how bony he had become. I propped him up with a book and went downstairs to get him a drink. Dad looked tired. He didn’t seem the same person. When I came back up, he was asleep. The book, which the old Dad would have read in an afternoon, was barely opened. After the previous visit to the hospital, the surgeons told us that they had found white shavings around his lungs on the X-ray. He was too old to operate on and they didn’t really know what it was. Dad had been determined to carry on as long as possible. Now, even though you never think your own dad will die, he looked defeated. From downstairs, I suddenly heard him scream out. I asked Mum what it was. She told me that it was now a regular occurrence to hear Dad wailing and screaming through the night. Nobody knew why. Was this the near-death experience – literally a nightmare of a lifetime’s experiences flashing by? Was it pain from the lungs? Was he more in the subconscious than the conscious? I couldn’t know.
He was rolling around in the bed, so I woke him. He had no idea of what had gone on. We were due home the next day and I asked Mum if she wanted Sue and me to stay. Dad was due to start taking heavy medication and, deep down, the writing was on the wall. Mum said to go and to keep in touch by phone.
When we returned, Sue’s dad was also unwell. We looked at each other, thinking the same. This was definitely the last year for both of them.
When I rang a couple of days later, I could tell the drugs were kicking in. Dad just sounded completely different, but in a good way. He was chatting for England, as though the tablets had given him a new lease of life. At the beginning of March, we went out again for a long weekend. Everything he talked about was clear and concise. The weather was picking up, and he was the most coherent he had been in months. I suddenly began to think everything was going to be fine. I genuinely went home unconcerned.
Sue’s dad was eighty-seven. He was a man who had nine lives – a miner and a smoker, too. He had caught MRSA in hospital and had his toe removed. He also had only one kidney. No longer able to live in his bungalow, he had moved in with Sue’s sister. That, in the short term, eased the burden.
We had a lot on – we both had full-time jobs and one minute we were in Spain, the next going up and down to Mansfield for Sue. I would ring Spain to talk to Dad. He would ask me if I was getting ready for the World Cup, talking like it was twenty years ago. The nightmares had gone, he was eating a bit and definitely perking up. Mum said it was solely the drugs. I was heading into Easter feeling a lot more relaxed about the situation.
Just before the bank holiday weekend, I had agreed to meet Chas Staines on the Thursday. Chas was an old buddy from my security days and we would hook up every few weeks or so. We agreed to meet at the old fire station at Waterloo. The night before, on the Wednesday, Dad had called. The medics were putting him on an oxygen bottle.
‘What do
you mean?’ I had said.
‘You know, one of those things you walk round the house with, strapped to you to help you breathe,’ he replied. I asked him why they were doing that – he said the doctors had recommended it.
‘That’s not a bad thing. That’s not the end of the world,’ I told him. I knew that the portable oxygen machines were brilliant.
‘That’s it now; I’m trapped. Speak to your mother.’
They had delivered the big bottle to the house and given him a small portable one for when he was out so he didn’t feel housebound. The medics were coming back a day later to set everything up properly. They didn’t need to.
Dad died the next day.
He was from that generation where they didn’t talk about things, but even though we weren’t close, I couldn’t pinpoint anything that would have caused him distress in flashback before the drugs gave him the short-term relief. Born on a farm in Scotland in 1930, he had worked all his life and hadn’t been an evacuee during the war. Like many dads from that era, he shared very little with me. He once told me of his biggest disappointment – getting turned down for a coaching job at Swindon Town Football Club when he came out of the military in 1972. He had also been an extra in the movie The Wooden Horse and played the role of a stretcher-bearer in the classic Dunkirk. His own dad had left his wife and served for fifty years in the merchant navy. He had sailed convoys across the Atlantic during the war, dying in 1969 in the Greenwich Seaman’s Home. I knew virtually nothing of his DNA. In fact, I can’t say I knew Dad well at all.
It was only in death, of course, that I realised this. Even though a friend of mine had told me when Dad was ill to say everything I wanted to or be left with a lifetime of regrets, I never got round to it. It’s stupid, I know. Of course, from having not really known him at all, I suddenly wanted to know him like there was no tomorrow. But now tomorrow would never come.
If I saw a picture, it would upset me. A lifetime of dodging and dealing with death professionally now crashed into my personal world, and all those bodies and families that, machine-like, I had dealt with as part of the job … well, I crossed over onto their side of the road for the first time. I don’t know if I had lots to tell him, but I wanted the right to do so. He loved all my stories and adventures, watching everything I did. He knew about the baby at the tsunami and Harry’s Game – stories I would have given minimalistic details of to Mum and Sue. I didn’t think I needed to unload this stuff, but he knew more than most. Dad would never say he was proud of what I had become since he dragged me out of that court to the army but he did let me know in the way that his generation did.
‘I saw you on that Panorama … I read about Friendly Fire …’ That was his way. And I was grateful for the life he had chosen for me after I turned my back on school. He had played a blinder, and I wouldn’t turn the clock back. Occasionally over the years he would bring it up jokingly but he never ever judged. ‘Did that really go on?’ was as tough as his moral line went.
When I would say that of course it had, he would urge me to tell him more and to get to the good bit, always interrupting at the crucial times, asking a million questions. I was an audio version of the books he loved to read, playing the narrator. His desire to know the story perhaps said we had more in common than I realised – both military men, but with me given the chance to take those skills into the modern era of media, something only the Oxbridge elite would have chanced upon in his day.
