updated Friday 11 December 2022
part two:
https://martinewman2020.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/part-two
(current accounts of meetings, incidents & ongoing housing issues)
OATH
I testify before God, my hands on the Holy Book of your choosing, that every word herein is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.
Martin Newman
INTRODUCTION
This is NOT an attempt to personally embarrass those whose help I sought, nor is it written without empathy for the difficulties of their employment, nor is it an attempt to gain compensation for the years I have lost when others, including members of my own family, have lost far more. This is to recount my personal experience of the behaviour of those who are paid to serve us, to protect the vulnerable, but whose actions, by design or incompetence, have been, for me, of no value whatsoever. Quite the contrary. I can only imagine their behaviour with others less articulate than I.
All personal names and identities (apart from mine) have been removed but can be supplied by and under strict Data Protection.
REACTION
Comments are NOT accepted anywhere on this blog. Any received will be screenshot and deleted immediately. If you want to leave a comment you may do so here: http://leicestereaction.wordpress.com which also includes visitor stats etc
CASE BACKGROUND
In 2012, after ten years of racist abuse, name-calling, public humiliation, false accusations, rumours, threats of and actual physical assault, consequent domestic ‘imprisonment’ and REACTIVE depression, a condition that a GP had diagnosed BEFORE I moved there (divorce, redundancy, near homelessness), I became physically ill and my mother, knowing of most of my experiences and worried about not hearing from me, phoned the local Police who broke in and found me unconscious with pneumonia and suspected TB specifically caused by a housing situation I had lost all ability to escape. It was mid-Summer. I spent three weeks in Hospital. According to the Doctors I might have died had the Police not found me.
This is a work in progress and will include relevant detailed accounts of meetings I have had with the Police, Housing Officers / Managers, GP’s / Hospitals / Counsellors, Councillors, Social Workers, Victim Support, Anti-Social Behaviour Unit, Shelter, Law Centre, Community Legal Advice, Citizen’s Advice Bureau, Star Tenancy Support, Legal Aid. I will also be including emails and scans of letters past, present and future, several of which are already published below.
I am well aware there are others with infinitely more severe issues and experiences than mine including and, in some cases, especially my own family. This blog is not for me only. The TRAUMA of having to fruitlessly recount over and over and over again the personal details of constantly debilitating experiences to ever-changing employees of organisations each in a state of crisis, each cut off from the other, each with the memory of a fish, cannot be underestimated.
QUESTION: Under what circumstance could one ‘White English’ be a victim of racist abuse by another ‘White English’ ? An apparently bewildering concept to every ‘non-White English’ employee I have ever sought help from. White British employees, while not racist (in my experience) have shown exactly the same ignorance. A perfect example of the former happened on Wednesday 13th April 2016 at 8:50 am …
A Housing Association had suddenly offered me a flat in a town where I had previously lived, worked and had a life. The offer was dependent on a statement from a GP supporting what I claimed were grounds for re-housing. I, for the hundredth time, recounted as best I could the race hatred I have experienced and tried to describe something of the effect it has had on my life but he was having none of it. His incredulity that I, a white English, could possibly be a victim of racism was impenetrable. A Doctor, not born in the UK, telling me that what I have experienced in all kinds of ways since I first attended Secondary School was untrue. London NW9, where I spent my first year trying to get them to call me by my first name instead of Jewboy, where they used to throw coins down in the playground and whoever picks one up is a Jew and gets a punch in the face. And where was such a mindset alive and kicking Now? “GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM!” they shouted, throwing stones at my window. “YEAH. TALK FUCKING ENGLISH MATE” they threatened me in the street. These are not ‘bullying’ as the GP saw fit to dilute, but RACE HATRED to all but the blind and ignorant. His unwillingness (failure) to support me scuppered my chance and the Housing Association withdrew their offer. AND I had to pay him £40 for his ignorance.
For the sake of Racial Equality I should also recount one of my unnumbered experiences of oblivious white English employees. At the Asthma Clinic, trying not to cry, desperate to find at least one person who might grasp my situation I, rather too poetically pathetic I admit, asked the Nurse if she ever looked at a person’s inner life? She, without looking up from her screen, replied: “Oh no. You’ll have to go to the Hospital for that. To the X-Ray Department.”
