Frank Gardner, the BBC‘s security correspondent, strikes me as a great hero of our time, not only for the courage he has shown since six al-Qaeda bullets left him partially paralysed in 2004, but also for the clarity and intelligence he has always brought to his reporting.
At the Aldeburgh literary festival a few years ago, I watched him talking and joking with John McCarthy, who was held hostage in Beirut for five years. I came away feeling that the two of them personified Hemingway’s definition of courage as ‘grace under pressure’.
Four years ago, Gardner was being filmed for a documentary. In one memorable sequence, he was due in the studio in a few minutes, sitting in a wheelchair, waiting for a lift to come.
When the lift arrived, it turned out to be full. Not one of the able-bodied occupants offered to let him take their place, even though, unlike him, they could easily have walked up the stairs. The next lift was also full and, once again, no one bothered to make room for him. By now, he was worried that he would be late for his live slot, so he had to wheel himself through the newsroom to try to catch another lift.
In an interview this weekend, Gardner was asked if, after seeing themselves in the documentary, any of his lift-hogging colleagues had apologised. ‘No,’ came his reply.
Frank Gardner, the BBC’s security correspondent, was paralysed by six al-Qaeda bullets in 2004
When we hear about this sort of inconsiderate behaviour, our immediate response is to tut-tut. No, we think, I would never behave like that; I would have leapt out of the lift and offered Frank my place.
But is this really true? Lifts are strange places, with their own ecosystem of human behaviour.
Perhaps because they are so cramped and enclosed, and carry a hint of jeopardy, lifts have an inhibiting social effect on those who ride in them. It is as though their occupants are holding their breath, fearful to embarrass themselves by stepping out of line.
If a stranger joins you in a lift, you might offer a furtive half-smile to one another, but anything more would be considered intrusive, even creepy. No one talks in a lift if they can possibly help it.
When you enter a lift and two people are already chatting, you have to signal you’re not eavesdropping by either looking down at your shoes or up at the panel that signals the next floor. Oddly enough, the two people will immediately start talking in hushed voices.
Especially awkward, I find, are those occasions when you are chatting to a friend just as the lift arrives. The doors open to reveal four or five inhabitants, all silent, and staring straight ahead.
Do you carry on talking to your friend or do you shut up? In my experience, you shut up, and stay as quiet as church mice while the lift travels between floors.
The moment the doors open and you are released back on solid ground, you continue your conversation as though nothing has happened.
In a lift, privacy is all: everyone retreats into their shell. We isolate ourselves from our fellow passengers. And I think this is why, had I been in that BBC lift, I suspect I would have kept staring into space, leaving poor Frank Gardner stranded.
T o allow Frank and his wheelchair sufficient space, three occupants would have had to have taken the snap decision to do the right thing. One bold occupant would have had to say to the others: ‘Look, if three of us were to use the stairs, Frank could take our place.’
But the protocol of lift-riding — buttoned-up, private — militates against such collective morality. Had they been given five minutes, everyone would probably have made the right decision. But lift doors stay open briefly and, in those few seconds, every man is an island in a sea of indecision.
There are, of course, souls bold and decisive enough to take a moral action in an instant, despite social inhibition. I’m prone to embarrassment, so I fear I am not one of them. Very few are. But I can think of one; and, oddly enough, that is Frank Gardner.