Wednesday’s Child: The Originality of Evil
Lucy Letby, Britain’s most accomplished child killer, has now been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The gentle reader remembers how her tale affected me – largely because it seemed to bring down to earth the winged phrase about the banality of evil. There was nothing remotely banal about the story of Nurse Letby, a fresh-faced, soap-and-water girl-next-door murdering newborn after newborn for not the slightest reason, yet otherwise perfectly sane or at any rate sane enough to stand trial for these crimes of hers.
That is the litmus test, it seems to me, for our emotional response to the daily horror story in the newspapers. When I read in the New York Post of the Russian veteran of the rape of Chechnya, who returned from a six-month stint in Ukraine after strangling his girlfriend and putting her body through a meat grinder – with the bones packed away separately – it does nothing for me. Even the subsequent twist in the narrative, namely that the killer has now been pardoned as one who has risked his life on the frontline, does little to make the story any less banal. After all, a ruffian is as a ruffian does. Perhaps only his surname, which tragicomically the ghoulish revenant shares with both Putin’s son-in-law and the president of Ukraine, injects a bit of unusual color into an otherwise monochrome picture of evil.
Compare this with a brand new story dominating the attention of Britons, that of a zoologist arrested in Australia for acts of animal cruelty – he admitted to have tortured to death at least 37 dogs which he had specially acquired for the purpose – and likewise possessed of an evocative name. Adam Britton, a world authority on crocodiles, is also standing trial for multiple counts of bestiality, which the indictment describes as “rape.” The term is then gleefully broadcast by British journalists, though the notion of consensual bestiality, implicit in the use of the term, strikes me as something of an oxymoron. Anyway, gentle reader, say what you will, but do not tell me it’s all par for the course, it’s old hat, you’ve heard it all before, and it just shows how banal evil is.
Still more original is the other story now dominating British papers, that of the mystery malfeasant who took a chainsaw to the centuries-old sycamore overhanging Hadrian’s Wall. Some hundred feet tall, it was known affectionately, among others to countless couples who had made their vows beneath it, as the Sycamore Gap tree. Could it be that the malfeasant had been spurned by a woman, with the consequence that repudiating Socrates on the subject of love in Phaedrus – the dialogue that, if I’m not mistaken, takes place in the shade of a leafy sycamore – was his motive? Doubtful, though, that a student of Plato would know how to use a yard-long chainsaw. They say it was a highly professional cut. But the fact remains that all England is now in mourning.
I daresay The Sycamore Gap is not only anything but banal, it has all the makings of a romantic novelette, a one-act play, perhaps even a modernist opera. At first glance all of it seems as unmotivated as any of Nurse Letby’s homicidal acts, but here, too, my imagination conjures up multiple scenarios by way of explanation. Indeed, what exotic and gorgeous lemurs tarry in the fallen tree’s crown? What original evil incubated in the heart of the postnatal hospital nurse?
Unless, of course, the guy just did it to post it on TikTok.
If it were me, I would just have them all hanged, including the one who sawed down the tree. You do not destroy national treasures. In a sane society he would have been lynched. To hell with all of them.
When I was about twelve I was making my way home after an evening playing with a boy who lived at the center of our village. and so my route took me past the village pub at closing time. Two men in the crowd at the bus-stop were having a fight. Our two village policemen, sergeant Reece and his constable, both massive men well over six feet, walked over to the bus-stop with a kind of stately dignity. Then Sergeant Reece took each man by the scruff of the neck, banged their heads together, and threw them on the ground. “We’ll have none of that here,” said he, and the pair walked away as stately as they came. I was so impressed by this that I told my uncle all about it as soon as I got home. “Not one to put up with that, Reece,” said he. No policeman would be allowed to do that now–but in those days things were more easy-going. They were still flogging some offenders, especially juveniles, using either the birch or the “cat.” The stocks & the pillory, though, definitely needed for the tree-cutter, are long gone.
Is sycamore a good wood from which to fashion stocks & pillory? The enabling law would be a more difficult matter anywhere in the West unless one is a Russian artist who refuses to denounce “Putin”, a heterosexual or a climate change or Holocaust denier.
I think stocks were still used as late as the 1860s, and it’s surprising how many English villages have preserved their stocks, usually on the village green–my ancestral village of Rivington, Lancashire, for instance. I’ve no doubt that even the modern English, left to themselves, would put the tree-cutter in the stocks.