For balance, below is a screenshot of what I posted on facebook after leaving hospital. Included here with equal gratitude, now as then . . .
https://facebook.com/martinewmanmusic
IDENTITY
Racism is a HUMAN condition common to ALL Races.
In the 2011 Census form below are contained the racial headings by which all community service employees must, by Law, divide their clients (and be divided). The race group certain people identify me as (which no employee ever has) is not readily included, nor am I suggesting it should be.
Here > http://britologywatch.wordpress.com/2011/03/07 is an analysis of the above headings though I will NOT be associated with ANY outside blog or, indeed, ANY of their comments.
Cry for Help
In a subsequent meeting re the above letter I was asked to fill in an incident form. Shortly afterwards, there being so many incidents to record, I completed it and posted it to her. Hearing nothing I made a further appointment at which I was informed the form had been “lost”. Unfortunately, being wholly inexperienced in the ways of Social Housing I had not made a copy, My case was not referred to any support organization and no response was received from any of the above letters’ other recipients.
At that time I was yet to realize any of the details in the above letter were actuated by racism. That they repeated everything I said in a strange accent was not enough for me to understand. The two lads near Humberstone Park who looked at me like they knew me before one of them threw a missed punch at my head didn’t make me see. The gang of youths full of hatred throwing stones at my window was somehow so devastating in my doubly depressed state that I never opened the curtain again. But the situation got much worse.
One evening walking back to this flat I found the usual subjects gathered outside. A boy on a bike, maybe ten years old, asked me if I had a spare cigarette. In the moment I felt sorry for him and, as I passed, touched his arm and apologized for not having any. To my horror the cry of “PEDO!” (pedophile) immediately rang out and did so for years every time I went out of the door. It went around the whole estate. One day I was in the local Post Office to buy stamps and a man with a boy told the Manager to give me a ‘kiddie’s’ one WHICH HE DID. Several nights without electricity, gas, food or phone I sat in the dark paranoid of a lynch mob arriving. It didn’t but the persecution continued for a whole generation and even extended into the City.
One sunny lunchtime, the moment I sat down on the grass outside of St Martin’s Cathedral (before the bodies and stones of the dead were dug out for Tourism) a group of youths I hadn’t noticed started throwing stones at me in full view of others. I walked over to them and recognized the one who had first shouted “Pedo!” at the back smiling. As I started to ask them why another shouted at me: “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up….” so I walked away to the sound of yet more jeering and everyone else looking on suspiciously. I phoned the Police and he asked me what I’d done to antagonise them.
my first 12 month ‘prison sentence’
IGNORED
the author
PERSONAL BACKGROUND
I include the following brief summary mostly to offset any accusations of racism in this blog . . .
Born in London, my only cultural self-identity was British. Yes my father was a Jewish refugee who escaped (Nazi) Germany in 1939 aged 14, his father, grandparents and younger brother murdered, who later married an English girl from an Anglican Geordie family.
My father was a Bandleader when I was born (my surname his ‘stage’ name) who was mostly away touring until I went to school, thus my first identity was with my mother, her family, England. My father didn’t tell me about his experiences until I was 11. I saw them as his family, not mine. We had a challenging relationship. I went into denial.
I moved to Leicester in 1999. While working as a freelance graphic designer / illustrator (screen-printing) and guitar tutor in schools (Montessori) I co-founded ‘One World Orchestra’, a grandly over-titled multicultural music collective. We played at all local Festivals and were filmed in the studios of MATV. I then conceived and, with CASE (formerly the Co-operative Development Agency) and two trustworthy friends, created EarthCo-op Ltd “for the production of cross-cultural workshop and performance projects that exemplify unity in diversity” which the core subject of this blog forced me to abandon.
