Fearlessness wasn’t an Ayres family trait that survived into the twentieth century. When I was a child in the eighties, my family would spend three brutal days driving to southern France for our annual summer holiday, largely because Dad was afraid of flying. On the highways and expressways we did a steady sixty-five miles an hour in our little Renault 9. And when the carnival visited our hometown, my dad would always refuse to take me on the Ferris wheel. “I’m not going on that bloody thing,” my father would say after taking one look at the pot-smoking carnie operating the machinery. Later, when I was learning to drive, my dad was the worst passenger imaginable, stomping his foot on a phantom brake pedal when even the gentlest of bends approached. Once, when I accidentally reversed my chocolate brown Austin Metro into a wall, I thought he was going to have a cardiac arrest. He hated physical danger.
Instinctive fear, however, is not the same as cowardice, and my father is wrong to portray himself as a coward, although he probably sees it as a good-humored way of shrugging off his lack of machismo. Perhaps it’s also an excuse for his own father, a manual laborer for twenty-five years who avoided World War II because of a vague problem with his hands, which meant he couldn’t grip a rifle. It’s odd, however, that Dad doesn’t try to plume his male feathers once in a while. He is, after all, a natural athlete who once boxed and played semiprofessional football. In fact, his first job was as a phys-ed teacher, before he took an open university degree and was promoted to head of a first school in Wooler, a farming village in Northumberland, near the Scottish border. Before he retired in 2005, my dad was the kind of firm-but-fair teacher that everyone liked. He would amuse the children by walking down the hallways on his hands, or by giving them all silly nicknames. But if anyone so much as uttered a swear word, or touched another pupil, he unleashed a wrath so terrifying that the incident was never repeated. Even in the old days, my dad wasn’t much of a fan of “Big Bertha,” the disciplinary slipper he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk. Instead, he used verbal assaults to put the fear of God into wayward pupils. “Son, if you do that again, you’ll be in so much trouble you won’t be able to handle it,” was his favorite threat. Generally, and in spite of my father’s featherweight build, the pupils believed him.
When it came to physical violence, avoidance was nearly always better than engagement as far as my father was concerned. Once, at the family dinner table, he told me a story of how he was attacked by a gang of older boys when he was growing up in the back streets of Warrington. After the gang circled my dad and his brother, one of the older boys pulled a knife. I asked my dad how he escaped, expecting a heroic tale. “I cried,” he said, without pausing. “The fact that I cried made them realize that I wasn’t worth bothering with, so they left us alone.” The thought of my father crying was enough to silence me for the rest of the meal.
Given that I had no talent for fighting, it was probably wise that I adopted my father’s avoidance strategy. I blamed my lack of school-yard combat technique on the fact that I had an older sister, rather than an older brother, and so didn’t have anyone to practice on. Later, my body awash with the furious chemicals of adolescence, I began to question my dad’s pacifism. My maternal grandmother, a redoubtable woman who admired Margaret Thatcher, had always told me that if Britain hadn’t waged war with Germany, we’d all be living under Hitler’s National Socialist Party and the Jews would be an extinct race. And so, as a teenager, when another boy in my class took a dislike to me, I decided to confront him—physically.
At first, it worked. On the bus ride home from school, I wrestled him to the floor and put him in a headlock until it was time for him to get off. The next morning, however, as I was sitting on the bus reading—feeling both macho and intellectual—the boy appeared out of nowhere and pummeled my nose into a bloody pulp before I had a chance to raise my fists in defense. I could, I suppose, have retaliated a few days later. But the circle of violence had begun, and it seemed pointless to continue it. My father’s strategy, I realized, was not to avoid standing up for yourself, but to fight only when it was worth it. My bloodied nose was the reason why: fighting has consequences. Not for the first time, I realized my father was right.
ISLINGTON, LONDON
1997
3
THE LUNCH TUTORIAL
The lounge of the Red Lion was warm and dank, and the thick, blue-tinted air carried a strong odor of tobacco and salt-and-vinegar chips. It had just gone twelve noon and, as usual, we were drinking heavily. An aging waitress with a poor memory of both the menu and our orders occasionally clonked an unwanted pork pie or cold lasagna between the sodden beer mats. The date was early June 1997—nearly six years before The Times would send me to the Middle East.
“This can’t possibly live up to expectations,” I declared to no one in particular.
“Right,” said Jamie.
“Why not wait and see?” offered Georgina.
Me again: “Where is he anyway?”
There was a contemplative silence. Glasses clinked. Then Chris said: “He’s on deadline, probably. A busy man.”
“He’s more than busy,” snorted Jamie. “He’s a celebrity.”
All of us around the table were enrolled at City University’s postgraduate journalism school, a kind of Fame Academy for aspiring reporters. In fact, City regarded its only serious rival as Columbia in New York. Whether or not this was bullshit was beside the point: City was a brutal place to study, partly because of the matriarch called Linda Christmas who presided over the course (her second name was a gift to young writers with a flair for cruel puns), and partly because of the ferocious rivalry between the students, a fact we tried to hide with forced camaraderie. Between classes we would put on our fake smiles and discuss how much we loved our classmates. The competitiveness was unavoidable: All thirty of us wanted one of the handful of junior positions that came up every year on national newspapers.
The crowd at the Red Lion, the nearest drinking establishment to City’s redbrick entrance on St. John’s Street in North London, also had something else in common: We had all opted to take City’s financial reporting course work, which, in theory, meant we wanted to write about stock prices and corporate takeovers. That, of course, was a joke. No one still in their twenties, and broke, goes into journalism to write about money—a subject in which they have zero practical experience. Journalism students don’t get excited about GDP fluctuations or the price-to-earnings ratios of widget makers. No, they want to bring down the prime minister, meet Robert De Niro, or expose human rights violations in Guantánamo Bay. Under the Christmas regime, however, everyone had to specialize. Which was why we were in the Red Lion, waiting for Robert Cole, our finance tutor.