-- Oi you two. Cut that out.
-- Paedophile! Paedo! Paedo!
My other half, Keith, is a lucky man, in many ways (see first three words of this sentence for details). More importantly, he's a good man. I'm also lucky (see first four words of first sentence for details), but I'm not so good. There's an Iris Murdoch novel called The Nice and The Good - but in any case most of her books deal with that never-ending conflict between the former and the latter: how hard it is to be good, when by the consequent actions, you may cause hurt to people you care about. My greatest failings, I'm aware, stem from an innate desire that other people are not discomfited by my existence; and this can lead, strangely, to failures of love. The ultimate, of course, in human failure.
-- I'm gonna kill you you little f*cker
-- Mister! there are two kids fighting down there, come and stop 'em
Another way in which his luck manifests itself is that despite working in inner London, we live close enough to his workplace that his "commute" is a thirty minute walk along the Regent's canal, from south Hackney to that strange, crouching, mechanical spider, the Old Street roundabout. It's a nice walk on a sunny day, that stretch of the canal from Broadway Market (if you keep going you come out at Angel), one of our favourites.
So one day last week he's walking home, he's somewhere between Hoxton Market and Broadway Market, close to but not on the canal path, when a schoolgirl (early teens, overweight, poorly dressed for the season, folds of flesh on display) runs across his path. A fight was underway, would 'Mister' help stop it?
What would you do? I'd feel flustered, annoyed at the interruption, I'd probably glance wildly around me, because I'd want to go and help, but I'd be scared to go on my own, so I'd start flailing about to locate Other Responsible Adults to take with me, and even while I'm trying to find one, my mind would be filled with lurid headlines about people kicked to death or knifed or even shot, for intervening in just such circumstances. I would get there in the end. But there would be a gap.
Keith crosses the road at once with the schoolgirl and locates the two boys. Not a gang turf battle, not a knifecrime, but still: violent attack on one boy by another, older one. So he goes up to them, pulls them apart:
-- Oi you two. Cut that out.
The enraged face of the older boy, distorted with hatred, glares up at him:
-- Paedophile! Paedo! Paedo!
Two things about this interest me (the other boy ran off, by the way, with the girl). One is the learned reaction of the miscreant: what's the quickest way to scare off a male stranger, upbraiding you for your bad behaviour? Why, shout paedophile at him! He's unlikely to be able to produce his CRB check to prove that the government permits him to intervene when schoolchildren are fighting, and the middle of an east London estate, in the darkening gloom of an October evening, is a particularly choice venue in which to launch such a verbal assault.
Perhaps more interesting is the affront felt by the child: his face really was distorted with hatred, and fury - because an adult had dared to intervene to prevent the instant gratification of his desire (to physically assault another human being). Obviously I don't know this. But I bet that Keith is one of the few people ever to prevent that child from acting, instantly, for his personal gratification. In a way his fury is entirely rational: how many adult men, I wonder, have ever before put a limit on his behaviour.
I learned about this event later the same evening: he told me about it as an anecdote over dinner, in an attempt to laugh the child's reaction off. But he was disturbed by it, I could tell, and I thought: another good man will now think twice before intervening in the future. In our desire to make the world a nicer place, we might have lost the ability to teach our children how to be good.