Ironically I had been publicly promoting multicultural values since 1974 through teaching projects, national (and international) music tours and as founding editor of a UK multi-Faith children’s magazine (through which I qualified as a graphic designer). During these years of “incapacity” and isolation I have spent all hours on-line promoting my work, being myself, mostly through social networks to which 12,000 people from 59 countries were, at its height, connected. Here is a full ‘creative history’ (scroll down for dated activities) https://facebook.com/notes/435582206555448
Of all the incidents of race hatred I experienced in Leicester the one (mentioned elsewhere) that finally punctured my soul was being threatened (the handle of a stanley knife half concealed in his right hand) to “TALK FUCKING ENGLISH MATE.” To him I am a ‘foreigner’. Whatever he thinks I am the root of his hatred is the facial characteristics I inherited from my father and my father (God rest his soul) was Jewish. Others might brush the incident off and get on with their lives but, from that moment on, I was invaded by all kinds of memories stretching back as far as I can remember, each suddenly revealing how others have always seen me but how I had always refused to see myself. Then I saw it in old photographs and, finally, in that man in the mirror, a stranger to my self.
My current mental state is impossible and inappropriate to describe publicly. Suffice it to say I learned very early on that my survival is dependent entirely upon my speaking the truth (as I continually understand it to be) from a position of absolute transparency. Further to this below are links to the social media I created to keep my work (and self) alive
https://www.facebook.com/martinewmanphotos
https://facebook.com/jacknewmanorchestra
https://facebook.com/martinewmanfriends
https://facebook.com/martinewmanmusic
https://facebook.com/martinewmanhome
https://martinewmanphoto.tumblr.com
http://youtube.com/martinewman2020
https://martinewman.bandcamp.com
https://twitter.com/martinewmanew
https://myspace.com/martinewman
https://facebook.com/mnstarlings
https://vimeo.com/martinewman
NOTHING FOR SALE
#Architecture my kitchen window
end of part one
PART TWO
https://martinewman2020.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/part-two
PART TWO
current accounts of meetings, incidents & ongoing housing issues
updated Friday 21 August 2020
Below is a negative / positive brainstorm prepared for ATOL
‘ Cancer / Death ‘ refers to my father who eventually passed away through all of this
They ‘signed me off’ more than once (maybe because of how keen I was to tell them about everything I was trying to do while, at the same moment, unable to stop myself from crying no matter how hard I tried).
“BUT I’VE ALREADY SEEN THIS!” said Dr S handing the above back to me. Apparently I’d shown it to her before. Appointment over. She later declined an invitation from the Police to attend a meeting about me.
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Desperate for help with abusive local pedophile-accusing youth and the effect their daily attacks were having on me I went to the Police but the Officer, WITHOUT ANY EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER, saw fit to immediately (secretly and in plain sight) investigate me as a sexual predator of children. WHY ? Every school day afternoon he would park opposite my window and once phoned me to find out where I was. His investigation went on to involve collusion with the Council to override me entirely in order to upgrade the Property. Eventually he and others he saw fit to involve changed their suspicion of my guilt to their recognition of my innocence and deleted me from their (unofficial) enquiries.
The above brief account does not touch at all upon the mental torture their collective behaviour FORCED me to endure.
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I sought the help of my local Member of Parliament (or, sat in the reception area of one of his local offices and told an oblivious young man my situation). The MP wrote to Housing then sent me a copy of their unhopeful reply. End of. Later repelled utterly by his proven sexual behaviour I went to see another MP nearby but she wouldn’t speak with me at all because, she said: “Westminster has very strict protocols about seeing your own MP.”
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A Doctor’s appointment. My mind so FULL of things causing me stress I couldn’t articulate ANY of them and suddenly SCREAMED in desperation. His immediate and lasting response was to warn me that they don’t tolerate anti-social behaviour.
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The way my IQ plummeted in the mind of the desk Sergeant when I told him where I live, even suggesting I had mistaken a uniformed Officer for a Social Worker.
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“SHALOM!” a young woman loudly greeted me as we walked past each other on a path through the estate. Shocked and bewildered I stopped, turned and asked her why she had said it. “I thought you were Jewish,” she replied. “Why do you think I’m Jewish?” I asked. Turns out she is the daughter of a local Councillor who was present at what I thought was a private, protected meeting. I sought advice from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and the advisor described the incident as “racial harrassment”.
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The same Councillor who, after I told her I was being attacked by local pedophile-accusing youth, said: “Yes. My husband had to go through that…” and suddenly it was all about her.
