It is not often that you are in the same room as a terrorist killer and the daughter of one of his victims. It is even rarer that you hear them describing each other as friends. Yet this happened in Room 109 of the Palmer Building at Reading University. The daughter was Jo Tufnell, nee Berry, whose father Sir Antony Berry was murdered in an IRA bombing in 1984. The IRA member who placed the bomb was Patrick McGee.
The bomb which killed Jo's father and four other people was a small terrorist outrage by world standards. Far more people are killed by suicide bombers on a regular basis in Iraq. But this bombing in October 1984 was not just any ordinary IRA coup. It was one of the most ambitious terrorist attacks ever before 9/11. It was intended to wipe out the entire British Government. When the Conservative Party, headed by Margaret Thatcher, met in the south coast resort of Brighton for their annual conference, their living accommodation was thoroughly examined in advance by anti-terrorist specialists. The "Troubles" in Northern Ireland had been in top gear for many years already, with numerous explosions on the UK mainland as well. But McGee, the IRA's long time Chief Explosives Officer, had planted a well concealed time bomb in a bathroom wall in the imposing Grand Hotel, overlooking Brighton's seafront, four weeks before the conference. So when the bomb went off Mrs Thatcher and several other senior Government ministers had an incredibly narrow escape.
I was on a long computer course at Brighton College at that time. Normally I stayed at a small hotel on the west side of the town centre. As one of the top seaside resorts in Britain, Brighton usually has a huge choice of affordable accommodation. But that week there was not a room to be had in Brighton for anyone except the Party delegates and the army of media hangers-on. So I ended up in a very good B + B in the smaller seaside resort of Worthing, 10 miles to the west. I drove past the Grand Hotel each morning and evening on my trips to and from the College on the east side of town.
On Friday morning, I packed the car and was about to leave the B + B when I could hear the unbelievable reports coming from the kitchen radio. Driving up to Brighton, I listened to the local BBC Radio Sussex presenter struggling to juggle ten sensational reports simultaneously. Nothing this big had happened in Brighton since they were fortifying the coast against German invasion in 1940. Yet this 1984 foe was an enemy which no amount of conventional weaponry could defeat. The police were stopping cars coming out of town - several weeks too late.
Brighton was in utter chaos, as the Grand Hotel bombing meant that the very busy coast road was closed and all traffic diverted onto inland roads. After an hour struggling through traffic jams, I finally made it to College. The local paper's lunchtime edition, compiled, to judge from the bylines, by every single member of staff, had a full-front page picture of the fine facade of the Grand with a huge crack from top to bottom. They later won a press award for that front page, proving it is an ill wind that blows no good.
The Grand was rebuilt and reopened, security precautions at major political events became ever more paranoid and everyone moved on with their lives, including the bereaved and the survivors, some permanently disabled. The IRA crowed, vis-a-vis Mrs Thatcher's lucky escape: "We have to be lucky only once. You have to be lucky all the time". And now, more than 23 years later, I found myself in the same room as the perpetrator, a thoughtful softly spoken man in late middle age using a walking stick. He could have been a lecturer in English literature at Reading. He's fully qualified for the job, with a PhD in "Troubles Literature" earned during his many years in prison after being convicted of the Brighton bombing.
The small audience, perhaps 100 people, surprised me. I had turned up at this relatively small lecture theatre without advance booking, expecting to be turned away because people were standing on the ceiling. But that bombing is so long ago for most people. Getting on for half the population is too young to remember Brighton and nearly all the students at Reading were born after 1984. But many of them still showed up, appreciating the relevance to present day conflicts.
Obviously for those closely affected it is always October 1984. Jo Berry struggled with her grief while raising her family and continues to grieve to this day. In 1999, in a day out with her children, she had suddenly been consumed by rage and fury at her father's death, all the emotions of 1984 flooding back. She almost crashed the car driving home that evening. She had been hugely helped by a reconcilation group in Ireland. In return she has worked to help others. Jo works with numerous reconciliation groups around the world in places such as Rwanda and Palestine. She is working with a man in Rwanda who lost 35 members of his family, including his mother, in the ethnic massacres of the 1990s. He is about to meet one of the men who murdered his family.
12th February, the day she spoke at Reading University, was her father's birthday. She had visited his grave to lay flowers and spend time with him. She wondered whether to come to speak that evening. I am sure everyone was glad that she had made the sacrifice to come and share her deepest feelings thoughts with us. It was an extraordinarily difficult and tense evening as everyone could sense her emotions and the effort it had taken both her and Patrick to come to their present position as friends. Patrick said that he would never make the first move towards meeting any of the victims of his bombings as this might only exacerbate the suffering of people who did not feel able to face him. It was Jo who had made the move towards meeting him in 2000.
They are still progressing in their relationship; there could never be anything glib or easy about "forgiveness" in such circumstances. They are still widely separated in some attitudes, as she is a staunch pacifist and he accepts the necessity for armed struggle in some instances. The question and answer session was at least as long as their introductory talks. The audience was willing to ask some very searching questions, such as whether the rest of Jo's family shared her approach to forgiving the killer. Her answer was guarded; as far as I understood it, they did not, but respected her integrity. She said she was anxious not to hurt her family more than they had already been injured. One questioner asked Patrick how he came to the point where he was able to take human life and then move back from that point. Patrick said that much of it was down to the paramilitary training, just as regular armies have to desensitise soldiers to killing. A young American student at Reading asked Jo about 9/11 and the "War on Terror". Jo described the work of "Not in our name", the US group of 9/11 victims opposed to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The meeting was organised and sponsored by the small but invaluable Reading University Chaplaincy team as part of a "Forgiveness Fortnight" during Lent. One of the questioners asked Jo about her religious motivation for forgiveness. She was again cagey about discussing her position, saying she was a spiritual person, but believed in human beings and their potential to change. When a woman referred to someone showing "Christian forgiveness", Jo preferred to describe it as human forgiveness.
It is always awkward questioning the bereaved and the pacifist; when the person under interrogation is both, punches tend to be pulled. The logical consequence of unconditional pacifism is that any thug can take over government unopposed. As George Orwell pointed out in WW2 Britain, there was an overlap between the British fascists and the Peace Pledge Union. Of course - both opposed resistance to Hitler and Mussolini...... And people who are dogmatically opposed to violence tend to be far more intolerant than those who believe it is occasionally necessary. So oddly, I find myself much closer to Patrick than Jo. But there is no questioning her dogged devotion and the good fruits it has produced for at least some individuals.
