The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker - reviewed by Susan Price

          When I was a Royal Literary Fund (RLF) Fellow, I worked

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker

alone in a small office in a large university building. For most of the day, the corridor outside was deserted. A woman lecturer I once met in the library said, with concern, "You're very isolated up there, aren't you?"
          And so I was. I saw hundreds of students, who came to my office by appointment, and in confidence. No one knew who I was shut in that small room with, or when. The majority of the students were female, but I also saw a lot of male students, some of them very large indeed.
          I never felt the slightest bit uneasy or threatened by any of them - except one.
          He didn't fit the part at all. He was shorter than me, slight, soft-spoken and very polite. Yet the moment I opened my office door to him, and quite out of the blue, a voice spoke up at the back of my head and said, very distinctly, "Not him."
          But I ignored this misgiving. After all, what was it based on? Nothing - except that voice in the head. I ticked myself off for being irrational.
          So I ushered him in, and asked how I could help. He didn't want help with writing, he said: he wanted to practice his English. I thought: Okay. I've no other appointments. We can talk about the headlines for an hour.
          But whatever subject I brought up, he turned it round to me. He kept saying that he wanted to know all about me. I didn't like this at all. Apart from this insistent curiosity about me - which I did my best not to satisfy - he didn't say or do anything in the slightest bit threatening, but the longer I was with him, the more uneasy I felt, though I couldn't have said why.
          Nevertheless, I agreed to another appointment - because I didn't want to be rude or foolishly irrational.
          I woke in the middle of that night, and in my head was the image of this student, and the firm instruction: "Not him."
          I still had no logical reason to refuse to see this student, but decided that if that inner voice felt strongly enough about it to wake me in the night, I would listen. Especially as it was such a strong contrast with the way I felt about my other appointments. I'd admitted many larger, louder and more abrasive men to that office, and no mysterious inner voice had ever bothered to say anything about them at all, not so much as a comment on their dress sense.
          The RLF insists that its fellows can refuse to see anyone, on a whim, if they feel like it. So I used this get-out clause. I emailed the student and told him that my RLF bosses were cancelling his appointment because the task of the RLF is to help with writing, not English conversation. (Which is true.)

Gavin deBecker

          I never saw or heard of this student again, so I can't supply a satisfying ending to the tale - which is quite a relief - but it was fascinating to read The Gift of Fear: The Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence, and to realise that its author, Gavin de Becker would have joined forces with the RLF and backed me all the way. Except that de Becker would say that I should have listened to the voice the first time it spoke.
          I found this book completely absorbing. De Becker was himself raised in a violent family and, he says, learned to read the signs that signal coming violence as a child.
          As an adult, he increased his expertise and uses it to protect people in the public eye, including presidents, from violence. His company, for instance, monitors the mail, paper and electronic, sent to politicians, stars and other people in public life. Private citzens too, if they ask for his help.
          The mail, which is mostly harmless, is constantly evaluated by de Becker's teams. The signs of coming violence are always there, de Becker says. The kind of rage which posts bombs, shoots randomly through an office or school, or decides to murder a singing star, never comes out of nowhere - though, to de Becker's disgust, most institutions prefer to think that it does and that 'there was nothing that could have been done.'
         In de Becker's opinion, there was always an awful lot that could have been done - but the companies and institutions in question have to be alert to those survival signals. Most can't be bothered.
          When de Becker's teams detect a rise in violent intent, they alert the police and the person threatened, and even move in to take action themselves. In one case, where they had reason to suspect a singing star was threatened, they had her move out of her house because it backed on to a large area of wild scrubland, and they didn't think they could adequately protect her there.
          Believing that their suspect was living rough in the scrub, they conducted a search - and found two other obsessed stalkers living in make-shift huts while they watched the singer. Neither of these men was judged dangerous - and the real threat turned out to have gone elsewhere, to make an attempted attack on a woman politician, who was on his list because 'women shouldn't be above men.' (The politician's office and local police had been alerted to this possibility.)
          De Becker analyses the behaviour and language of attackers, showing how they use words and actions to gain control over the person they intend to attack - but his message is that we are all as expert as he is in recognising and identifying this behaviour, if only we would listen to ourselves. Again and again, he reports, the victims of violence, in retelling their stories, identify key signals which raised their suspicions at the time, but which they ignored or suppressed, because they didn't want to be 'silly' or 'rude.'
          He takes us through cases of mass shootings and bombings, where the alarm was raised about the criminal well before the event - because other employees or students felt consistently uneasy in his presence. (I'm afraid it usually is 'his' presence.)
           This feeling of unease or suspicion, says de Becker, is our primitive animal nature screaming a warning. It should never, never be ignored. Listening to it could save your life.
          I think everyone should read this book - but it's perhaps of especial interest to writers, who are always curious about the peculiar pathways human nature can take.
          I think I shall search for some more books by de Becker.

