London, 1991.
I’m walking along Station Road in Wood Green, on my way to interview George Michael.
Yes, George Michael. The singer.
We’re going to talk about songwriting and music.
Nothing particularly unusual about the evening. I’ve got an interview to do. Presumably I’m thinking about what to ask him.
Then somebody shouts.
“Oi! You!”
I turn around.
Big mistake.
A man, perhaps thirty, has got out of his car. His girlfriend is still sitting inside.
He’s coming towards me.
Fast.
And he’s carrying a knife.
Within moments he’s standing in front of me, threatening to kill me.
I don’t know him. Never seen him before. Haven’t the faintest idea what I’ve supposedly done.
Maybe he’s on drugs. Maybe he isn’t. Whatever’s going on inside his head, it’s clearly not good.
And now I’ve got a problem.
A potentially terminal one.
The Art of Not Getting Killed
I try talking.
Friendly acknowledgement. A little dry humour. The sort of conversational approach that’s got me through difficult encounters before.
Nothing works.
I manage to calm him slightly.
Then up he goes again.
More threats. More agitation. The knife remains very much part of the proceedings.
His girlfriend tries to calm him down.
That seems to make things worse.
I consider running.
But he’s too close. If he catches me, I’ve turned an already dangerous confrontation into something worse.
So I stay where I am.
Talk.
Observe.
Assess.
Keep looking for an opening.
This goes on for what feels like twenty minutes.
And something happens that people who haven’t experienced prolonged danger might not appreciate.
You begin to run out of energy.
The adrenaline doesn’t turn you into Superman. Your system is working flat out, and you become increasingly conscious of the strain.
You’re frightened.
Of course you’re frightened.
You’d be an idiot not to be.
But you’re trying to keep your voice steady and your movements controlled. Not because you’re fearless, but because you don’t want to give this unpredictable man another reason to escalate.
Eventually, he appears to exhaust himself.
There’s an opening.
I take it.
And get away.
No great triumph.
No heroic moment.
Just considerable relief that I’m still alive.
And, presumably, a rather different frame of mind for discussing songwriting with George Michael.
The Victoria Line
Another London night.
I’m heading home towards Tottenham on the Victoria Line, probably around ten o’clock.
I hear a commotion further down the train.
Football supporters.
West Ham, as it turns out.
They’re excited, noisy, and giving the distinct impression that they’re enjoying the nervousness of the other passengers.
I can see them through the connecting carriage windows.
I think: Please don’t come this way.
They come this way.
In they swagger.
Everybody looks terrified.
I identify the apparent ringleader. A hard-looking fellow, animated, restless, seemingly unpredictable.
I think: Please don’t sit next to me.
He sits next to me.
Wonderful.
So I turn towards him.
“Hello mate. Hate to ask, but win or lose?”
He looks surprised.
Then smiles.
We start talking.
About football, naturally.
I get the impression he doesn’t quite know what to make of me.
I’m not displaying fear. I’m not challenging him. I’m simply treating him as another bloke coming home from a football match.
Inside, of course, I’m anything but unconcerned.
I know perfectly well that the situation could turn nasty.
But for the moment we’re chatting.
Eventually, at Finsbury Park if I remember correctly, the supporters get off.
And I’m relieved.
Again.
Two Men With Baseball Bats
Bristol, one winter night.
Heavy snow.
Buses have stopped running, so I’m walking home. Four or five miles, perhaps.
Then I hear voices behind me.
Two men catch up.
They look pretty hard.
And they’re carrying baseball bats.
Oh, terrific.
Just what you need on a freezing night when you’ve already got miles to walk.
They come alongside me.
I decide to acknowledge the obvious.
“I won’t ask about the bats.”
One of them replies, perfectly matter-of-factly:
“We’re going to see to someone.”
Right.
Well, there’s not much to add to that.
So we talk about the snow.
The bloody buses.
The inconvenience of having to walk home.
All perfectly ordinary conversation, apart from the baseball bats and the probable violence awaiting somebody further down the road.
Eventually, the two men turn off.
Perhaps they found whoever they were looking for.
Perhaps they didn’t.
I never found out.
But it was a revealing encounter.
I’d acknowledged something potentially dangerous without challenging them or pretending it wasn’t happening.
And for a while, three men walked through the snow discussing public transport.
The world is a peculiar place.
Don’t Play the Part They’ve Written for You
There’s a principle connecting these encounters.
People often arrive in a situation expecting a particular response.
Fear.
Hostility.
Submission.
Confrontation.
Sometimes you can change the interaction simply by refusing to play the expected part.
This works in much more ordinary circumstances, too.
When I go to Sainsbury’s after dark, I sometimes park near the River Lark.
