Brighton Rock

Some people will know that I have a new job. It's only temporary, actually. I'm working in a summer school for foreign students. It's a very demanding job, and so far I've been working six-day weeks, with quite punishing hours. The pay is really not very good, either.

Well, yesterday – Saturday – as part of my job, I was amongst those members of staff who accompanied some sixty or seventy students on a day out to Brighton, a famous English seaside resort, sometimes also known as 'London by the sea' (apparently).

I was actually rather looking forward to the trip. This job has proved very stressful to me in many ways, not least of all because enforcing classroom discipline does not come naturally, and I have found myself having to stem situations where the lessons simply became unmanageable because students were talking and not listening. Many other people on the staff have also been complaining about the lack of respect and so on prevalent among the students. However, despite the possible problems that might arise, and the general exhaustion engendered by having to keep an eye on and feel responsible for, so many students, I thought that I might enjoy myself. I had never been to Brighton before, but I knew a fair amount about it. Apart from having the strange glamour of a Victorian seaside resort, with its pier, its stalls selling ice-creams, its pebbly beach of stripey deck chairs and so on, it is distinguished by a fairly interesting historical and cultural background. For instance, it is the gay capital of England. In the sixties, it was the site of violent clashes between the mods and the rockers, as featured in the film Quadrophenia. It is home to the Royal Pavilion, which was built for King George IV, and boasts a strange fusion of Chinese-style interior and Indian-style exterior. But perhaps I was most interested in seeing Brighton because of its association with the novelist Graham Greene, who used the town as the setting of one of his most famous stories, Brighton Rock, which was later made into a famous film. The novel begins, again, rather famously: "Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anyone could tell he didn't belong…" I thought it would be cool to get someone to photograph me looking rather noir and Graham Greeneish against the background of this seaside resort.

Our two coaches arrived in Brighton, and our first stop was Brighton Sea Life Centre. This is apparently one of the oldest aquariums in the world, if not the oldest (I can't remember now), and it was, in fact, one of the most memorable I have visited (if not the most memorable). I was particularly entranced by the rays (I'm not sure of their exact species). They seemed rather tame, and would come to the surface of the water and raise their flat heads above it as if blowing eerie, fishy kisses to the visitors.

After the Sea Life Centre, we moved to the front of Brighton Pier, which was to be our meeting point before we boarded the coaches again at the end of the excursion. The students were given leave to see the sights, and the staff also dispersed. One of them was showing a group of our girls where the Lanes were, and the others were going for lunch at a cafe or restuarant somewhere. I had brought a packed lunch to save money, so I said I would eat it on the pier, which I proceeded to do. I sat down on one of the benches next to an old lady, and we began talking. She told me all about her children and grandchildren, and about her own life, too. Apparently, like me, she had also been a teacher of English as a foreign langauge. She had taught the sons of some very rich men from the Far and Middle East. She told, amongst other things, of the time that a Thai student had told her how he had been using his father's harem since the age of twelve, and about how she had chased him down the corridor with a book (presumably to wallop him), when he had suggested that she would enjoy life in the harem. Later, when he was grown-up, she met him again. "Do you remember me?" he said. "How could I forget?" she said, "And do you remember how I chased you down the corridor with a book?" "Remember it? That's going into my memoirs when I am minister of the interior in Thailand."

Well, we chatted for a long time, but I was aware my time in Brighton was limited. I made my excuses, to the effect that I must go and check that none of my students are getting into trouble, adding, for the sake of honesty, that I would also like to see the beach and the rest of the pier while I was here.

I strolled down onto the beach and took a few photos here and there, hoping to capture something of the atmosphere of an ancient, but beautifully preserved, seaside resort. Then I saw an amusement arcade and decided to have a look inside, and maybe play on some machines. I had taken a couple of photographs in here when a man came up to me and told me to come with him. He took me to one side and asked to see the photographs I had taken. I remembered a similar experience in America, where someone asked me not to take photographs in a supermarket. I don't know why they asked me that. I presumed it was some humourless paranoia about industrial espionage. I assumed this to be a similar kind of humourless paranoia. I was not wrong, but I had misjudged the extent of it.

I showed the man the two photographs I had taken in the arcade.

"That's a photograph of me!" he said, as if shocked.

"Is it?"

I looked, and he was right. I had accidentally captured him on camera. Perhaps, I thought, that was what this was all about.

"I can erase it if you like."

"No! Don't!" His tone suggested this was some cunning trickery of mine.

He asked to see the "other" photos. These, it turned out, were the ones I had taken on the beach. Apparently, he was 'security' and had been trailing me. When I asked him what this was all about – it was beginning to dawn on me anyway – he said that he suspected me of taking photographs of children.

I don't remember the entire conversation, but I do remember that I became quite angry that someone could simply pull me aside and accuse me of being a paedophile. When he explained what grounds he had for suspicion, he said that I had been walking along the beach "looking weird".

"Looking weird?" I repeated, incredulously.

"That's right. A hot day like this, and you've got a jacket and scarf on. You're carrying two bags and walking slowly along looking around."

"So that's weird, is it?"

"Yes, in my opinion."

"Yes, in your opinion."

Apparently – and this has been commented on before – wearing many clothes in hot weather is an eccentricity of mine. I simply like to cover myself up in the sun, rather than expose myself to it. I am not keen on getting burnt, or on getting a tan. I do not like showing my skin or wearing T-shirts and shorts in public, if I can help it. Maybe this really is eccentric, but I begin to despise people when they cannot tolerate eccentricity. And it's certainly not a crime or an indicator of liability to commit crime.