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The ironically black interviewer in a legal advice centre listened at length to my story of racists, depression, Council and Police, watched my inevitable tears and said he’d have to talk to someone else. He returned after not very long, laughed: “You won’t like the answer” and told me it wasn’t the sort of thing they deal with.
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“How many times have you been abused in the last three weeks?” asked the woman on the Legal Aid enquiry line sounding (to me) slightly bemused at the idea I had been abused at all. I couldn’t think. It had been going on for so much longer. I told her so. She repeated the question. I couldn’t think of an occasion. End of conversation.
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The Policeman who, after viewing and understanding the gist of this blog, gave me the following advice, that a) because I was obviously in a state of anxiety I should go on prescription drugs and b) because I have such difficulty in going out I should have my food delivered.
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The uncanny coincidence of opening my door to a woman saying she was a Social Worker and can she help me with anything with, at that VERY moment, me seeing the Council workers I had been looking for since overhearing them from my open window talking about me as if I was “another bloody asylum seeker.” “There’s those nazis” I exclaimed without thinking as I saw them drive past. The Social Worker became alarmed and my attempts to assure her she wasn’t in any danger only made her more agitated and she backed away and left.
The next morning I received a letter from the above Social Worker inviting me to phone and arrange a meeting with her which I did but was met by another who, on entering the room, said of the first: “She only sent you the letter to cover herself.” She then spoke to me as if she knew me and understood everything about my situation even though I was yet to tell her anything. What I did say was met with no-alternative solutions to her own interpretations without ever enquiring about either the cause or effect of what I had experienced. Her presumptions overwhelmed me with claustrophobia and I HAD to get out of there as quickly as possible. Which I did.
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I phoned a Housing Officer to complain about her letter wrongly accusing me of anti-social behaviour against an all times of the day and night young family living in a one bedroom, made of hardboard flat beneath me intended for singles, their constant sudden noise driving me to ever greater distraction even as I write. During the conversation I, to my surprise, suddenly burst into tears. “O dear,” she said. “I’m not qualified for this.” She went on to become a Team Leader and later still to decline an invitation from the Police to attend a meeting about me.
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When a new tenant moved in opposite it immediately became clear he’d just been released from Prison. He would stand on the landing and shout through the wooden bars about passers-by in the street below as if they were on television. He’d knock loudly on my door … “OY MATE!” … as if I were in the cell opposite. “FUCK YOU THEN!” when I didn’t reply. The next day I saw him over the street fist fighting with local youths, two of whom I recognized. Later that night I heard what sounded like someone drunk trying to get their key in the lock then succeeding and slamming the door behind them. In the morning I found a trail of fresh blood up the stairs and a puddle of it gathered outside his door also covered in blood where he had struggled with his key. Later that evening two Police cars arrived and I never saw him again.
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Sitting alone in the waiting room of a Counselling centre unable to stop crying, my hair unevenly self crew-cut short. Suddenly the door opened. I looked up and saw a Counsellor looking at me as a cleaner would at an after-party office. Without a word she turned and closed the door behind her. I left.
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The locum Doctor, after listening to my account of events and the effect they were having, cocked his head to one side, looked down at me from his financial eyrie and, with a mix of patronising ignorance and sincere confusion, asked: “Why don’t you move?”
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Leicester Housing offered me a flat in the same property (backed on to a knacker’s yard) on two separate consecutive occasions. The first time I turned it down in writing, the second by telephone to the local Office who sent me the offer. “You WILL pass the message on won’t you,” said I. “Yes,” she replied. Then receiving a letter punishing me for not having contacted them. In a later attempt I again handed my letters from the NHS to another woman at Housing. “Oh we’ll have to see more recent evidence than this,” she said cheerfully turning me away.
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The woman from STAR who did the VERY thing I SPECIFICALLY told her NOT to do (giving my NI number to an energy supplier) who then denied that I had told her and the subsequent reply to my complaint from her boss backing her and entirely missing the Point. Apparently help cannot be obtained from them unless they are given control over personal finances. My thankful ability to manage my own thus far rendered them useless (to me) four times over.
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The way the middle-aged Policewoman vainly flicked back her fringe and said, “Well I’m about the same age as you and my life isn’t over yet,” when I told her mine was.
