Chapter 19: Day Seven (Saturday, 17th September)
The Journey Home

We left in the morning. Redman would not even look at me. I was in a car being driven out. Gerard Braughn's son tried to avoid my gaze but when he met it he grinned and we gesticulated as if to say 'goodbye' and all that. Redman had his back to me with his arms crossed, and I thought, 'We'll be meeting again someday.'

We had stressed to the crew that we wanted to be picked up by the same bloke who had brought us, but the fellow who came for us was not even the one that they expected to turn up. I have been absolutely assured that he was not sent by anybody else to pick us up. He knew the layout of Ingols Hall already. He did not have any trouble knowing where people were nor where our equipment was going to be.

'Did you brief him?' I said to Luke at the time.

'I've never met him before,' he said.

These people who drove us were both self-employed, hired by Armada TV. What Armada said they do is that they will pick the driver who is closest and most available, cheap but experienced in this kind of job and there is a lot of money to be made driving in a job like this. Now the driver on the way home was a strange character and I think he would smile, wryly at what I am about to say. I do not think he would be offended, because I developed an equally emotional tie with him as I had with Miles on the way up. Obviously, after what we had just been through, we were emotionally in a bit of a state. It was neither good nor bad but extreme, as though we had just had a whack off the electricity mains. What the hell had just happened to us?

As we were just leaving, I realised something. 'Oh my God,' I thought. This new driver had been talking to Cargill the cameraman and to Skip, still wearing his 1945 demob suit. The driver had been talking to them about his time in the army. So, I thought, it is not over yet. I have got to sit next to a seventy year old man who has served in the British Army. I do not think we are going eight hours without that coming up in conversation. Nor did we, but what further shocked me was his immediate and very frank openness about the fact that not only had he served in the British Army, he had been involved in covert operations, and he had served in the Yom Kippur war, which the British Army was not even supposed to have been involved in. He told us he had served in Burma and was quite open in telling me about the horrors, the mutilations, the dismemberment, and the torture of 'natives' in the occupation of Burma by the British after the Second World War. Nor did he mind saying any of this in front of our small child. Here was a man who had killed people, again and again.

Yet this bloke meant no malice at all. Even in the midst of his most horrific tales, he seemed almost angelic. He was like the physiotherapist in the film Jacob's Ladder, I thought. This was a visitation from something more than a human being. This was very strange indeed.

Of course, you have to remember the state my mind was in at this time. I could have perceived anyone on that level, because of the way my brain had been fired up. It was like my foot went down on a mental accelerator pedal every time I was interviewed. I had had to talk about what happened to me, and make it succinct, always bearing in mind that if I went off the subjects I wanted represented on television then conversations not involving those subjects would be shown instead. So for a week, both Kiran and I had constantly briefed and debriefed one another on the fact that we must constantly bring up important issues, literally second by second as conversation flows. We had had to think that quickly for a whole week just so that we did not blow our one chance on the huge platform that is mainstream television. I have an agenda. Everybody has an agenda and anybody who says they have not is either an idiot or they are lying. So, after a week of that, my brain was in a very sensitised state on the journey home. This fellow doing the driving was a mammoth intellect who had lived his life doing the dirty jobs of the people I would see done away with and he wanted me to know everything.

He already knew everything about me. Excuse me? He already knew about me? Who the hell was this? Who was he? Was he with MI6? Had he come to have a look at who the next media icons might be and whether or not they should be allowed to be such? My mind was racing. Who was he working for? This was not your average cabbie. Not in any way. He had analysed what had just happened and he had got hold of us. He was very keen to point out to me that he could kill a man with his bare hands, even at seventy and very quickly. He was giving me the whole tamoolah. There was I expecting to be telling him what I had just been through for most of the journey but he had come to tell me about himself, already knowing who I was. He did not know all that had happened, not in detail, so he did want to know some things. When I told him, he, again, like the driver on the way up, was in fits of hysterical laughter.

'My God, this is the class war that should have been on telly years ago,' he said, 'and it was bloodless as well. It was a bloodless coup, my friend. There can be no better conflict than that.'

Remember, this was a military strategist and he was particularly ashamed at the blood-letting he had seen and been responsible for.