Basically, this man had decided to throw the most unpleasant and insidious of all accusations at me on the grounds that he did not like the way I looked. To be more specific, I was wearing a scarf and jacket and carrying two bags, one of which, he commented in an 'I-rest-my-case' kind of way, "is basically a handbag". He even went on to say that it was the kind of bag that perverts and paedophiles carry.

I do not know what kind of fantasy the man was living in, but it was, anyway, bizarre. He was, apparently, an expert on paedophile fashion. He imagined a world where groups of paedophiles get together and decide on what fashions will best advertise themselves to the world. Worse than this was a deeply ingrained ignorance implied by his comments that runs something like this: Effeminate = homosexual = perverted = paedophile.

Anyway, he talked about asking a policeman to come along (I rather think now, I should have agreed to this suggestion rather than talk to him) and insisted on seeing more of my photos. We got past those I had taken on the beach, past the ones I had taken at the Sea Life Centre, and onto the ones I had taken a couple of days before.

"What's this?" he said, pointing to something in the picture, as if he had found some evidence.

"That's my room," I said, by now thoroughly disgusted with this dirty little man and his dirty little questions, which, no doubt, proceeded from a dirty little mind.

Finally, he decided that there was nothing "discriminating" amongst the pictures.

"Au contraire!" I wanted to say, "I think I have a very discriminating eye."

He even repeated the same malapropism, thus proving it was habitual with him.

"If there had been anything discriminating here, we'd have been taking you to the police station now."

And this is the kind of person in whom a makeshift justice is entrusted – one who cannot even speak the language of justice.

He asked for my details, and I asked for his. Just as I was about to go, there occurred perhaps the most surreal part of the whole squalid incident. I turned around at some movement behind me to see some kind of urchin there with his hand raised as if to strike me. My friend, the beach 'security' person, made a little gesture, said, "It's all right" and the urchin backed off.

"What's this?" I asked.

"Oh, nothing," said the man, with a strange smirk, "He belongs to me. He's one of my… lads."

What is this, indeed? Is this Dickens? Fagin and his Artful Dodger? No, I had got what I had come for, after all. This was Graham Greene's Brighton, and I had found it within three hours of my arrival. I almost expected the lad to say, "All right, Pinkie. You're the boss." And his boss to say, "Just do what you're told, Spicer. Wait outside."

Not wanting to outstay my welcome, I left soon thereafter.

I was rather disinclined now to enjoy the beach, and walked towards the town. There, one of the first things to meet my eye was a pile of magazines in a shop window, the kind that are very popular these days, full of photographs and stories about celebrities. Plastered all over the cover of the magazines, openly on sale, were pictures of the arses and breasts of some poor unsuspecting women on a beach somewhere in England. Were the men who took these photos hassled by 'security' I wonder? What about the people who buy the magazines?

In the film Brighton Rock there is the following line of dialogue:

Rose: People change.

Ida: I've never changed. It's like those sticks of rock. Bite one all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. That's human nature.

Personally, I think that there's a kind of dirty hypocrisy running through British culture like 'Brighton' through a stick of rock. This hypocrisy is best represented by the tabloid press. I do not like the tabloid press. There is an aura of filth and violence about these publications. It is a filth that is ingrained in British culture, and, I suspect, in the mind of the man who interrogated me. I wonder if he is even capable of seeing a child without seeing pornography.

One of my musical heroes, Momus, has much to say on this aspect of British culture. I recognised a great deal of what he was saying in an essay called 'Nasty, British and Short'. In his blog he has described Britain as a land where "every naked child is a porn star by default". This is precisely the atmosphere – one of filth and fear – in which the suspicions of the security man oblige us to live. I see more and more of this brutish aspect of the British as time goes by.

I am reminded of the case – tragic and farcical in equal measure – of the paediatrician whose house was attacked by vigilantes. Why? Because he was a paediatrician, of course. This is a true story. I can't remember the names involved, so haven't yet found it on the Web. Just as our friend mixed up the words 'discriminating' and 'incriminating', these vigilantes mixed up the words 'paediatrician' and 'paedophile'. And, exactly like my interrogator, they lived in a grimy fantasy-land in which paedophiles actually advertise their presence – in this case by a brass plaque. What exactly can be done about such comically tragic and brutal ignorance? Well, for one thing, I suggest we do not pander to it.

I went to take photographs of the Royal Pavilion, then I returned to the pier. Soon the students who were in the charge of myself and the other staff began to assemble for the journey home. I told one of my colleagues about my little adventure, and he was as outraged as I was:

"What, you can't even go on a holiday trip to a beach and take pictures anymore?"

It was a relief to be back amongst people who do not live in a fantasy world of suspicion. People who accept me as a person, too – innocent until proved guilty. These people are not angels. They are just normal people, with an average amount of human decency, but they do not live in a fantasy-land of pornographic paranoia. My students were lively and chatty. One of them, who was to be leaving the next day, asked if she could have a souvenir photograph with me. I was very happy to oblige. Later another student threw his arms around me and said goodbye.

Writing in New York in the year 2000, in the essay to which I have provided a link, Momus says:

"Because I'm Brutish, I've been trained to expect people to hate the freedoms I habitually grab, and to try to take them away from me. Here I am in a country (well, a city) where people are actually encouraging them. I'm in a country — a city — where people think human nature is essentially good and that creativity and experimentation should be encouraged. I'm in a country (okay, a city) where people are confident enough to play."

I repent now of my complaints about my teenage students and my thoughts about their lack of respect. They have had enough respect to treat me as a human being. That is quite enough for me, and quite enough now to move me, not because it is extraordinary, but because it is normal.