As he would listen to me recounting the stories, he was living them with me in person. I think in the end we showed love in this way, without knowing it. His enthusiasm for my stories met my desire to tell them – it was an unspoken thank you from me for showing me the way at such a young age, and a massive show of pride from him that he had steered his boy from going off the rails. When I took that call after four or five pints with Chas, I knew that there would be no more stories. This was his last chapter.
Mum told me he’d gone up to bed feeling unwell. Then he said he was going to be sick, so she went for the bucket. When she returned, he had passed away.
‘What?’ was all I could say.
He had seemed so well lately, yet so empty the previous night when he was telling me about the the oxygen supply. Was that it all took? Was it one dent in your recovering confidence that would finish you off or had the medics actually identified brilliantly that Dad was about to take a turn for the worse again? I would never know, of course.
Mum seemed strong. I went into organisational mode. She had her friend Scarlett to take immediate care of her while the doctors took Dad away. She said they had been very kind. I rang Sue. She said she would come and collect me. I had to call my daughters Charlotte and Kate first. Chas came out to get me because I had been gone for half an hour.
‘Come inside and let’s have a drink and a chat,’ he tried to console me.
I don’t think whatever anyone says to you at this point goes in, as well-meaning as they are. You hear them but you don’t listen. You speak but you’re not in a conversation. I toasted my dad. Then burst into tears. Of all the deaths, this was the only one that rocked me.
I wanted to give him a good send-off. It was 21.40 in Spain on a bank holiday weekend at home. I rang Paul Easter, who just said to go. I called the special BBC 24-hour desk and told them I had to get to Alicante in the morning – as soon as possible.
‘£364,’ the muppet at the end of the line stunned me. The flight would leave at 07.30.
‘Put it in on the charge card for News …’ I said.
‘Oh, I can’t do that,’ she replied. ‘You have to pay for it.’
It was always the way. If I had phoned in work time, I would have sorted it because they knew me. Not on the eve of a four-day weekend, though. My mobile then rang. Monarch had declined my BBC Amex Card. Did I have a card that would cover it? How could Monarch Airline not accept the BBC credit card and what the hell were they charging that much for? You didn’t need grief at a time of grief.
Sue would follow me out later.
At Mum’s house, Scarlett told me the undertakers were coming that evening to sort the cremation.
‘What about the insurance?’ I asked Mum.
‘Well, we haven’t got any,’ she replied.
‘What about money?’ I said.
‘Well, we haven’t got any of that either.’
I told her not to worry, and went into clinical mode. It was the only way I knew how to operate and it was the only device I had to protect myself. We drew up a list of all the things we needed to do. I told her if we didn’t contact the Military Pensions, they would end up taking the money back off us.
Before I knew it, the undertaker was at the door. He was a real gentleman, speaking perfect English. He was first class, but then perhaps much of his business was elderly British people, and even in death, there was always a salesman. I was now on the receiving end of people organising death. He showed me the brochure. Unbelievably, a brochure.
I told him I was not spending thousands of pounds on a casket that was going to be burned – that was a waste of money and Dad wouldn’t want that. He showed me the urns on the back page. The parents of those poor kids in Ciudad Juárez would have been through this. Drug money, though, would have paid for their send-off.
‘Take me to the front page with the cheapest coffin.’ I didn’t want to waste any time or money.
He took me to page two. ‘You know what, Mr. Summers, there’s no point spending that much. You are correct. I could sit here like a salesman but that’s wrong,’ the undertaker said.
I told him I wanted to spend £75 and take the ashes home. It was holiday in the UK and I wanted it over as soon as possible. We settled on the Tuesday evening at 5 p.m.
‘Would you like to see your dad?’ he asked. I said I would.
The undertaker was supremely professional. He didn’t mention money, and was efficient, thorough and had integrity. I aspired to be the same in my line of work. I respected that.
; And it took me back into operational mode. I told Mum that we had to leave messages on answer phones in the morning. You heard horror stories of people getting fleeced because they had been slow to record loved ones’ deaths. I said I would ring BT, the army, the Pensions, everyone. If it meant speaking into a voicemail, so be it. It was on the record that my dad had died at this time and on this day. There would be no doubt.
At 7 p.m., I drove Mum to the chapel to see Dad for the last time. The undertaker was there on schedule. Even though we had a lot in common professionally, I could never have done his job, despite having done those duties several times over. I offered him a down payment straightaway, even though he was ushering me in. In all it came in at 3,500 euros.
Then it was time to see Dad. The chapel where he lay would be the same for the service. Two young Spanish lads hustled out and said it was ready. It was all so very strange, as though the king was summoning us. Mum went in first – she hadn’t seen him since he had passed away. She went in briefly but came out too upset.
Then it was my turn. I’m not religious in any way, but the stained-glass window behind the altar was stunning. It felt perfect. Then I saw the coffin and felt I had done Dad an injustice. It looked cheap. As I got closer, he looked good, absolutely brilliant – like the Dad I remembered. They had done a really good job on him.
I leant over, said very little, almost nothing, just staring at him, and walked back out. It couldn’t have been ninety seconds. Despite the number of bodies that I had seen, I didn’t know what to say or how to behave. In my mind, I was thinking, I’ll be seeing you Dad, but I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do.
Did it change my attitude to Banda Aceh, to Stuart, to Kaveh, to Kate and to all the others? I don’t know. It reminded me of all those clichés about one life and all that. The difference still remained that in all those stories, I was on a job and that was what the job was. For work, there was a dead body. In real life, there was a dead body that was part of me.
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