'This should go huge, big, massive,' he said.

Then he started to coach me in how to do it.

'You have got to change your attitude, Craig,' he said. 'You do realise what might be about to happen to you?'

'Yes,' I said, 'I do.'

'No privacy, ever again, anywhere in the world. Complete and utter notoriety and a continual set of platforms for debate about your views, transmitted globally, repeated, shown again, referenced to again in programmes about history. Do you realise how big this could be?'

This was a seventy-year old man and he was big. He was a massive fellow, physically. His head was almost touching the roof. This was like a character out of a David Lynch story. Again, as with the driver on the way there, he fell in love with our family. I apologise to both you gentlemen, but I fell in love with you too. It was like taking Ecstasy on a good night, that was how much my endorphins were racing around my body. I was suddenly aware I had to be a bit careful, though, because then he told me that when he left the army he became a police officer. He was a criminal murder detective, one of the ones that they make so many TV programmes about, who investigate the worst things that have happened in human society. He did that for the second half of his life. He investigated serious, savage murders where he was the first person of authority on the scene. One of the other specialist areas he dealt with, apart from murder, was paedophilia.

'Oops,' I said. 'Well, I'm an anarchist, who doesn't believe in the police force at all and thinks it should be disbanded at once.'

'Quite right,' he said.

'Do what?' I said.

'I was disgraced when I left,' he said, 'and when I started a business in retail in my retirement and owned a newsagents on the outskirts of Hull, I got attacked and mugged and robbed a lot more than I should have been and I got no assistance at all from the police force.'

'Oh,' I said, thinking this could all be untrue, of course. He is saying what I want to hear. I decided to play along.

'Have any television programmes about murder detectives, from Sherlock Holmes all the way through to Inspector Morse really been realistic in any way to you?' I asked. 'Did they reflect your life as one of those people?'

'Never,' he said. 'Never in any fiction ever, from The Sweeney all the way through to James Bond if you like. Never.'

'Isn't that a weird thing in society,' I said, 'because they have provided us with some of our most fascinating stories, but they bear no reference to reality at all, as you understand it, as a murder detective?'

'No,' he said, 'no. Not even close. Not even dealing with characters that were supposed to be based on me.'

'Well,' I said. 'That's interesting. We are learning today. We're on an upward learning curve here.'

'Too right,' he said.

His darker side came through later, of course. You cannot suppress it. There was a split second when he asked our daughter if my mother was interfering with her and I wondered whether I should just knock the bastard out at that point. I remembered, though, that he had made a very good point of explaining to me how he had hospitalised kids who were trying to mug him and rob his shop because they would not expect a bloke of his age and the way he looks to be able to knock you out with one cut to the neck. So, I thought, I will bite my tongue again, but that is out of order, my friend. My daughter might actually give you the impression that it is not a safe relationship she has with my mother without it being true because she is not in a position to communicate like that, but if you ask her leading questions you might get 'yes's' but they are not true. You are investigating my family, I thought. You are calling my mother a paedophile but you do not want to rub up a Cheeky, Chirpy Cockney Character like me and if you do not realise you are rubbing me up, you are an idiot. He looked at me, eye to eye, and I thought, you have told me you are a killer, and you have told me all sorts of things, but you may die now. I cannot deny I did think that and he saw it. He looked very apologetic.

'Yes, yes,' he said. 'We should move to another subject.'

You poor bastard, I thought. You could not help saying that. You did not do that voluntarily to wind me up. You have been programmed to ask that question, round and round, because a policeman is never off duty even after he has retired. So I had a policeman, a top, special, secret service agent international killer, driving me home from Ingols Hall? God was having a laugh here.

'You're anti-military, right?' he said. 'I'll tell you about the army then. There has never been a moment in history where the British Army has been the good guys. Not ever. It was not the British Army that served in the Second World War, either. It was the British public. Every other point in history, from the Middle Ages right down the line, we have always been in the wrong.'

'You say that to me,' I said, 'after you have spent a life doing wrong?'

'Absolutely,' he said.

Was this man having an epiphany? Was this as important to him as it was to me? It seemed so.