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The Housing Officer who, on being informed of abusive attacks on my person, told me to walk down a different street.
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When I shared with an NHS Counsellor (for ‘reactive depression’) the intimacy of my being a singer he literally SCOFFED with derision at the very idea.
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A visit from an NHS Psychiatric Crisis Team (other than those in letters published above). For the sake of clarity I will describe them as being both of mixed race, a male of African descent and a female of Indian descent. They took no notice of the permanently closed curtains or dishevelled state. I found myself telling them of how I was pushed head first through a shop window in 1969 by ‘skinheads’ out ‘paki-bashing’. The moment I (unfortunately) used the (then common) term (for clarity) they looked at each other with raised eyebrows and I saw them conclude they were with a white racist. The fact that I was the victim in my story flew way over their heads. The tone changed. I had to answer a set-list of questions each irrelevant to my situation. When I protested the male became dominant. Upon finishing they went to sit in their car saying they will return shortly with a verdict. There was nothing they could do. They gave me the local Samaritans number and left.
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“Eugh. Jewish” and “You’ll need a big hanky for that nose mate” jeered the small crowd of clubbers gathering on Charles Street who walked on when I stopped walking.
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“. . . and suddenly there was a naked man in the room,” laughed the young Policewoman when describing to her newly arrived fellow Officers how she had, twenty minutes earlier, woken me from a pneumonia induced sleep on a mattress I had then crawled out of and was still sitting on being attended to by Nurses. “I WAS NOT NAKED!” I managed to shout. The Officers stopped their visual search of my destitute rooms and looked at her. “No, you weren’t,” she said sheepishly.
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Mid-morning walking along an empty street a man on a bicycle stopped in the middle of the road ahead of me and shouted: ” E – D – L ” (English Defence League) then rode on.
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The big half empty plastic coke bottle thrown at me by an unknown angry youth from the other side of the street. I walked on.
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“GET AWAY FROM THOSE KIDS!” a man once shouted at me as I walked past the nearby children’s play area (I looked but couldn’t see anyone). Even to this day I hear his shout in my mind every time I walk past.
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Walking to the shop I saw a happy little boy playing in a front garden. “HELLO!” he called to me as I passed but I dared not respond for fear of appearing suspicious. I had to ignore him completely and, because of it, cried all the way to the high street.
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Who but a devil would abuse an angel.
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The woman in a burqa calling me brother and begging me for money.
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The teenager who saw me and growled “Hitler.”
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A Rabbi and a Policewoman sat next to me at a conference table, she (without my approval) pointing out to him a now highlighted paragraph of a letter entitled PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL that I had posted to her previously. After reading it they looked at each other and nodded in agreement. Regretfully I said nothing. It was immediately before a meeting with others purportedly to discuss my situation and see how they might help me but which appeared to descend into attempts to make me appear delusional. They saw nothing and, therefore, understood nothing. They may as well have had bags over their heads.
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So frustrated was I by the kind, helpful but oblivious Policeman (now retired) not understanding a single word I was saying that I found myself banging my head hard against the wooden door of the outside drying area over and over and over, determined to do myself in. Not an unusual occurence at that time I must admit when everything was a CRISIS. Even forgetting something at the local shop was an act worthy of giving my forehead a good bashing with my fists at the prospect of having to go out THERE again, reproaching my self utterly for having allowed my self to fall into the situation in the first place. Unable to see any external reason for my outburst the Policeman insisted I go with him to the Hospital so I could be assessed psychologically. I eventually decided it was an opportunity and agreed. As we walked to his mini-bus a full rainbow arched over us and I felt hopeful. At the Hospital he made me promise that, despite the wait, I would stay and see a Doctor. And what a wait it was, and what a disappointment. Another set-list of questions, each again irrelevant to my immediate situation. On my claim of racist attack they noted I don’t have a local accent and said they’d write a letter. I never heard anything. It was after midnight when I left so was forced to walk the three miles back in the dark and, for good measure, had to endure “YOU FUCKING CUNT!” from youths in a passing car.