There are often teenagers around.
Now, young people are frequently accustomed to adults complaining about them.
So sometimes they’ll behave in ways that seem designed to invite precisely that reaction.
Walk slowly across the road.
Get in the way.
See whether the approaching adult gets annoyed.
I generally just acknowledge them.
A small wave.
Maybe a casual remark if I’m walking past.
Not trying to be one of the kids. Not performing some embarrassing attempt at youth culture.
Just treating them as people.
It’s surprising how pleasantly they can respond.
Sometimes I’ll stop and have a chat.
Most people, I’ve found, are perfectly decent.
And some who appear intimidating are simply expecting hostility because that’s what they usually encounter.
But here’s the crucial qualification.
It doesn’t always work.
The man with the knife in Wood Green wasn’t interested in my conversational skills.
And another incident in Bristol taught me something considerably more painful.
The Girl on the Bus
I was about nineteen.
Living in Bristol.
One day I’m travelling on a bus when two men, probably in their early twenties, begin harassing a young woman.
They’re white. So is she.
From what I could gather, they were angry because she’d been involved with black men.
One of the two is particularly aggressive.
His companion seems uncomfortable with what’s happening.
Then the aggressive one starts punching the woman.
Hard.
Repeatedly.
In the face.
Her face begins swelling. She looks close to losing consciousness.
This isn’t a minor altercation.
She’s being seriously beaten.
And nobody does anything.
Passengers look away.
The driver doesn’t intervene.
Remember, this is long before mobile phones.
There’s no quick call to the police from your seat.
No obvious help coming.
I look at what’s happening.
I know it’s dangerous.
I know perfectly well I could get badly hurt.
But the woman is being battered.
And I can’t simply sit there watching it continue.
So I get up.
I approach the men and try to calm things down.
“Come on. Maybe we can talk this through.”
Something along those lines.
The aggressive man’s companion tells me to leave it.
Best to back off.
And strangely enough, I think he means it kindly.
He doesn’t want another confrontation.
But the woman is still in danger.
So I persist.
I try reasoning with the aggressive one again.
And he responds with a punch.
Very fast.
I don’t see it coming in time.
It knocks out my two front teeth.
The Martial Arts Expert
Now things take another peculiar turn.
The less aggressive man gets hold of me and sits me down.
The man who punched me joins us.
And I get the distinct impression that both of them wish things hadn’t gone this way.
The young woman gets off the bus.
The two men remain for a while.
Then they prepare to leave.
The companion puts his hand on my shoulder.
There’s something almost apologetic about the gesture.
Then they’re gone.
I’m left sitting there, minus two front teeth.
The bus continues.
I know the final stop is near the hospital, so I stay aboard.
Eventually we arrive.
As I’m getting off, the driver tells me something remarkable.
He’s a martial arts expert.
Apparently.
This from the man who had done nothing while a young woman was being beaten and a passenger lost his front teeth attempting to stop it.
You couldn’t make it up.
The hospital sorts me out.
Later, a dentist fits caps.
They’re still doing their job today.
What Should I Have Done?
I’ve thought about that incident over the years.
Could I have handled it differently?
Possibly.
But I struggle to identify an alternative that was actually available at the time.
A woman was being beaten severely.
Nobody was intervening.
The driver wasn’t helping.
There were no mobile phones.
And we were inside a bus.
That’s important.
Enclosed spaces are potentially dangerous because they restrict your options.
A narrow aisle. Seats on either side. People in the way.
Very little room to retreat.
No space to move backwards out of range when somebody throws a punch.
And even if several passengers had decided to help, we’d have needed some coordination.
Three people acting independently might simply have made the situation more chaotic.
I knew, when I got out of my seat, that I was taking a serious risk.
In a sense, I sacrificed myself to change the situation.
Not because I wanted to.
Because I couldn’t see another way to interrupt what was happening.
And the situation did change.
The woman was able to leave.
I can’t know what would have happened if I’d remained seated.
But I know what was happening before I got up.
And I know I couldn’t continue watching it.
Brave? Don’t Be Ridiculous.
People have a strange idea about bravery.
They imagine somebody facing danger without fear.
Chest out.
Jaw set.
A determined expression.
John Wayne marching towards the gunfire.
It’s nonsense.
At least as a description of what danger feels like from the inside.
You’re scared.
Sometimes you’re terrified.
You might be shaking.
Your voice might want to quiver.
Your mind is racing through possibilities.
You don’t particularly want to be there.
You want out.
You want the situation to end.
And if you’re fortunate, you retain enough control of yourself to assess what’s happening and make decisions.
I’ve never been particularly interested in being called brave.
What interests me is what can actually be done.