'We were in Burma simply to nick the rubber,' he said, 'just like they are in Iraq simply to nick the oil. That is all, that is all it has ever been about. The Crusaders went there to nick the gold. That is what it has always been about.'

'For you to say that,' I said, 'after seeing it from the inside, then it's a case of game, set and goddamned match to Joe Public and the walk of shame for the British Army. Nothing to be proud of whatsoever. I've always thought this, but now you're giving it to me from the inside. This is not just me speculating.'

'Oh no,' he said, 'you're right about us. We have also helped people in tragedies but the tragedies, if you take them back to their root causes, have usually been because of us. We shoot 'em and bandage 'em up and think everybody will love us.'

'That is mental illness as far as I am concerned,' I said. 'Not those poor sods in the asylums around the world who have gone mad as a result of witnessing what you have done. They are just the victims of mental illness. They are not the ones who are truly mentally ill, but a general who sends how many hundreds of soldiers to their deaths in one morning at the Battle of the Somme... that ain't healthy, that ain't mentally healthy.'

'Everyone says they try to reduce casualties,' he said. 'We used to fire cannon at the Indonesians and the Burmese but we would do it to try not to kill them. Oh no, we tried not to kill the natives, even though they had turned to Communism. We would fire a mass of rounds, and I organised this, but I did not pull the trigger. We would get all the artillery batteries lined up and we would completely destroy an area of jungle. This was pre-Vietnam, remember. We would utterly annihilate every living thing along a rectangular stretch just in front of their villages so that they fled rather than died.'

'Well,' I said, 'that's moral, is it? And you did that just in order to steal their rubber?'

'Yes,' he said. 'Don't think for a minute we were just out to exterminate them.'

'It's a thin line, though isn't it?' I said.

'Oh yes,' he said, 'because obviously we could not be that precise.'

'Indeed,' I said. 'Do you think this 'precision bombing' thing is a myth?'

'Those are the most ridiculous two words to put together,' he said. 'There is no precision in bombing. I found a young teenage girl once, impaled on the branch of a tree, having been hit by a blast that threw her backwards and impaled her, so the branch was sticking out through her stomach. I was with some Gurkhas, and without a second thought, one of the Gurkhas went up and chopped her head off with his kukri.'

'Why?'

'He was putting her out of her misery. There was no way she could be repaired and she could have lived for a long time in that condition.'

'Am I to be admiring of the Gurkha for doing that?' I asked, 'when you did it in the first place! You did that to her. Shoot 'em and bandage them up. Shoot 'em and put them out of their misery. Yeah?'

'Well,' he said. Not at one point did he look remorseful but he was being extremely honest about things that a lot of people in his position would not ever tell a bloke like me. This was a cathartic experience for him as well. All the same, I was panicking. I did not know if I wanted my daughter to hear any of these words. She is only two.

So here I was being driven by a bloody patriarch who has helped support the male domination of this planet, and the white male domination of it at that, and I am driving him to meet my dad, who is exactly the same age. This is going to be interesting, I thought. You know, this man even had chats with us about his little kitten and things like that, there was a human being in there and earlier on I had mentioned that there was an angelic quality about him. He was not macho at all. I will tell you who he reminded me of in a weird way, which did send a bit of a shiver down my spine, if any readers are aware of the film Firestarter. He was like the CIA agent in that who, ultimately wanted to destroy the little girl in order to get her power. Her ability to project fire. I thought that however much you are ex-military, ex-police, special services, secret-ops, you do have your own agenda, mate, haven't you? You are not really the employee of anybody. You are just convenient, like everybody else, but you do not actually see anybody as a boss, at all, do you? That, again, was a bridge between us, because nor do I. Nor does Kiran.

Aside from the dark paedophile question, he was very good to Lily actually. So was the driver on the way up there, but I would imagine that part of the remit of getting a job like that was previous experience of dealing with kids. Again, he, by the end of the journey was more excited about the project even than I was. He knew how the system worked from the inside and I do not know who he knew as mates, whether old generals or colonels or police inspectors that he chats to over the phone, or the chief commissioner himself, but he wanted this on telly. He wanted it badly, but he was trying to influence how I would be on television and it was a battle of the wits for eight hours.

'But Craig, the angry days are over. If you go on television and you are as angry as you are, and you use language like you do, it will not work.'

