Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

‘My feeble attempt at dieting hasn’t succeeded in reducing my weight,’ I told the others, my voice wobbly, ‘but it may quite possibly have saved my life. If I’d bought that croissant, I’d have missed the train I came on, and caught the one after.’

I was pretty shaken for many days afterwards, but I didn’t suffer the survivor guilt that some people report after a close shave of that kind. I guess one day I may eat these words, but I’ve never really got that ‘Why me?’ stuff. The answer, it seems to me, is quite simple: I didn’t buy the croissant. What more do people expect? How exactly do they imagine this universe is arranged?

And as to the question of why anyone could feel justified in killing and maiming people who he or she didn’t even know, well, that wasn’t a mystery to me either.

Nowadays, when white British folk like me hear the word terrorist we think of some fanatical Islamist dreaming of martyrdom and paradise, his beliefs utterly alien to our own. My neighbour George, for instance, is a philosophy lecturer who is irritated to distraction by anything that isn’t logical, and he blames the whole phenomenon, firstly on the backwardness of the Islamic religion, and secondly, and more generally, on religion itself. If only these people could be weaned off their medieval belief in a superior being and persuaded to embrace secular, scientific, progressive modernity, then, in George’s view, this irrational and ugly behaviour would cease.

But George is very young, and I’ve reached the age when even philosophers look like kids. I remember the terrorists of the sixties and seventies: the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Basques and the IRA. None of them were motivated by religion, and most of them, including even the Arabs, were Marxists: which is to say that they subscribed to an ideology that saw itself precisely as secular, scientific and progressive. What’s more, the European terrorists often came from very similar backgrounds to my neighbour George and myself. Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, for instance, both came from middle class academic families, just like the family I grew up in, or George’s family now.

So, yes, in these present times, it is young Muslims who are being drawn to the possibilities of random murder as a way of making a political or moral point. But in my teenage years that particular pressure wave was passing through a different medium, and was much closer to my own world and my own experience. And, sequestered though I was in the bubble-like environment of a private boarding school, I myself felt its pull.

I fancied myself as a writer back then and I remember writing a story when I was fifteen or so, which contrasted two figures. One of them was a kind of Christian guru, a bit like Mother Teresa, to whom the famous and powerful came for spiritual guidance; the other was a greasy-haired loner who built bombs in his mouldy bedsit and threw them randomly into crowds. The point of the story was that it was the terrorist who was the truly good person, even though he had a crappy personality and everyone hated him. The guru bolstered an unjust world by making the powerful feel good, but the terrorist, by making everyone feel bad, was driving the world towards change.

The school was called Shotsford House and its main building was a former stately home, surrounded by woodland and chalky hills. It saw itself as progressive – no fagging, for instance, no cane and no cold showers, though these were all still common at that time – and it had a sort of Christian humanist ethos of a kind that was more widespread in those days than it is now.

Here, for instance, is the headmaster, standing at his podium at morning assembly. His name is Mr Frobisher. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ he booms out, ‘for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ He pauses for several seconds, his great head bowed over the book, wind whistling in and out of his nostrils. Christ , that man could ham it up! Then suddenly he looks up at us with fiery and accusing eyes. ‘Blessed are the poor – in – spirit ,’ he repeats, and begins to speak with passionate intensity of the selfishness, greed and crass materialism of the modern world. ‘Grab what you can,’ he hisses, clawing at the air, his whole face distorted by the ugliness he wants to convey. ‘Grab what you can by whatever means you can get away with, and to hell with everyone else.’ The country is in the middle of a railway strike – large industrial strikes were pretty frequent occurrences back then – and Mr Frobisher uses this as an illustration of his point. The railwaymen, he says, are ‘opportunists of the worst kind, holding the whole community to ransom, not for the sake of some great cause, but for colour television sets and bigger cars .’ He almost spits out the words.

Now comes the pause again, the bowing of the head, the whistling wind. ‘You are very privileged,’ he concludes in a new soft voice. ‘You will have many opportunities. You could very easily use those opportunities for purely personal gain. But I beg you, I beg all of you, to make them into opportunities to serve.’

After another silence, he lifts his head, and becomes suddenly brisk and business-like as he turns to the more mundane everyday business, of which we all of us must take our share. He makes various announcements. And finally he issues one of his regular reminders that ‘decorum and courtesy’ are expected at all times when potential pupils are being shown round the school with their parents.

These people might arrive in brand new Jaguars, the tense-faced little boys in the uniforms of expensive preparatory schools, the mothers in furs, the fathers with heavy Rolexes on their wrists, but their crass materialism will never in any circumstances be pointed out.

I planned a terror attack with my best friend Jules. We’d recently seen the Lindsay Anderson film if … and it almost perfectly encapsulated our mood.

‘We could do something like that,’ said Jules.

I loved that boy. He was never still. He thought three times as quickly as anyone else, talked three times faster, laughed and raged three times as often, burning up so much nervous energy that he always looked half-starved, like some beautiful, penniless Romantic poet. He was constantly thinking of new ways in which he and I could step out of the dreary consensual world and into the forbidden brightness beyond. It was him who decided one night we should walk right round the stone cornice of the main school building, four storeys up in the dark. It was him who got hold of those two tabs of LSD, the first of many, which we took one October day on top of a hill and watched the whole red pile of Shotsford House below us reveal itself to be nothing larger or more significant than a gaudy cake, iced in vulgar pink and white, and crawling inside with maggots. And it was him now who was proposing we become terrorists.

He suggested it on a Sunday afternoon, when we’d driven down to the coast in a beaten up old car the two of us had managed to acquire for a few quid from an elderly local. We’d stopped at a pub and were sitting outside in the sun. Gulls were wheeling above us. The forbidden beer was pure ambrosia, our forbidden white Cortina a celestial chariot that would carry us between the stars.

‘We should do something like that,’ Jules said. ‘Get some guns and shoot the place up. Think of the impact! The whole rotten system would shake in its fucking boots.’

Shotsford House had a rifle range, and we knew that guns were stored in a metal cupboard in the basement corridor. Things were much more casual in those days. Nowadays an expensive boarding school like Shotsford has a whole team of uniformed security guards equipped with vehicles and radios, and each pupil has an individual room, complete with en suite shower. But we washed in communal bathrooms and slept on sagging mattresses in chilly dormitories, while the entire security of the great dark building around us was entrusted to a single elderly man from a local village who wandered round the place with a torch. His name was Eliot, and, for strategic reasons, Jules and I had made a friend of him.