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taking their kids in a car with a stranger – but the geezer genuinely wanted to help and there was a different mentality in those days. I’m not saying there weren’t evil fuckers about, because there were, but everyone wasn’t so primed by the media always to be thinking about the worst thing that could possibly happen. We didn’t have that same fear factor we do now everyone’s got Sky News.
    In my memory, that change in people’s thinking wasn’t something that happened gradually. It happened more or less overnight when everyone found out about the Moors Murders. I’m not saying children hadn’t been taken away and killed before, but it wasn’t something people ever really thought about until Brady and Hindley put it in their heads. In a way, taking away that freedom for parents and children to live without fear was another crime that they committed. Even though it happened all the way up north in the hills outside Manchester, it was such a horrific case and it scared everyone so much that it might as well have happened just up the road. When we got up the next morning after it had been on the news, the streetsof East London were empty. A lot of the old freedoms that we used to enjoy had gone out of the window overnight. I must have been eight at the time.
    It was a dangerous old road, that one out to Southend. The third – and most dramatic – of the incidents I remember from those drives was the time we drove past a big car crash. There were police everywhere, and as we approached what appeared to be a fair amount of carnage, my mum said, ‘Don’t look.’ Obviously that’s the worst thing you can say to a kid – it’s right up there with ‘Never play with matches’. So by the time we drew level with the scene of the accident, Laura and I both had our faces glued to the window.
    I’ve never forgotten what happened next. Things kind of went into slow motion, as they always seem to at moments of crisis. I suppose it’s your body’s way of protecting you – the adrenaline speeds up your brain, so whatever else is happening seems to slow down in comparison, which (in theory at least) gives you more time to respond. That’s why when we’ve seen something really horrible, we usually remember every unfolding detail, because it’s like we’ve recorded it so fast that when we try to play it back at normal speed it comes to us in slow motion. Anyway, as we drove past the wrecked car, the back door swung open and a body fell out. I hoped she wasn’t dead, but the absent look in that woman’s eyes has stayed with me ever since, and there was someone else in the car who looked in a bad way too.
    As I’m describing this, I’m realising that it sounds quite like the car-crash sequence in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, and probably loads of other films as well. When something shocking’s happened to someone and they say it was ‘like being in a film’, they usually mean it was out of the ordinary. But the reason things happen the way they do on the screen is because a lot of people have got together anddone their best to create the illusion of what it actually would be like. So it’s no wonder we use those kinds of scenes as a way of understanding reality and distancing ourselves from it at the same time.
    I’ve had similar experiences several times since, of being a witness to really bad things happening. I’m not saying I see dead people like the little boy in The Sixth Sense (although I did look a bit like him as a kid), but knowing what death is does change you as a person. And I can understand what they say about people who see a lot of it – whether they be soldiers or doctors, policemen or undertakers – finding that their emotional responses start to close down. We use the word ‘deadened’ for a reason.
    It’s the same with me and violence, which I’ve seen a fair amount of over the years. I’ve never liked it – and I’ve liked it less and less as I’ve grown older – but it