'I beg to differ. This is me, fuck you, I am going to be the same as I am in the living room, watching the television or I will have become one of them. I will have become like every other radical who hits telly and becomes a nice guy and does fuck all.'

'But Craig, how many people will hate you? If you really want the environmental changes, the political changes, and the demilitarisation of the planet, you are going to have to appeal to just about everyone on it.'

He was putting me in a situation where he believed that I had a shot at the Gandhi job, not just a media icon. Whether or not he was trying to neuter me, or play around with the brains of the people involved, knowing that they could not stop it happening I could not tell.

Well, one of the things he wanted to know about was the family we had swapped with, but he was not surprised at anything I said. He was perhaps more aware of their lifestyles than I was. He had never picked up a couple of anarchists, an Asian and a white British with a kid but we had just been swapped with a millionaire of the kind who, we already knew, would have hosted parties for the likes of him. So when I said that I did not find anybody up there intellectually challenging, that was not news to him.

'So,' I said, 'I want to know why it is that you have been one of the guardians of a state where that is possible, because surely it is no good to the people with money if that society does not educate them and, you know, what the hell is the use of a system where the only people who try and educate themselves are the poor? Half of the reason that I believe the things I do is because I am on a continual quest for understanding and learning.'

'And so have I been,' said this driver. 'And one thing that you must never underestimate, Craig, is that there are those on the other side of the fence, supporting this system, who are as well read as you. They may have had different experiences to you but they have that same thirst for knowledge.'

This was not one of those stereotypical, thick English bobbies here. His intellect was certainly on a level that you would equate with a murder detective.

'I need to show you something,' he said. At that, he pulled off the motorway and took a sudden detour. He drove us into a city, down a street and pulled up outside the very shop he had owned before he fully retired. He then took us to meet the family that ran it.

Even recalling this event, I am welling up with emotion again as I write these words. These were the people he had passed the shop on to and they were Asian. He needed to show us that some of his closest friends were Pakistanis, that he passed the shop over to them, that they remained important people in his life and he in theirs. They knew him well and there was a lot of love and respect between them. He wanted to show us that we all had something in common. Well, he had been a White Supremacist, neo-Nazi, British-Empire scumbag and more besides, I should imagine, for quite a few years. On our journey, I had been hearing a man renounce his whole life. I am glad I am never going to have to do that. What do you say to fellow who is admitting that he was wrong to that level? How do you comfort a human being like that? I did not want to wring him dry of any comfort he could have in his later life by encouraging him to believe that his whole life had been wrong, but I felt like I had the power to do it. I think I could have snapped him. But morally I could not. I do not think it would have been right to. So we had this weird thing where he had this extraordinary power over me, that was making me question my whole attitude to other human beings and what I should now become, what I should mutate into, as some kind of super-human celebrity bloody telly-star, but at the same time, at any time I could have broken him by saying, "You're a murderer! You have no right to be a murder detective. You are the murderer inside yourself. Investigate that, you P.I.G."

We said our goodbyes to the family in the shop and headed onto the motorway again. We then got back to his constant battle of wits over how I should present myself on television should I be interviewed. In spite of my disagreement, I knew that I was being granted an audience here. I believe old people are the wise ones, which we often underestimate. We think they are a spent force, but they are the ones who should be in the colleges and universities studying the nature of existence. It is unfair to lay this on the youth. They should be left to play and dance and court one another. Our seats of learning should be packed with seventy-year-olds reporting back to us on what they have decided about the nature of human existence. So I big up the pensioners. I always have, ever since I was a teenage punk looking back a generation and deriving inspiration from my elders in style and grace, the Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls. So, as you have read, I have always had great respect for the elderly and, boy, did I get a head full of them through this experience. The druids have come down from the hills, I thought, and they are telling me how it needs to be.

So, that being said, I am going to be the last to say that what he was telling me was ignorant, but I wondered about his agenda in trying to make me less angry.

'I pride myself on having a justified anger,' I said. 'Anger is a tool. It is a method of communicating how dissatisfied you are and if you do not express anger, ever, then you are complicit in the bad things that happen, in my view.'