What options exist?
Which ones might work?
Which might make matters worse?
How do you get through the situation with the least possible harm?
That’s a rather different approach from trying to be a hero.
And I suspect I learned much of it from my father.
The Men With Medals
My father came back from war with quite a few medals.
I have them on my wall.
He wasn’t especially proud of them.
He kept them, certainly.
But he knew what they represented.
Men had died.
He’d saved some of the wounded.
Others hadn’t survived.
And much of it, he believed, need never have happened.
He’d got to know Germans.
Ordinary men.
They hadn’t wanted to kill him.
He hadn’t wanted to kill them.
Yet governments had placed them on opposing sides of a war.
And ordinary men were expected to kill one another.
For what?
Power.
Territory.
Wealth.
The ambitions of leaders.
My grandfather had been through the First World War.
He came home with his weapons.
And refused to surrender them.
Eventually the authorities raided his house and took them away.
I suspect my grandfather regarded the leaders of nations as the real enemy.
Perhaps that was partly why he wanted to keep his weapons.
I can’t know precisely what was going through his mind.
But I know he wasn’t inclined to hand them over voluntarily.
Between my father, my grandfather, and the old soldiers I encountered through my dad, I absorbed a rather different understanding of conflict from the one presented in war films.
These men weren’t particularly impressed by John Wayne.
They knew what fighting involved.
They knew men died.
They knew that surviving might depend as much upon circumstance and luck as skill.
And they knew that medals didn’t bring anybody back.
Fieldcraft, Not Heroics
My father also taught me something else.
How to observe.
Not through formal instruction.
Just by being with him.
He’d notice something happening.
Point it out.
Wonder what somebody was doing.
Suggest we hang back.
Or take another route.
Or simply watch for a while before deciding what to do.
You learn to read the environment.
Not as a place filled with enemies.
But as a changing situation in which information matters.
And that became normal to me.
Observe first. Assess. Decide. Move.
Sometimes the best option is conversation.
Sometimes a little humour changes everything.
Sometimes the safest choice is to leave.
And sometimes, as on that Bristol bus, every available option looks bloody awful.
The point isn’t to become fearless.
It’s to recognise what’s happening without allowing fear, anger or pride to take complete control.
There’s a difference between responding to a situation and being carried along by it.
That’s where fieldcraft meets what I now call Dokology.
Self-observation.
Attention.
Recognising the scripts people are following, including your own.
And maintaining the ability to choose your next action.
The Enemy Isn’t Always the Man in Front of You
There’s another lesson running through these encounters.
Human beings are complicated.
The football supporter who looked intimidating turned out to be perfectly capable of a friendly conversation.
The men with baseball bats discussed the snow as though we were three commuters waiting for a delayed train.
The companion of the man who knocked out my teeth seemed genuinely concerned about what had happened.
My father knew German soldiers who had no desire to kill him.
And the knife-wielding stranger in Wood Green demonstrated that friendliness and reason have their limits.
You cannot reduce people to appearances.
Nor can you assume that everybody will respond to the same approach.
Some people are frightened.
Some are angry.
Some are performing toughness.
Some are genuinely dangerous.
Some are several of those things at once.
Your task is to recognise what you can, remain aware of what you cannot know, and act accordingly.
That requires attention.
Not paranoia.
Not aggression.
Not the fantasy that you’re some invulnerable warrior.
Attention.
And the humility to recognise that you may have misread the situation.
Getting Home
I sometimes think about those medals on my wall.
My father’s.
The men he saved.
The men he couldn’t.
The Germans who didn’t want to kill him.
And the old soldiers who’d experienced things that no Hollywood film could adequately convey.
I doubt many of them thought of themselves as heroes.
They had a job to do.
They wanted to survive.
They wanted their friends to survive.
They wanted to get home.
That’s rather how I look at dangerous situations in civilian life.
You don’t want the confrontation.
You don’t want the fight.
You certainly don’t want the injuries.
You want to get through it.
And if somebody else is in danger, you may find yourself having to make a decision you desperately wish you didn’t have to make.
Sometimes your judgement works.
Sometimes it fails.
Sometimes you pay for the decision.
But none of that has much to do with swaggering around pretending you’re fearless.
The most useful thing you can do is remain aware.
Of the people around you.
Of the environment.
Of your own fear.
Of the options available.
And of the possibility that the situation may change very quickly.
There’s no glory in a confrontation that didn’t need to happen.
And no particular glory in surviving one, either.
Just the considerable satisfaction of still being here.
Preferably with your teeth intact.
FIELDCRAFT 002
Dokology · Attention · Self-Observation · The Human Condition
Observe. Assess. Decide. Move.
— Doktor Snake