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Katie Barron's Diary
By publicising these figures, we hoped to raise awareness of the effects of the US/UK war in Afghanistan. The board was built in Leicestershire by John Cobb and Stan Reeve of SLR Cricket Company. 'You won't be needing more than a '4' in the left hand column, will you?' asked Stan, who is eighty and has been making cricket scoreboards for half a century. When I said the number should be able to go up to nine, he grumbled: 'It's a bit morbid!' Still, the board looked handsome against the eighteenth century columns of the church. The sun shone on the newly-painted white lettering and any passerby who wasn't just looking at his feet was forced to read it. Only one man stopped to talk in the morning. 'Where's the recruiting officer?' he asked. 'This isn't the army. It's a peace demonstration,' I said. At lunchtime, more people stopped. A young man in a baseball cap took a few steps towards the board. 'Haven't you got the deaths wrong? Shouldn't it be six thousand six hundred?' 'We haven't included the deaths on September 11 because this is a scoreboard about the deaths we British are responsible for,' I said. 'We didn't cause the deaths in New York.' He looked at me blankly. The idea of responsibility seemed new. On the TV an Afghan death looks like an American death. You cannot show responsibility visually. It only comes out in words and thoughts and discussion. An older gentleman who looked Arab or Jewish gave me a short lecture: 'You need to have another scoreboard with the deaths in New York. Otherwise it's not balanced.' Are we looking for a balance? Four thousand or so Afghan deaths to balance the estimated dead in the World Trade Organisation? I want balance in another sense - that we apply to ourselves the same rules we apply to others. My boyfriend Michael turned up. He wanted to discuss our future life together. 'I'm in a peace demonstration,' I said. Nevertheless we sat down on the steps, clasped hands and fell into deep discussion. An art student approached and asked if she could take a photograph of us for her project on emotional security. We would be her first subjects. We were flattered. Michael gave her his address so she could send him a copy of the photo. Bang went my emotional security. Michael left and a nice looking man with brown eyes and peroxide hair appeared. 'Will you go for a cup of tea?' 'No, I'm in a peace demonstration.' He sat down next to me and bemoaned his lack of a girlfriend. 'I don't know about women. They're so materialistic. I mean, you seem nice, you're listening to me. But it isn't enough. It's not enough. Look at them all.' We looked at the people hurrying past and the traffic pressing on towards the Strand. 'Where are they all rushing to? I don't know. Do you know? They're all hypocrites. They get married and they call it love. It's not love, I know that much. It's lust or, I don't know what it is. I don't know what love is but at least I'm honest. At least I know I don't know.' 'You're going to be in a photo now,' I said, pointing to a camera that was twinkling across the street. 'Oh God! People are always staring at me! It's my hair!' he moaned, and ran off. The vicar came out and squatted on the steps. He'd had five hours of people ringing up to complain. It isn't even his demonstration. Most had been Americans angry that the deaths in New York had been left out. Quick as a flash my anger rose to meet theirs, blood rising to blood. How dare they expect the whole world to cater for them! If they want a board with American deaths in the middle of someone else's country they can bloody buy themselves a board and stand there for seven hours at risk of being beaten up. Why the hell should I have to do their grieving for them? Katie, Katie. You are a peace activist. Calm yourself. There is no 'them'. Just individuals who are suffering. Suddenly a six-foot bouncer-build man stormed up the steps and leant into my face. 'I can tell you what I'm gonna do with your scoreboard. I'm gonna shove it up your arse!' An Algerian who had been kissing my hand left rapidly. An hour later the big man and I were still talking. Every ten minutes his sports bag would slide off his shoulder and he would heave it up to begin the slide again. He was a Yorkshireman and an ex-soldier. I was a self-righteous middle-class Southerner. 'My father, my uncle, my brother' - he counted them off on his fingers - 'were all miners. The police used to send us post-cards, during the strike - they were sent up from the South and they used to send us post-cards: 'I'm on holiday in the Caribbean. I'm eating steak and you've only got bread and jam.' 