Running Wild

Running Wild Adam Phillips J. G. Ballard ???? HarperCollins J. G. BALLARD Running Wild Copyright (#ulink_ebfd3b46-b53a-5e07-b71d-1159ef977325) Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77?85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB www.harpercollins.co.uk. (http://4thestate.co.uk/) First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson in 1988 Copyright ? J. G. Ballard 1988 The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. Introduction ? Adam Phillips 2014 Interview ? Vanora Bennett 2008 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author?s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. 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Cover by Stanley Donwood, with background colours partly formed from combustion of ammonium dichromate carried out by Dr Roy Lowry at Plymouth University; photographed by Anna Walker Source ISBN: 9780006548195 Ebook Edition ? OCTOBER 2014 ISBN: 9780008120269 Version: 2014-11-19 Contents Cover (#u7d577d41-4dd7-5d55-a9c5-9faa7b127e08) Title Page (#uce6ad1d9-4bd0-57c6-a806-8adf0b3c2a39) Copyright (#ulink_c4807807-b2ee-56d6-95f7-fb440c935d60) Introduction by Adam Phillips (#ulink_600e1d00-4da9-590e-b3f0-a8df685f62f6) From the Forensic Diaries of Dr Richard Greville, Deputy Psychiatric Adviser, Metropolitan Police (#ulink_957447dc-1012-5951-af25-574eb23d3cc3) Postscript, 8 December 1993 (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Interview with J. G. Ballard (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Introduction (#ulink_ee350150-6b2a-5271-9ff7-aab8f6013fca) by Adam Phillips ?I don?t think I?m allowed to forget Heart of Darkness. If the phone rings, it?ll probably be Joseph Conrad, saying, ?Mr Ballard, you stole it all from me.?? J. G. Ballard, The Hardcore 8, 1992 In an interview given in 1988, the year Running Wild was published, Ballard said that despite the variousness of his books he was still mostly thought of as a science-fiction writer: The reason is, of course, that I take a hard, cruel look at the everyday reality around me in Western Europe and the United States, and I see science and technology playing an enormous part in creating the landscape of our lives and imaginations ? As a writer I?ve always had complete faith in my own obsessions. It seems to me that the obsessional approach to life is very much the way in which the twentieth century conducts its business. He is called a science-fiction writer because he takes ?a hard, cruel look at the everyday reality? around him. And he sees science and technology ?creating? our internal and external worlds. What makes a writer of science fiction ? or, indeed, a writer, like Ballard, of utopias and dystopias, of satires and farces ? is a certain way of looking at ordinary contemporary life. And it may seem cruel because it exposes what the everyday tries to conceal, and it is hard because it is unyieldingly unenchanted, and undistracted by what it sees. One of Ballard?s obsessions was just how dystopian utopias always are, as the twentieth century made abundantly clear. Ballard?s heroes and heroines often have the idealistic monomania of Conrad?s Mr Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. They are people who want something so much that they forget all the other things they might want. And, indeed, all the things other people might want. It is the incredible cruelty people are capable of in realising their dreams and ambitions that haunts Ballard?s extraordinary fictions. Ballard?s look is cruel because of the cruelty he sees in everyday contemporary life. What he describes in Running Wild is the hard cruelty of parents being unduly kind and understanding to their children, parenting being one of the commoner ways people attempt to realise their dreams and ambitions. And how this particular hard cruelty ? what Ballard calls ?the regime of kindness and care which was launched with the best of intentions? ? gave birth to its ?children of revenge? (it gives nothing away ? because Running Wild is determinedly not that kind of mystery story ? to say at the outset that this is a book about a group of children who kill their parents). The phrase, as always with Ballard, whose verbal subtlety is often preternatural, is ambiguous. It makes us wonder what kind of revenge the parents in this terrifying novel may have been taking by treating their children with this particular kindness and care that is itself a regime? And why it might be that the children want to take their revenge? Why has revenge become the issue? If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, what kind of intentions should we have? Regimes are one of Ballard?s preoccupations, as they are for everyone (the retrospective question is always, what did I consent to, and what did I have to submit to, as a child, that I didn?t actually agree with?). Ballard grew up in Shanghai during the Second World War, spending nearly three years, as a young boy, in an internment camp. ?Anyone who has experienced a war first-hand?, Ballard said, ?knows that it completely overturns every conventional idea of what makes up day-to-day reality. You never feel quite the same again. It?s like walking away from a plane crash.? There is always an eerie sense in Ballard?s fiction of disasters waiting to happen, ironically because his characters are usually living in the aftermath of a disaster that has already happened. Ballard?s characters live in a world of after-effects, of a foreboding that somehow connects the past with the future (once you have been in a plane crash you half expect the next plane to crash). And Ballard?s account cannot help but make us wonder what it is like to experience a (world) war, that