'If you are to go on the media around the world, as I do not doubt will happen,' he said, 'because it is not something the public don't want to see, those who take a great interest in how society works... but if you are, then you will have to conquer your anger.'

The director did say, at one point that he thought I was the scariest person he had ever met, ever though he had never felt at all in any physical danger, which is a fantastic form of flattery to a bloke like me. It is terrible, but true.

'If you end up with a massive platform for your beliefs,' the driver said, 'the anger is the first half of your life and now you should not be angry at all. You do not need anger now. You will need a whole new armoury of weapons to fight this battle.'

I still don't buy it, I thought, I really don't buy it. I was very polite to him. He was extremely polite to us.

'I am going to listen,' I said, 'and I am going to think about what you have said. In any situation where I think I am being too angry, then I will consider what you have said. I am not going to blot this out and think you are wrong, mate. In some situations I think you are right, but not in all.'

'But think on this,' he said. 'You have shown just how angry you can be and the end of that programme is going to be probably the only thing that people will remember about you. The last image they will have of you, other than your band's music, is you, yelling in the face of a man who did not shout back.'

I had told him that Luke had promised to film our band in a studio performing the anti-war tune that was not allowed at the ball. He had said this when we had a preliminary meeting before this week. If we couldn't get it on in the environment I entered then it would be filmed separately & used at the end of the show. All this came to pass & to this day the film of our performance with Dave's projector light-show is the only footage that any of us have been allowed to see. Ninety odd hours were filmed that week both in Wales & Yorkshire. Luke was to condense it into a forty-six minute program to be broken up by adverts & shown at nine o'clock prime-time, during a week-day on ITV! Having our anti-war tune on the show in all of its electric mayhem was one of the agreements they made in order to get us on the show.

Our driver carried on with his assessment of my anger. 'Regardless of what you were saying at the end, a lot of people will not hear the words.'

'Well,' I said, 'the director seemed to think it was very succinct. You can't mistake it, after all.'

'That's not what I am saying,' he said. 'Words go into the human brain but they are not often assimilated in context and when you raise your voice to a certain pitch, and the amount of drills I took, I know all about this, you stop the person thinking and that is the nature of a drill sergeant. You must stop the soldier from thinking and then you can control him.'

This was information straight from the source. It was like I had the MI6 equivalent of Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan here. This was powerful magic.

'Are we talking about control of other human beings?' I said, 'because I have no desire to do that.'

'Then do not shout any more. Who was a great historic shouter?'

'Who?'

'Adolf Hitler. He never did anything without shouting. You could not do anything but listen to him.'

'You're right,' I said.

Kiran was, kind of, grimacing here. I knew what she was thinking. "You are trying to dumb down my fucking husband here. Don't turn him into a liberal because I don't think I could live with him if he turned into a goddamned pacifist."

I could see her. I could see her in the corner of my eye. He could not, because she was sitting behind him, but it was daggers. Even though for some of the time she was enamoured because he was extremely pleasant to our child and obviously he had had to help children who had been abused, and it had upset him, and yes, he had hospitalised some people outside the law, he was prepared to admit that.

'Oh, so it's all right to break the law, then? But you're a copper!'

'What's new?' he said.

'They all do it?'

'I never met one who didn't.'

'What? Never met a copper who didn't break the law?'

'Never.'

It makes your heart race, doesn't it? I will not forget any of this, I thought. Log it, file it, stamp it, put it in the appropriate compartment in my mind and never bloody lose it.

'So, no anger at all?'

'None,' he said.

'Never, in any circumstances, even if I am being shouted at?'

'None. No anger, no confrontation. Nothing. Just explain your views.'

'Never get angry again, ever?'

'Not in any situation, on or off camera. Ever.'

I did not want to hear that. I look forward to getting angry. You cannot take that away from me. Was this man seriously trying to get control of me or was he trying to educate me? He was going to take away a very serious part of my personality if I were to take this in its entirety. Then I realised that, thank God, he was going to meet my dad! Kiran did not look happy at what he was doing to me, but the reason I bring my father into this is because his would be the final say over this matter. If anybody wants me to stop being angry from this moment on, as a strategic attempt to communicate with other human beings about who I am, then I will do it but I am going to ask him what he thinks of you first, I thought. I felt panicked. The power this bloke had over me was like the Ancient Mariner. It was not the cliché of the Middle Eastern concept of the Gypsy hypnotist. This was a big, fat, fleshy white man, who was not macho in any way. He was like a character from a British sitcom. But he had that power. He had investigated people. He had interrogated people. He had used every mind-trick in the book to find out what that person knew about death, rape, child molestation, where the rubber plantation was, where the Communists were...