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One day I heard commotion on the landing and opened my door to find two teenage girls writing and drawing sexually explict words and pictures all over the walls, doors and woodwork with permanent markers, one in red, the other in blue. One of the girls scarpered the second I appeared while the other stood frozen to the ground. “What are you doing that for?” I asked mystified and without anger. “It wasn’t all me,” she said. “I only did the red.” I told her to go away which she did. At the local Housing Office I was informed I had to wait THREE DAYS for them to remove it. After three days branded for all to see the same Housing Officer had forgotten me. Only by loudly expressing the extreme urgency of the situation did I wake him to the idea of doing something about it.
The Council also took three days to remove the long stool of fresh faeces that a human left for me on the stairs. For years I found myself stepping over it as if it was still there, trying not to visualize the tricky, despicable position he would have been in when doing it.
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Late one afternoon walking ‘home’ a stone flew too near my head and crashed into the fence beside me. In that split-second, after far too many incidents, I’d had ENOUGH. I looked around me and saw a good sized stone. Fully intending to throw it back I reached down but, as ever since childhood, I saw myself reaching down and with it saw again all of the consequences and implications arising from revenge. Mindfullness. I cling to my humanity as if life depends on it. Because it does.
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Every day walking through these streets is like being in a film set where, at every turn, violent scenes are re-run repeats, the reactions of those from whom I sought help a hateful soundtrack, my mind ballooning into a ROAR of anger, NONE of which I, in my very heart, want ANYTHING to do with. “Your creativity will save you.” (Dr McCormack). Every day working alone online, the computer my only window to hope. Every way shut in my face, my inner mind my only freedom.
The walls closing in. It was MY Grandfather murdered in Auschwitz, MY Great-Grandparents in the Warsaw Ghetto, MY Uncle, aged 18 months, by a nazi ‘doctor’, MY father dying of cancer.
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Too many nights preferring not to eat than go out and put myself at risk.
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INCIDENT 25 May 2019. 11pm. Last night walking . . . a car drove past me and youths inside shouted hatefully: “GET YOUR FUCKING HAIRCUT YOU LONG-HAIRED CUNT!” I was wearing a hat. There was no one else in sight. The car turned left away from me. Continuing to walk I saw its brake lights though there were no headlights of another car ahead of it. I walked on. Maybe 100 yards from my flat I heard a youth behind me, perhaps from the car, perhaps not, shout: “OY MATE!” I walked on. He shouted again. His increasingly aggressive tone caused me to walk faster. 20 yards from the security door he shouted a third time and when I turned around (still walking) he started to run towards me. I managed to open the door, get inside and, the door still sliding closed, he kicked it SHUT in my face, his foot at waist height as if he were kicking it in. Then he ran back in the direction of the car though I didn’t see him get in. I never stopped walking and didn’t say or do anything else. A few seconds earlier and he would have kicked my head in. No doubt about it.
I emailed the above account to the Police describing it as being actuated by race hatred. After all these years of failed attempts by me and others on my behalf to engage them in such an apparently incomprehensible truth, I received the following reply:
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The Policewoman, unable to get a reply from my doorbell (because it was disconnected), standing in the street calling my first name up at my open window over and over, announcing it to the neighbourhood.
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One of several meetings with Victim Support, this time with a young woman. Loathe to do so but still in hope of help I spent twenty minutes retelling the same events and their effects at the end of which her only response was to say what a strong person I must be. Turned out she was here from Finland, maybe Sweden, studying part-time to be an accountant and helping out with their then open charity shop. Other meetings were equally pointless. The final straw was a follow-up phone call from what sounded like an impressionable teenager asking me if I was satisfied with the help I had received. “What help?” She didn’t know.
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During the initial height of visits to this blog a black wheelie-bin with the numbers 2020 painted vertically in white down one side was, by strange, slightly eerie coincidence, left outside the front door of these flats (see address of this blog). I showed it to my then Police ‘liason officer’ who scoffed at the idea of it having any significance. I put it round the back and it eventually disappeared.
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Sitting on a park bench, a man sat down beside me. “And what country are you from?” he asked.
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“YOU LIKE CURRY MATE?!” shouted a young woman at me as we approached each other walking over a field through the estate. When she was a little distance behind me I turned and asked her why she had said it. Surprised, perhaps also by my English, she said: “Dunno. Felt like it.”