we experience at second- or third-hand. What the effect might be on us of the wars that came before us, and of the contemporary wars that we live through in the media, the technology that Ballard believes has also changed everything? The children in Running Wild ? children of the 1980s, but compared in various parts of the novel with, among others, the Baader-Meinhof Group, the Viet Cong and the children of the House of Atreus ? are trying to walk away from the plane crash that was the extraordinary wealth and comfort that some people acquired in Thatcher?s England, so soon after the previous plane crash of two devastating world wars. The parents of these children are types we have become all too familiar with ? merchant bankers, stockbrokers, private doctors, entertainers, psychiatrists, media executives, company directors; all referred to in this book as ?the miscreant super-rich? (?miscreant? meaning also a heretic, an infidel, and so asking us to ask what the rich should be true to, or believe in?). They live in gated communities, which are themselves a sign of threat, however undefined (a contradiction that Ballard would write about with such percipience in Super-Cannes). Surveillance ? what the narrator calls, in a memorable phrase, ?surveillance of the heart? ? security and order are everywhere, continual, casual reminders of disarray and danger in the offing (the ?community? in Running Wild is described as ?a warm, friendly, junior Alcatraz?). It is not merely, as Ballard both hints and insists, with his strange mixture of vision and bafflement, that the ways we protect ourselves sustain our dread; that our efforts to forget about our vulnerability make it more daunting. It is that we provoke the nightmares we fear, as if to get them over with. Or as if there is something implacably self-destructive about the way we live now. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Ballard?s work, apparently straight-faced, as concerning ?Eros, Thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies?. So much the better. The Life Instinct, the Death Instinct, and Technology. What seems finally to prompt the children to ?massacre? their parents is the significant fact that a BBC2 documentary is about to be made about their perfect community. The children use the technology they have to coordinate their attack. Propaganda and terrorism: the terrorists using the weapons of their oppressors. All this is a familiar story by now, but not quite so familiar by then. ?Madness as a way of finding freedom?, the narrator suggests. Freedom, then, is still a value. But the children seem to use their new-found freedom, as it turns out ? and Ballard leaves this just about uncertain ? for further terrorist acts. They make an assassination attempt on Margaret Thatcher, who is never named but referred to as a ?former prime minister?, now sometimes known as ?the mother of her nation? or ?Mother England?. Another parent who knows best, another person who knows how we should live. The parents in the appropriately chosen Pangbourne Village ? all the names in Running Wild are there to be noted, not least Reading and the Reading police, about whom we read so much in this book ? look after their children with assiduous love and care, and the children murder them all. This is at once some kind of joke, because Ballard is, like Swift, a kind of comic writer ? the narrator clearly relishes the irony, so to speak, of it all ? and some kind of prophetic warning (we don?t always know when Ballard is being arch because he so determinedly avoids being portentous: Ballard?s seriousness always has a strange lightness). It is always important in Ballard?s novels that we never quite know where the narrator stands; we know more about his suspicions than about what, if anything, he could be said to believe in. And this is what makes Ballard?s writing, and particularly perhaps Running Wild, so timely. Because Ballard is writing in the ruins left by those people who knew, and know, all too exactly what they believed and where they stood, the fascists, the communists, the born-again capitalists, whom he pointedly refers to, in shorthand, as ?the way in which the twentieth century conducts its business?; the business that ran ? and is still running ? wild. It is, of course, not news that the solutions to the problems of the twentieth century ? ?the way in which the twentieth century conducts its business? ? have indeed run wild. What is news, in Running Wild, is the way in which solutions can be so much worse than the problems they are attempting to solve. And how the official explanations, and the solutions to which they lead, all too easily sound like more of the problem. And in this sense Running Wild is a spoof detective novel; the hero who solves the crime, in the tradition of Poe?s Dupin and Conan Doyle?s Sherlock Holmes, is an unofficial detective, a ?dangerous maverick?. He solves the crime with the kind of understanding we are led to believe a policeman or an everyday detective could never have. Indeed who did what to whom in this novel seems clear, though quite why it was done is not. The crime seems to be virtually solved very early on, and the book ends with the kind of comprehensive explanation we are familiar with from Poe and Conan Doyle (Running Wild is calculatedly not a whodunit, but asks instead the less simply blaming question, for what good reasons would anyone do such a thing? It is a mystery to be thought about, not merely a problem to be solved). The only difference is that in this case the complete explanation is given in the context of a novel that is above all suspicious of the Great Explainers (the Nazis, Margaret Mead, Margaret Thatcher, Piaget, psychiatry