Susan Price's website can be found here.

Empty Chairs by Stacey Danson

Review by Bill Kirton

Some of my friends have said of this book that they want to read it but, knowing the pain and horrors it chronicles, need to get themselves into the right frame of mind to do so. Others have admitted that they doubt whether they’ll actually get round to it. They should and must – for several reasons.

It’s an autobiographical story, written under a pseudonym, which reveals how a 3 year old was subjected to gross sexual abuses at the behest of her own mother, and forced to continue servicing visitors to the house until eventually, at the age of eleven, she ran away. Thereafter, life on the streets proved equally stressful, threatening to confirm all the negatives she felt about how people behave.

Perhaps that crude synopsis has made you join the ‘I’m not sure I could read this – it’s too horrible’ camp. If it has, it’s deprived you of an astonishing experience. Because this is a page turner and, bizarrely, a sort of celebration. I know that’s a cliché beloved of Amazon reviewers, but here it’s a fact. The story is relentlessly riveting. There’s tension, hidden (and not so hidden) forces at work, powerful characters, and observations of social interaction that are penetrating insights into what lurks behind the facades of sunny, happy-go-lucky Australia, where families picnic in the sun and glory in sights such as the fabulous Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The abuse inflicted on the infant Sassy-Girl (let’s use the street name she earned) was not at the hands of social low-lifes, but ‘respectable’ middle class professionals. When she eventually rebels and runs away, she has to find places to sleep, clothes to wear, ways to get food, and simultaneously avoid the pressure from pimps to recruit her into their stable. She experiences some kindnesses but her whole life seems to have been a denial that trust is possible between humans. When groups of girls at the zoo mock her for the clothes she’s wearing, she asks ‘why do people do those things? What was it that gave those girls the right to make fun of something they didn't understand?’ adding that ‘It would take a very long time to discover how common that trait was in humans’.

It would have been so easy (in theory) to succumb to prostitution to earn her keep, but the abuse she suffered makes her determined never to allow her body to be used again. As she says ‘I knew my soul would die anyway if I made a conscious decision to sell the child's body in which it was housed. I wasn’t being brave, or strong. I simply knew that all of me would survive – or another me would. What point would there be living without my soul and my spirit?’

An author’s note at the beginning speaks of the compulsion Danson had to write this, the promise she’d made to someone to do so, but she also admits that it’s taken longer to get round to it than she thought it would. And that’s part of the spell this narrative weaves. We’re getting the intimate day to day experiences of a 12 year old – the encounters, the threats, the violence, the alienation – but they’re all being recounted by the mature woman she survived to become.

And the narrator herself is aware of this, of course. This is a woman who knows how to write, how to use language, sometimes simply, always directly, to engage the reader, a woman who has come to know that friendships and trust are possible, and yet who’s re-entering the mind of her pre-teen self and reliving those years, with their innocence and ignorance. Because Sassy-Girl is uneducated (in formal terms). She thinks everyone speaks Australian (except Americans, whom she’s seen on TV and who speak American). ‘If someone had told me we all spoke English,’ she says, ‘I would have been even more confused.

At times, the mature narrator lends her voice to the girl. When she makes her way to the War Memorial, for example, she says she ‘spent the rest of the night in the company of the spirits of people who had died in a nightmare as well’. And there’s an awareness of the power of simplicity in sentences such as ‘I wanted to laugh and mean it’, or ‘It reminded me of the way I cried, back when I still could.’

But these aren’t intended to be criticisms. The moment Sassy-Girl suspects she’s feeling self-pity, she forces herself out of it. She’s a survivor and, despite all the torments she’s endured in these early years, what remains is an affirmation of her spirit, a confidence that, despite the enormous forces ranged against her, she won’t be a loser. It’s a compelling read, a reminder of the deepest evils of which we’re capable, but also a celebration of our ability to overcome.