So, on the journey home, this fellow was an enigma and a revelation to me. It was quite incredible really. Just when you think everything is over, you are suddenly in another situation, one that is quite extraordinary and he was quite keen to point out that this would then happen all the time for the rest of my life should this go global. He was excited to an hysterical degree, at times, almost like a little kid and I suspect that that is a side to his personality that he does not display often. You do not see fellows like that rub their knees with glee and laugh so hard that there are tears in their eyes. and say, 'This is amazing, this is rich, this is the most incredible thing I have ever heard.'

'Hang on,' I said, 'you've seen this in Burma, and you've seen that in Israel and Palestine and you have been involved with murder and this that and the other and you have probably kept this semi-stoic attitude to life, and suddenly this has excited you?' You are a strange one, I thought.

When we got home, I was really pleased that he came in and ate with my parents. They had already made a vegetarian shepherd's pie ready for our return. He was a bit reticent at first. I found this quite extraordinary for a seventy-year old who had just driven for eight hours some three hundred and eighty miles, but he then claimed that he was going to have to drive straight to Edinburgh. By this time it was one o'clock in the morning.

'You what?' I said.

'Well,' he said, 'I had to drive over two hundred miles to get to you.'

And yet Luke Houlgate had been absolutely convinced he was local and worked locally.

'I did have a job before I came to pick you up,' he said.

'Wait a minute,' I said, 'you drove over two hundred miles to pick us up, you have now driven three hundred and eighty miles to West Wales and now you are going to drive a further five or six hundred miles to Edinburgh. You'll die!'

'No,' he said, 'I'll be all right.'

What an extraordinary fellow, I thought. He was seventy, remember. The character of Brond, played by Stratford Johns in a four-part TV drama in the mid-nineteen-eighties sprang to my mind. It was a play on the word 'Bond' because this was the real secret agent and he was a bastard. He murders a child in the first five minutes of the bloody show and then mentally tears apart both his own employees and the main character, an innocent young man who witnesses the child murder but cannot pin it on him. Well, was this bloke a murderer? He had killed people. Is killing someone murder whenever it happens? You do not meet killers that often, not that closely and not under these circumstances. He turned up at our flat, and bless him, he is very, very humbled by the offer of a meal.

'You should stay here and sleep,' I said. But he was not into that. I think this was someone whose metabolic level is in a strange state, to be able to physically do that at his age but not sleep, though. A fellow like this, having done what he had done, his metabolic state must have been reset more than once.

Anyway, he met my mum and dad. Now, when my dad and he saw one another, a really weird thing happened immediately. My mum knew exactly what was going on. This was manus et fucking manus again. After my family's suffering at the hands of the military/industrial complex, by them being used and abused in two World Wars, this was something here. Here we had a right-wing, guardian of the state, the crown, the Queen. Another yeoman, in effect. And here we have the socialist revolutionary, from his own generation, now this is something. We all stood in the kitchen. He offered to help, I said no. My dad had him in a room, on his own, in seconds. I had not even told my dad anything of what you have just read.

'He served in Burma in the fifties,' was all I said. My dad took him into a room on his own at once, and we left them in there.

I just glimpsed them through the crack in the door while I was helping my mum and Kiran with both Lily and the final bits of preparation for the food. They both looked serious. There was no humour. Usually my dad laughs. He is extremely funny, all the time. The slightest thing will make him double up with mirth. People have likened him to the Amazing Mr Blunden because he not only looks like that, he is permanently grinning, except when he is angry. This, however, was a different side to him entirely. From the other fellow, there was none of the humour and light-heartedness there had been in the car. There was a deep look of suspicion between them. We are the opponents. We are the enemies of one another here. Not me and him - my dad and him. It was a bit like me and Gerard to be honest. We are the same age and we have been fighting each other all our lives. There was no question, this goes back to school. This was beyond politics in a strict sense. This was personal. There was no aggression, no anger either. There was just a quick, rapid exchange of conversation & information between them.