and antipsychiatry, Stalin?s Russia, not to mention Animal Farm and Citizen Kane, among others, are all referred to or alluded to, in this deliberately and excessively allusive book, for a good reason, and for good reasons). The parents of the murderous children were also great explainers and understanders of and to their children. So if Running Wild is also, as it were, a (faux-)child-rearing manual, its counsel is peculiarly unsettling. If you are not willing to leave your children alone and guard their privacy, and to offer them your very conditional love, they will take their revenge. When rebellion is discouraged, (violent) revolution is encouraged. When all needs are supposedly met, more monstrous needs will emerge. The children ?murdered the parents and other adults who stood in their way? because they were never willing to properly stand in the way. These children, the psychiatrist-narrator is clear, wanted something realer than love, care and understanding. ?What they were rebelling against was a despotism of kindness. They killed to free themselves from a tyranny of love and care.? There are things that might matter more than the things we think matter most. Utopias are the folly of the omniscient, tyrannical promises that create the very thing they fear. Tyrannies might be the real problem, and they can take many forms ? kindness and cruelty, understanding and determined ignorance, explanation and prejudice. Vice is virtue running wild. So Running Wild, like all Ballard?s fiction, is never trite, but it satirises the tyranny of the trite (it isn?t saying, ?learn to say no to your children?, or, ?we need strong fathers?; it says, ?be careful of how you wish?). Running Wild is obsessed by explanations because it is obsessed by our wish to believe, and how wild it makes us. And it is obsessed by how we go about believing our wishes. ?A lot of my fiction is cautionary,? Ballard has said, ?it deals with possible end points or trends.? Running Wild is one of Ballard?s very best cautionary tales, a virtual documentary of the trends and end points we are now having to live with. London, 2014 From the Forensic Diaries of Dr Richard Greville, Deputy Psychiatric Adviser, Metropolitan Police (#ulink_662f4ebf-ebc4-5547-8172-9d941c18bcbb) 25 August 1988. Where to start? So much has been written about the Pangbourne Massacre, as it is now known in the popular press throughout the world, that I find it difficult to see this tragic event with a clear eye. In the past two months there have been so many television programmes about the thirty-two murdered residents of this exclusive estate to the west of London, and so much speculation about the abduction of their thirteen children, that there scarcely seems room for even a single fresh hypothesis. However, as the Permanent Secretary impressed upon me at the Home Office this morning, virtually nothing is known about the motives and identity of the assassins. ?I say ?assassins?, Doctor Greville, but there may have been only one of them. I?m told that some sort of martial arts fanatic could have got away with it.? Sitting beneath the portrait of his more illustrious predecessor, he gestured gloomily. ?And as for the whereabouts of the orphaned children ? they?ve vanished through some window in time and space. Not a ransom demand, or even a simple threat to kill them ?? He sounded almost aggrieved, and I commented: ?All the same, I think we should assume that they?re still alive.? ?Should we? To be honest, Doctor, I?d rather you didn?t assume anything. That?s why I?ve asked you here.? He stared at me without hope, already regretting the decision. As we both well knew, the fact that I had been called in by the Home Office, after my unpopular minority report on the Hungerford killings, was less a compliment to me than a comment on the failure of the police, the CID and the intelligence services to come up with even a solitary clue to the sources of this horrific crime. As baffled as the Permanent Secretary, I could only think of asking his permission to visit the murder site at Pangbourne Village. The luxury housing estate was still sealed off from the press and public, but had been tramped over by an army of heavy-footed investigators. I waited as he scribbled my laissez-passer, my arms burdened by two Home Office briefcases loaded with their probably useless files. Then I remembered the comfortable seats of the viewing theatre in the Whitehall basement, and as an afterthought asked if I could see the police video recorded at Pangbourne within a few hours of the crime. ?The police video? All right, but it?s pretty grim stuff. Though after Hungerford, I dare say you have the stomach for this sort of thing, Doctor ?? Irritated by his tone, I almost declined. The senior people at both the Home Office and Scotland Yard regarded me as a dangerous maverick, overly prone to lateral thinking and liable to come up with one embarrassing discovery after another. Later, looking back as I revise these diaries for publication, I realize that it was there, in the deserted viewing theatre, that I was given my first glimpse into the real causes of the Pangbourne Massacre. If I failed to recognize what I saw, and if over the course of my investigation I seem unduly slow to identify the culprits, I can only plead that what now appears self-evident scarcely seemed so at the time. My failure to recognize the obvious, in common with almost everyone else concerned, is a measure of the true mystery of the Pangbourne Massacre. The Police Video Like millions of other television viewers, I had already seen selected extracts from the film in numerous documentaries about the massacre, and I hardly expected any sudden