The family saviour?

This week my mind was brought back to a period in my life to which I do not return often, but has nevertheless left me with some stains, some scars, and yet some moments of growth and awareness that have shaped the rest of my life.

But it is not the troubled, yet ultimately rewarding, growing pains that I went through during late adolescence that I was returned to with a jolt, but rather an episode in which I met face-to-face for the first time someone who’d had a profound impact on our family over the preceding years.

Greville Janner, as he was to us (Baron Janner of Braunstone, as he became when elevated to the peerage, seemed far too remote), had been since the beginning of the 1970s Member of Parliament for Leicester West, the district of that fading but once grand centre for textile, clothing and shoe production where my maternal grandparents had lived for several years—up in New Parks, just across from the Co-op on Aikman Avenue (and to where my mother and I would return many years later, bowed but not defeated by a set of difficult circumstances).

Greville took over the seat over from his father, Barnett, who announced his retirement from the Commons two days before the candidate nominations closed in 1970. His son was chosen in his place and on the basis of his father’s reputation as an excellent MP who cared for his constituents, and in the belief that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, was duly elected to parliament.

At the time, my family (I was yet to be born) were living in Ireland, outside Cork, in a small and somewhat remote village strung along a hillside near the coast. But even there, nestled in gently rolling countryside crisscrossed by unruly hedges, we heard that Janner junior was proving himself to be just as capable an MP as his father, and that his office door was always open, as it were, to constituents who needed his assistance.

A few years later, my own father was working back in England. Gainful employment was scarce in County Cork and it was his only option to earn a crust, although it meant he had to leave his growing family behind for months on end. On one of these jobs, working alone, he fell through an unbeknownst-to-him broken cover and into an angled steel pipe. The resulting injury to his right leg was so bad that he couldn’t walk for six months, and was consequently unable to work.

The company that had employed him wouldn’t respond to his letters asking for some kind of support, some sick pay at the very least. Desperate and with no one to turn to, my grandparents suggest he write to Greville Janner, highlighting that they lived in his constituency, to see if he could do something. It all seemed rather far-fetched, but not only did Janner send a kindly reply to my father, but he leaned on the company until they coughed up full sick pay for the entire time that my dad was unable to work.

That episode, for which we were eternally grateful, cemented Janner’s status in our wider family and he became seen, by me at least, as a semi-mythical saviour, ready to help those in need when they required it most. And he proved himself equal to his knight-in-shining-armour reputation, stepping in on more than one occasion to assist us, even though it was only much later that we moved back into his constituency and were, technically speaking, eligible for his aid.

Fast-forward several years: I am 15 years old and all alone in a remote classroom on the far side of my school. My homework and exercise books are open before me, and I am wondering how I will be able to spend the whole day there, let alone the next two weeks, whiling away the hours in complete silence; expected to work responsibly but with no oversight.

Sunlight streams in through the closed and dusty windows, although the room is perpetually cold. I contemplate walking straight out of the classroom and disappearing for two weeks. But what would I do? Spend my days hanging about in the park? Wander aimlessly around town? I don’t have any money to go shopping, certainly not for two weeks, and all my friends are busy, as I should have been.

I could go to the local library, but what would be the point? It would be same as being at school, in the end. My mother was insistent that I go to school every day, to make a point, but what it meant for me, bored to tears after just a couple of hours sat in empty silence, was apparently of no import.

After a few minutes staring at the windowpanes, I place my hands on the desk, ready to push back my chair to go over to the window. At that precise moment, the door bursts open and in strides a teacher I know remotely (I initially think he is there to check up on me and am disappointed that I cannot have even one second of relaxation without being caught), followed by a surprisingly tall, vigorous man in a brown suit who I recognise instantly: Greville Janner.

The teacher idles by the window, looking guilty, while Janner glances around the room, clearly puzzled.

—Hello. What are you doing in here on your own? (He may have added ‘young man’ on the end, but I cannot recall.)

I can tell our local MP-cum-family saviour is expecting me to recount a tale of teenage mischief and its sorry consequences, and I can see from the expression on the teacher’s face that he is expecting me to say as little as possible and allow him and his important guest to leave as quickly as possible, none the wiser to my situation.

Instead, I take a deep breath and explain that I am supposed to be at a work experience placement with a local factory that makes machined parts for other manufacturers to use in their tools and engines, but I am not allowed to go, even though I really want to. Why not, demands Janner. Because they require that anyone who steps onto the factory floor wear shoes reinforced with steel toe caps and, as my mother and I are living on benefits, we don’t have enough money to buy some, especially not for just two weeks’ work experience.

Janner stares hard at the teacher, before turning to me and saying: “We’ll see about that.”

He smiles at me then stares again at the teacher before announcing that it is time to move on. An hour or so later, a voucher for a pair of reinforced boots is placed on my open exercise books by the same teacher. “Don’t tell anyone about this,” he says seriously. I smile. “Thank you, sir. Of course not, sir.”

My father and I discussed both of these episodes this week, sparked by a broader deliberation over leg injuries and their potentially lifelong consequences. As always when I finish recounting my encounter with Greville Janner, which proved to be his final intervention in our family life, I became melancholic. I remembered that, in the final years of his life, he was discovered to be a paedophile.

I always find it hard to reconcile the fact go him being so good to us, I said, with the idea that he could have that side to him. It doesn’t make sense to me, I continued. I had no inkling at all from our meeting that there was anything untoward about him. Everyone has their secrets, my father said. Yes, but not all of them are as unsavoury as that.

Then, when I was looking into Greville Janner’s life for this piece, I read that his accuser was Carl Beech, a fantasist (and later discovered himself to be a paedophile) who was convicted for falsely accusing Janner and many others, including politicians, military officers and heads of security, and jailed for 18 years; an episode that left a deep stain on the reputation of the London Metropolitan Police.

And now, typing this, I am left confused, torn between my admiration for Greville Janner; the weight of disappointment and guilt I carried with me at not seeing him for his apparently true self; and the revelation that he died a man seemingly maliciously accused of heinous crimes that he never committed.

Perhaps he was who we thought he was all along: a good man who did his best for others in need of the benefit his privileged position afforded him. Of course, I can never return to my previous, teenage state of pure admiration, much as I might want to, but it does underline why we should not take people, and their reputations, at face value, even though we do indeed all have our secrets.