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“HELLO!” smiled a stranger in a cafè where I was eating. I didn’t recognize him. “You work in kebab shop, no?”
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It’s not that they think I’m foreign, it’s that they KNOW I am.
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“I FUCKING HATE THAT MAN!” I found myself shouting at the ceiling in front of two visiting Policewomen (having already warned them of an approaching F-word). I was referring to one of their fellow Officers who had for years consistently refused to acknowledge what I had sought his help for, who had failed to see through his own, as I see it, unconscious bias, and who had instead investigated me without any evidence whatsoever. Judging by the level of insight they had shown on a previous visit I doubted the Policewomen would have grasped the contradiction of my a) criticism of his actions and b) respect for his bravery (I tried to explain). It is his behaviour, his trickery and patronising arrogance, his mind-games in spite of his ignorance and lack of insight that I find so despicable, not his soul. As fate would have it I walked into a sandwich shop a week or so later and there he was in uniform, his back to me, facing the counter. Having no reason to leave, quite the contrary, I did nothing but stand and wait and look at the back of his head with an almost biological venom. “You fucking bastard. HOW DARE YOU!!!” roared my mind in the moment but I heard it roar and said nothing. As if also hearing he turned suddenly, recognised me immediately and motioned for me to go before him, mentioning my name as I passed with dignity but still radiating intense resentment and still saying nothing. Leaving the shop I looked back and saw him whispering to the Policewoman beside him, she listening with a concerned faraway look on her face. My interpretation, self-centred perhaps, was that she had been aware of my hostility and he was giving her his explanation. Waiting at the nearby bus stop I watched them drive past and, not visible to his passenger, he gave me a thumbs-up sign which, considering how many years I had fruitlessly sought his help, seemed strangely inappropriate. I had my hands in my pockets and felt goaded into giving him a middle finger in exchange. He was not looking at my eyes. I declined and mouthed the word “Never” which he saw. “NEVER!” I shouted with my voice as they drove away, the traumas that his abandonment had allowed marching through my memory one by one. Reflecting on it afterwards I suddenly found it hard to believe that a man of his education and cultural heritage would not know what a thumbs-up sign means in the Middle-East, ie what an Arab might say to a Jew? Strategic ambiguity? Far too sinister for me to believe he would actually do such a thing. And yet.
I didn’t tell any of the above to the two Policewomen still standing at my door. Instead I started to list for them what I had been wrongly accused of by both Public and Police but one of them interrupted me saying: “I’m going to talk to the Council,” and they abruptly left. The next morning I heard sudden voices calling my surname from the street below my door. When they stopped I opened it and heard what sounded like the cheery voices of young secretaries out on an errand walking down the path towards the back of the building. I looked down at them through the wooden slats and let them see me. “Mr Newman?” “Who are you?” They both proudly held up their identity cards as if it qualified them to talk to me about any of this when it manifestly didn’t. Viewing in the moment the prospect of making myself emotionally vulnerable to two office workers at the scene of the crime which would undoubtedly result in the same fruitless merry-go-round as I don’t know how many times I’d been on before, I declined. It took very little to, respectfully, get rid of them.
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“Forget about it.” PCSO SB
“We were investigating a lot of people.” PC AL
“You can trust me.” A, Social Worker
http://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/BOYS-LURED-car-PERVERT/story-21082691-detail/story.html DELETED
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During a home visit I watched a Housing Officer (rebranded ‘Estate Manager’ to remove her ‘Duty Of Care’ ?) trying to gain her Team Leader’s confidence in her ability to deal with me (“Mr Newman is a pussycat”) and I watched him watching her self-serving ignorance with contempt. Resuming the conversation I showed him this blog and he (shortly before he left his job) said: “But that (the multiculturalisation of housing estates) was decided upon years ago.”
Indeed it was . . .
UNITED NATIONS 2000:
‘REPLACEMENT MIGRATION’
Original link
https://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/migration/migration.htm
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Text © Martin Newman, 2020. All Rights Reserved.
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THE THREE NOTHINGS
They saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing.
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A MISTAKEN IDENTITY 