Anyway, we had the meal, and he was very impressed with vegetarian cooking, as everybody is when they get good stuff. Then he left, immediately, to drive to Edinburgh from West Wales. So after we put Lily to bed, we sat down, had a glass of wine and sat in the living room.

'I haven't told you anything about him, have I?' I said.

My dad looked at me very seriously.

'I haven't told you anything about him at all,' I said. 'I don't know what you discussed with him but it was for some fifteen minutes only. What did you make of him?'

'He's been sent by someone,' he said.

'Did you ask him?'

'Of course not,' he said. 'He's been sent by someone.'

That was all he would tell me. Now, when your seventy year old father says something like that, you listen. If he had not been sent by someone, he should not have given the impression that he had been. Was he sent by God? That would have been as unwanted to me as if he had been sent by the state. I do not choose to believe in a God that would send a higher authority down to police me thank you very much. All the same, my dad did not like him and he does not dislike people easily. The fellow had looked very uncomfortable in my dad's company. My dad is completely and utterly non-violent but has a temper that is far in excess of any man I have ever met. Perhaps that is because I have seen more of him, but that man does not want me or my dad to be angry, yet he is prepared to kill with a smile on his face. Is the anger more evil than the conflict? Stiff upper lip, thin red line? My dad went from being very admiring of this ethic as a child to thinking that it is the single most evil human characteristic. If you are going to do something horrible, you had better be bloody passionate about it and have a good reason. You do not do anything clinically. To quote you Shakespeare, Richard III: 'For I can smile, and murder while I smile.' Or the film of A Boy and His Dog with the robot sheriff. That has got to be one of the most disturbing scenes. The robot is coming to get you and there's no way of stopping him and there is a grin on his face!

Now my dad has made friends with ex-coppers in his pensionable life in West Wales, and I find that his particular friend, who is an ex-police officer, an ignorant, rude bastard and I will not visit my parents while he is there. Yet this driver he did not like.

So, this was all well and good, because even at my age, at forty-one, if my father didn't remind me that anger is my right, then I could easily end up far less effective as a revolutionary as I get older. There is no question. Most people get less revolutionary as they get older. You do get a sense of feeling, "I must make peace with this society before I finally leave it." This bloke was suggesting that, really. Because should I get rid of my anger, then the outrage goes. If the outrage goes, then the indignation goes. If the indignation goes, then the argument is lost, because you obviously do not feel strongly enough about it. Without anger you are saying 'things must be generally all right & even though you have criticisms of the state, you are prepared to accept it'. It is only when the anger hits a certain level that any society can change. It is like the critical mass and it is ironic that 'critical mass' is a term both scientific and social that refers to a state where the whistling kettle starts to scream. He was trying to take me off the boil. If he is right, then why do so many members of the public react positively to a passionate response. We are not getting enough of it on the media, because here we have Mark Kermode, Germaine Greer and all these people sitting there and there is hardly any emotion because they do not want to give any of it away. Maybe this is because they are so scared of alienating themselves and turning the public off, but the public are not listening to these words a lot of the time because it is just this same lilting tone like muzak in a shopping centre not a passionate concerto where you have got all the bloody fiddles going at once.

Perhaps we can have passion without the shouting, raging anger that he claimed turns people's thoughts off. Perhaps. Well, here is an irony for the reader. I am not displaying it now. I did not display it in the car. I displayed it for only five minutes at the end of that show, and he had agreed in the car that that was the necessary way the show should have ended. But he forbad me, and he was telling me, he was not asking me, he forbad me ever to do that again. What a weird thing. He had become like a teacher and I had become like a kid. Did he have the right to come across like that? When I am seventy, will I look at forty-one year olds and think, "you are a child yet and need some help with the educational process"? I have to leave the reader to decide.

So, there we have it. We got back. Everything was the same. Gerard Braughn and his partner had not touched anything for fear of it upsetting them, being damaged, for fear of it not looking like it did when we got back. Even our one padlocked suitcase was just where we had left it.