'On the day Earl Mountbatten was killed I lost fifteen of my comrades. They were smeared across the field. There wasn't enough left of them to fill a carrier bag. You people just don't know. You don't know what it's like to be writing your last will and testament. When we were called to the Falklands we were sitting in a big warehouse, all of us... We lost 150 men in the first 50 minutes. There were no helicopters to collect the wounded - the carrier ship had sunk. I left a lot of meat behind me, I can tell you. I was shooting children point blank. I was shooting children...' 'People say, 'Don't be racist'....' He looked up again at the scoreboard. 'My wife is from the Philippines. The women over there are gentle. They're not so materialistic as the women here...' If he wins the lottery he's going to set up an orphanage for GI children in the Philippines. As it grew dark, a knot of people gathered on the steps, partially obscuring the statistics. Bernard the Anarchist arrived. He has been an anarchist since 1953. With an eye for rebels, he pointed out a couple of women in black who were standing rather shyly at the Edith Havel memorial up the street. They looked mysterious, having no placard or explanation for what they were doing there. We invited them over. They were very glad to join us as they had felt a bit surplus to requirements, standing anonymous in the middle of the rush hour traffic. They looked dignified and statuesque amid the growing chaos of our demonstration. Michael returned and flashed resentful glances at Bernard. A man swept up the steps with his arms open as if to embrace the scoreboard. His blue eyes shone. 'I've loved people but they don't give me love back!' he declared. He sat down and began his story. Diary part 2
A small Mexican man breaks off guzzling his chips to give me a hand. Later he comes back with another batch. ‘Today I am hungry,’ he says and shrugs apologetically. We both eat his chips. When someone seems about to beat me up, someone else magically appears. As if it takes evil to conjure up good. No, not evil. That word is used too cheaply. We seem always to want to label someone ‘evil’.The figures on the board are the best estimates of the damage we have done so far in Afghanistan, since September 11th. People get angry because the deaths in New York are not included. They are not included because we are not responsible for them and cannot do anything about them. I had just sat down for a breather and my mind had taken off with the pigeons circling around Nelson’s column when the words reached me: ‘You make me want to vomit.’ I looked up to find a man in a sophisticated cream suit leaning over me. He looked like an advertisement for Evian: the prosperous older man – jewel blue eyes and a black turtleneck. His face appeared perfectly serene, contrasting with his words. ‘Person is too good a word for you. You’re not humane. You haven’t an atom of humanity. You aren’t worth the space you stand up on. You make me retch!’ I stood up hastily. He gestured at the figure for the dead. ‘What about all the thousands the Taliban have killed? They built a stadium just for public executions. But you don’t care about that, do you?’ His mouth was creased nearly into a smile. I wondered if in fact this was some kind of arch joke.A bearded man hurried up the steps. ‘She has a right to say what she thinks,’ he muttered. The Evian ad continued: ‘You’re like those skinhead yobs that live off social security and then go off to Afghanistan, paid for by the British government, and then when a few of them die they complain! You’re soft.’ I am soft. I didn’t kick him in the balls. Still, the insults hit home. ‘I’ve never taken hand-outs!’ my right-wing heart screams. And I lie awake that night composing patriotic speeches to the turtleneck about how my grandfather fought in the First World War, did air raid patrol in the Second… Vans hung at the traffic lights full of pent up energy to be thrusting on south. Angry white males shouted from the windows: ‘It’s alright to bomb white people but it’s not alright to bomb Moslems!’ And within the forceful manly throat I hear a high pitched nine-year-old whine – ‘It’s not fair! He started it!’ What does Mummy always say to that? A handsome man in a tweed jacket trotted up the steps. ‘Can I have one of your leaflets?’ I smiled. He took the leaflet, ripped it in half and gave it back to me. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. Angry men don’t read leaflets. I am at a loss how to deal with them as I have been brought up to listen politely. This drives them to distraction. Then I start to feel guilty about causing them such discomfort. One ginger-haired man in a barber, feeling he was getting nowhere with me, charged up the steps and changed the figure of the dead himself, from ‘750’ to ‘7,750’, on the basis of out of date statistics from New York. I snapped. ‘If you want a demonstration about the dead in New York you can pay for a board and you can stand next to it in the freezing cold every Monday!’ I yelled. He leant into my face. ‘It’s people like you that make this country what it is today!’ he said. We looked at each other for a moment startled because it was such a cliché. Then he said: ‘Wussy, liberal and weak!’ and skimmed along the steps and out of sight without ever bending his knees, so firm, upright and disciplined was his posture. After these experiences I began to stiffen if a suit or a barber came anywhere near me. But my prejudices were ill founded. ‘What can I do? Are you collecting money?’ asked a bewhiskered man in a wide pinstripe suit. As he signed the petition he sighed: ‘No-one ever asked us if we wanted a war!’ I sat down again to take the weight off the heels. When I next looked up a tall man in a brown bobble hat was before me. ‘I would rather destroy them than have them destroy my country,’ he said in a heavy cockney accent that sounded as if he was chewing on a sticky bun. ‘But these people aren’t the terrorists,’ I said, pointing to the 400,000 in Afghanistan who are already acutely short of food. His suggestion was to tell all the Afghan women and children to move to the borders, then nuke the men left in the middle, clean out the whole country and start again. ‘They killed everyone in Babylon,’ he said, standing as motionless as a statue. His almond grey eyes were clear of any emotion. ‘They poisoned the water with wormwood. I know about wormwood. I know what it does. It makes you nervous and restless. You can’t sleep, you can’t do anything. I know about these things from my past lives. That’s why I’m different from my brethren – ‘ ‘Which church do you go to?’ ‘They only have faith but I know.’ ‘Which church do you go to?’ ‘Kingdom Hall.’ I looked blank. ‘Jehovah’s witnesses. But I’m different from them. I know everything what has happened. I have the keys to my past lives. Angels gave me the keys.’ He didn’t blink, but at the end of each statement something flickered in his eyes as if he was testing whether I believed him. I nodded. ‘If he had only answered my letter. If Tony Blair had only answered my letter.’ ‘Yes, he didn’t answer mine either,’ I commiserated. ‘If he had only had audience with me, none of this would have happened. I know about demons. I’m stronger than what they are. I’m stronger than every single demon. The devil tries to frighten us but he is weaker. He is the weaker one. A demon attacked me when I was born. He tried to take my life and split up my family. He gave me drugs. But I am stronger. He tried to get to me through noise. He made the people next door to me make noise all the time to drive me out. That’s how I came on the homeless scene.’ In his arty hat and suede jacket he made it sound like the coolest thing in town. ‘That’s how I met this girl. I told her, I’m not gonna use you. I’m not gonna hurt you. That’s why she hates me. But I’ve told her, I’m not gonna give up. She’s addicted to crack and heroin. It’s hard when someone’s addicted. You don’t know how to help them. She said to me, "I don’t fancy you. I don’t need you. So stop following me around." She’s angry at me because I’m trying to help her. I’m trying to stop her from making money the easy way. ‘She was angry because she only got forty pounds from someone when she could have had one hundred and fifty. I said it’s much better to have forty pounds that he wanted to give you than to have one hundred and fifty that he didn’t wanna give you. Relationships are always like that – not that we’re in a relationship,’ he admitted, looking at his boots. ‘I said I wasn’t ever going to get involved with someone again because I believe I should have a wife if I’m going to have a relationship. But it’s nice to cuddle up with someone – not that I have,’ He smiled as if caught out. ‘Today I left five pounds next to her. She was in her sleeping bag asleep. Yesterday I gave her six pounds. I try to help her. She’s trying to run away from me but the day is not far off. The time will come and it isn’t far off – in a few days I’m gonna say to her, ‘I won’t ever hurt you.’ Katie Barron would like to thank everyone who stopped to talk to her when she was minding the scoreboard at St. Martin’s in the Fields, between October and December 2001. This event was organised by Katie Barron, not Community Support. CS merely wishes to publicise her excellent work. Email: barroncatherineAThotmail.com (replace AT with @). Sources of statistics: Estimated dead (BBC); Starving (OXFAM); Refugees (UNHCR). |
| Scoreboard |
No Final Solutions: Remembering the War in Afghanistan |
updated:
29 Aug
2002