GOOD GRIEF

Stan Gebler Davies reports

on the aftermath of the ferry disaster

Zeebrugge A DISASTER involving the death of large numbers of human beings is inevitably a messy business and gruesome in detail. It is impossible, for instance, to contemplate the hulk of the Herald of Free Enterprise without the realisation that some 80 corp- ses are entombed within it.

It looks like it. It looks like a tomb, as perhaps in television pictures it looked merely like a broken toy. I suppose this would explain why the many thousand who drove for miles last Sunday to view it, blocking the approaches to Zeebrugge and bringing their children with them for the afternoon's outing, looked quite grey once they had seen it. From the foundered ship to the morgue was only a matter of a few hundred yards, but the Belgians were civil enough to keep well away from it, apart from a few local teenagers lounging on their bicycles. The grief-stricken, or about to be grief- stricken, came and went, and were left in peace insofar as they were capable of peace. Many were not, and wanted to talk. At that point, those of us who were present as reporters became in our humble and in- competent manner useful, in the provision of catharsis. The newspapers would not otherwise have been full of harrowing detail, which was volunteered, and not extracted by guile or subterfuge, as some imagine who think that journalism is a trade akin to espionage and robbery with menaces.

Catharsis, a term originally signifying the purgation of the bowels, is a fair description of the reporting of disaster. When one's child has been snatched away and drowned in icy water, it is a cleansing of the soul to report the fact.

Always, at a disaster, the bereaved want to talk, and must talk. Grief must have its outlet. Be there no priest or minister at hand, or should the grief-stricken happen not to be in communion with God through his vicars on earth, then reporters become the chosen vehicles.

This is bad luck on reporters, who would prefer to be covering, as we say in the trade, some joyful occasion, such as a royal wedding or a peaceful football match. The portable tape-recorder, now about the size of a cigarette-pack, has become the equiva- lent of the confessional, but the man who is wielding it has not had long training at any seminary and is often at a loss for words of comfort.

I know this for a fact because I am often on the receiving end of confessions of grief. Every person who admits to grief is confes- sing sin, most vehemently if the loved person has just suffered death, because they always feel in some way responsible. Rationalists would call this feeling irration- al, but it is not in the least irrational; it is 'I booby-trapped the crock of gold.' God-given catharsis, a necessary purgation of the soul.

A German gentleman approached me outside the Town Hall, which is where you go at the moment if you want to find out if someone you love is lying in the morgue around the corner. He asked me whom I had lost. I had to answer that I had lost no one at all. I felt quite ashamed of my deficiency, as if it were my fault that I could not share his grief.

He said he had probably , lost his son, who was due to take that sailing last Friday, and that the people who were with him had probably lost their daughter, who was his son's girlfriend. I explained that I was a journalist and regretted. that I could not help him. I told him that the people in the City hall would help him.

`I know,' he said. 'Do you know that children never telephone to say they are safe? Maybe they are safe. What do you think?'

`God grant that they are,' said I, or some such pabulum, my eyes now streaming from a mixture of associated grief and a biting east wind.

`Are you sure,' the German asked, before going in to find out if his son was dead, 'that you are all right?'

The Lord knows why we all behave so well when afflicted. I had earlier blundered into the Town Hall, not realising it was off-limits to the press, and was treated with the utmost solicitude by the personnel, who understandably assumed I was one of the bereaved and thought maybe I was slightly deranged because I was taking such a close interest in the exhibition of model fishing-boats contained in glass boxes.

`How may I help you?' at length asked a very kind medical officer.

I explained that I was a journalist.

`Then I cannot help you at all,' he said.

I think I blushed deep scarlet. Most journalists, to do the profession credit, would have done so. I suppose I must have looked like some creep who was intruding on private grief, instead of a mere incom- petent who had walked into the wrong place.

I made the same mistake with the British Army, who had set up camp in the Town- send Thoresen offices, having come to pick up their own dead.

`Awfully sorry,' I said, tut I suppose I shouldn't be here.'

'Quite right,' said the Army. 'Clear off.'

The point I am making is that it is quite easy to intrude into anything at all, and that when it comes to grief, nothing could conceivably be more public. This is as it should be. Nobody wants to cry quietly and alone when there is some shoulder, or better still, collective shoulder, they could cry on. The function of the journalist, in such circumstances, is very like a priest, or a member of the royal family, unsuited though he may be for the role.

Grief must be paraded before it can be dissipated.