Terry Hall opened me a door on the wonder of being alive
So I woke up at 4am, drove to the ferry with my eldest daughter Emily and Tilly the border collie, and got to Harwich at 7.30am to drive on to the boat sailing to the Netherlands.
You have to go through these huge doors (the bow literally parts in two, each door is at least 20metres high) to get into the hold, and as I waited in the queue to drive on to the ship’s car decks I stared at these huge white doors — and experienced deep, deep resistance. It’s a not-unfamiliar feeling: I don’t want to go through doors that lead into a travel experience I’m not in control of. This same feeling has prevented me from flying for the last 25 years. Going through the door of an aircraft has become impossible for me. I never much liked flying: the anxiety of getting on a plane troubles me for weeks in advance and, sadly, that includes what happens when I arrive at my destination, because I know I’ll have to fly back. The only time I enjoyed flying was a one-way trip from Kathmandu to Patna in an old twin propellor Dakota left over from WW2: the views of the Himalayas were so stupendous it entirely made me forget I was in an aircraft.
Anyways, over the years I’ve persuaded myself — and attempted to persuade others — that this no-fly rule is an environmental stance I’ve taken. Now, you can’t fool yourself forever, but I was obviously trying, and I would have carried on with this default narrative but for two reasons.
Firstly, Tilly. Dogs are very intuitive and truthful — especially border collies — and that obliges me to be more intuitive and truthful.
Secondly, Terry Hall of The Specials died this week. I didn’t know much about his life, or the band, though I loved their two-tone musical and political stance — edgy, not preachy, always on point about the interconnectedness of multi-cultural Britain. Terry Hall was my sort of age, The Specials were great but I knew very little about them, and it was interesting to read, in among the tributes, that he was bipolar.
I also had no idea, until reading about his life, that he had been abused as a child. When he was 12, he was abducted and delivered to a pedophile ring in France, it sounded like the worst nightmare. Reading that triggered a muchly forgotten memory. I was 11 when such a fate came to claim me.
I was a day boy (as opposed to a boarder) at a prep school on Harrow on the Hill. I had to walk down the hill to the nearest bus stop to get home. One afternoon I was walking down the hill and two thirds of the way down a white van pulled over. There were two blokes in it. One got out and said ‘hey, jump in, your mum asked us to drive you home’. I was like, huh? ‘Yes,’ the bloke said, opening the van’s rear doors. ‘She had to go to the dentist but she says she’ll be home soon. Jump in.’
Now it just happened that my mum, she was around 50 at that point, had recently started working again. She’d been a telex operator for the Women’s Royal Air Force in the war and had found a telex job, so she couldn’t be home. And I was tight with my mum, she always told me what she was up to, and she hadn’t told me anything about a dental appointment. So I was stood looking at the van’s open white doors and felt very strongly that I should not under any circumstances get in. But, being polite (I was younger then), I was conflicted. That moment was the first time in my life I used my intuition, the first time I connected with obstinate Mike, the first time I understood that the world couldn’t really be trusted. So I just very politely said ‘no thank you’ and kept right on walking, hoping and praying they didn’t grab me.
Well, they didn’t grab me and bundle me into that van — I was near South Harrow tube station, there were no people about at that moment but it was a very public place. But ever since, every time I see white doors I buckle a bit inside. They are portals to a world of terror I don’t want to investigate, that are to be resisted at all costs, especially if they are vans, planes, or boats.
I’m sure Terry Hall didn’t want to go down that road either. He seems to have handled his experience as best as anyone could — he mentioned it, even wrote about it (a slither on ‘Well Fancy That’, which ran: “On school trips to France, Well fancy that, You had a good time, Turned sex into crime”), recording it as briefly as possible without giving the abusers too much of his energy and his time. It’s not known how he got home but when he did he didn’t tell his parents, which seems ineffably sad. He moved on, as you do. But there are legacy issues. I don’t know what his were but I now know much more about what mine are from the briefest slither of contact with that world of horror.
It often seems nothing good can come from death, but the reality is that death makes the wonder of being alive and all its myriad experiences even more poignant.
Rest in power, Terry.
