Sometimes the inexplicable simply cannot be explained away

THEY thought she was the bee’s knees, did her parents, and they did their best to make her the cat’s pyjamas, too.

She was sent to elocution classes so that she would talk like an upper class girl. She was pushed to succeed in school, because her parents believed education was the key to every worthwhile thing in life.

Then, when Lynn Barber was 16, on her way home from school one afternoon, a luxurious car – a Bristol – pulled up alongside her and the driver offered her a lift. Despite parental instructions about not talking to strangers, she hopped in. The driver took her home and asked to meet her again. She agreed. In no time at all, this ordinary Twickenham schoolgirl was spending her weekends in London nightclubs, being wined and dined by a man claiming to be in his late 20s. She was 16. He was, in fact, a decade older than he claimed.

The first jolt was that her parents knew about the relationship and didn’t fling themselves in its path. Simon charmed the boots off them. He charmed them out of their judgment and their responsibility.

Their daughter continued to work hard at school, relishing the chance, when her friends asked her to join them at a disco, to announce that it wouldn’t be possible because she’d be spending the weekend in Paris with Simon. She got good enough results to ensure her acceptance at Oxford, as had always been her parents’ dream for her. Around about the same time, Simon proposed to her. She expected her parents to rubbish the very suggestion, since it would prevent her going to Oxford. (What she didn’t know until much later was that he had told them he was going to take her to live in Israel.)

Their reaction floored her. Her father told her Simon was a decent skin and that she shouldn’t mess him around. Her mother said that he’d make a good husband and if Lynn had a good husband, she’d have no need to go to Oxford. Education, their prime preoccupation for as long as she could remember, was abandoned overnight.

Everything she had been brainwashed into believing to be essential to the civilised life, to personal fulfilment, to achievement, went over the side in favour of marriage to a much older man about whom neither her father or mother knew anything other than what he’d chosen to tell them. Lynn was baffled. Let down. Furious. But if circumstances had not intervened, she’d have gone along with what they now wanted – never mind what they had always wanted – abandoning her career at the end of secondary school.

Circumstances took the form of a casual opening of the glove compartment of his posh car. Inside, she found envelopes addressed to him – and his wife. She investigated. He not only had a wife, he had children. He was also a crook who shortly thereafter went to prison. Lynn, in contrast, went to Oxford to read English.

But as she recounts in her autobiography, An Education, the double betrayal changed Lynn Barber’s life. Of her parents’ encouragement to forget about the education they had consistently sold to her, she said that it was akin to spending eight years in a convent only to have the Reverend Mother casually remark that God didn’t exist.

Simon’s betrayal taught her lessons she’s sorry she learned. When I interviewed her in front of an actively involved audience on Friday night as part of Listowel Writers’ Week, she made it clear that the episode had taught her to question, which arguably led to her career as the Demon Barber, a newspaper interviewer who took no prisoners when interrogating and writing about athletes, politicians and other celebs. Less positively, she says, she learned not to trust people. To be too wary, too cautious, too ungiving.

“I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of ‘living a lie’. I came to believe that other people – even when you think you know them well – are ultimately unknowable”.

That’s an inconvenient, indeed a currently unacceptable truth. No matter how bizarre the actions of an individual, the assumption immediately takes hold that, properly investigated and analysed by experts, the incomprehensible can be reduced to Before and After, Cause and Effect and Guilty and Innocent. That assumption has been floridly evident in the aftermath of the massacre in Cumbria, with astonishingly idiotic results. Even yesterday, commentators were announcing – as if it was a) news and b) significant – that the taxi driver who shot 12 people to death in the Lake District “might have selected some of his victims deliberately while shooting others down at random.”

That speculation wasn’t speculation. It was self-evident fact within hours of the murderer’s suicide. So why raise it as a mystery to be solved in due course by brilliant forensic work? One reason is that media never says “You know something? We’ve got nothing to add to what you already know.” In situations where a multiple of people died, media is understandably unwilling to shrug and move on to other stories, although that applies only when the dead people can be identified with by the readers/listeners/viewers. If 12 people had been shot to death by a taxi driver in India, Cambodia or China, it would have been a one-day wonder and nobody would have interpreted it as having wider social significance. But when those killed are ordinary folk in an area close to home, where it’s possible to get photographs of them to stare at, that’s different. And when it’s possible to easily freight reporters and camera carriers into a location, media does precisely that, and then is reluctant to take them out again. So those reporters and camera operators end up making big stories out of a 10-year old-who saw one of the killings and whose future coping skills are unlikely to be helped by being fawned on and queried by total strangers and persuaded to tell his tiny sliver of horror again and again and again.

The eyewitnesses at least made sense, in this instance. The experts, in sharp contrast, made so little sense, you’d have to wonder about their value in the day job. They told us that sibling rivalry can, in a minority of cases, find expression in lethal violence. (That was for those of us who missed the point of Cain and Abel.) They stated that feeling hard done by as a result of a will can tip people over the edge. They opined that when a rage-filled man has two guns at his disposal, the outcome can be tragic.

None of which added one whit to our understanding of the atrocity, which, while it will undoubtedly generate a shelf-full of books and TV programmes, is unlikely to be satisfactorily explained. Ever.

Sometimes the inexplicable can’t be explained. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to surrender the illusion of total control and realise that the world will always throw up exceptions who cannot be intercepted along the way. Sometimes – as Lynn Barber learned – people are ultimately unknowable.