revelation. But as I relaxed in the viewing theatre, I soon realized what a remarkable film this was, and how well it conveyed the curious atmosphere of Pangbourne Village ? in its elegant and civilized way a scene-of-the-crime waiting for its murder. The twenty-eight-minute film was taken by officers of Reading CID soon after eleven o?clock on the morning of 25 June 1988, some three hours after the murders. Thankfully, there is no sound-track, and one is glad that none is necessary, unlike the TV programmes with their hectoring commentaries full of lurid speculation. This minimalist style of camera-work exactly suits the subject matter, the shadowless summer sunlight and the almost blank fa?ades of the expensive houses ? everything is strangely blanched, drained of all emotion, and one seems to be visiting a set of laboratories in a high-tech science park where no human operatives are employed. The film opens by the gatehouse that controlled access to the ten mansions, the recreation club and gymnasium that made up the estate. The medallion of the private security firm is visible beside the visitors? microphone, but there is no sign of the uniformed security guard who usually sat at the window. The camera turns to show the delivery van of the local wine-merchants which the police have parked among the ornamental trees on the grass verge. The driver, a pallid young man in his early twenties, is staring in a despondent way at the deep ruts left in the finely trimmed grass, as if the costs of restoring this once-immaculate surface will have to be met from his wages. It was he who gave the alarm, after discovering the first of the bodies as he delivered a case of white burgundy to the Garfield house (No. 3, The Avenue). The camera fixes on him, and like a badly trained actor he steps forward to the gatehouse, a tic jumping across his sallow cheek. He points to the door, and a uniformed constable opens the armoured glass panel to reveal the interior of the office. A security guard is lying on the floor below the row of television monitors, their screens a blizzard of snow. Someone has cut the cable running from the surveillance cameras mounted all over the estate, but clearly officer Turner had no time to reach for the telephone whose scissored cord hangs from the desk above his head. Arms pinioned, he lies within a bizarre contraption of rope and bamboo sticks, his neck gripped by a pair of spring-loaded steel calipers, as if in his bored moments he had been constructing a box-kite for one of the pampered children of the estate and had been trapped inside it. In fact, as I can see from the livid contusions on his throat, he has strangled himself after blundering into this lethal cat?s cradle which his murderer dropped over his shoulders, its double nooses tightening around his neck as he struggled to free his arms and legs. The camera leaves the gatehouse and sets off along The Avenue, the tree-lined central drive of the estate. The handsome mansions sit above their ample front lawns, separated from each other by screens of ornamental shrubs and dry-stone walls. The light is flat but remarkably even, a consequence of the generous zoning densities (approx. two acres per house) and the absence of those cheap silver firs which cast their bleak shadows across the mock-Tudor fa?ades of so many executive estates in the Thames Valley. As well, though, there is an antiseptic quality about Pangbourne Village, as if these company directors, financiers and television tycoons have succeeded in ridding their private Parnassus of every strain of dirt and untidiness. Here, even the drifting leaves look as if they have too much freedom. Thirteen children once lived in these houses, but it is hard to visualize them at play. For once, unhappily, the pale green slopes of Parnassus are marked with a darker dye. The police camera turns to examine the Garfield family?s Mercedes in the driveway of No. 3. Roger Garfield, a merchant banker in his mid-fifties, sits in the rear seat, head leaning against the off-side stereo speaker as if to catch some fleeting grace-note. He is a large-chested man with a well-lunched midriff and strong legs that have spent agonizing hours on an exercise cycle. He has been shot twice through the chest with a small-calibre handgun. Almost as surprising, he is wearing no trousers, and bloodstained footprints emerging from the house indicate that he was shot while dressing after his morning shower. He somehow managed to walk downstairs and took refuge in his car. Perhaps his clouding mind still assumed that he would be driven to his office in the City of London. But the Mercedes was going nowhere. Garfield?s chauffeur had been shot dead a few moments after his employer. A white-haired man in a black uniform, Mr Poole lies face down in the bed of orange-tipped cannas beside the front door, cap still held in his right hand. The camera pauses over him and then enters the house, following the bloody footprints through the open door. Garfield and his wife had made numerous trips to Hong Kong, and the rooms are filled with pieces of chinoiserie ? large porcelain vases stand on the blackwood furniture, and there are pairs of Ming horses and jade figurines. Surprisingly, none have been disturbed, suggesting that the murderers had approached their victims without surprise. The housekeeper, Mrs West, lies shot below the marble mantelpiece in the drawing-room, interrupted while doing her dusting. In an upstairs bathroom the camera finds Mrs Garfield, a handsome woman in her late forties, slumped against the glass door of the shower stall, her yellow toothbrush still in her hand. All trace of the Garfields? sixteen-year-old son, Alexander, had vanished. His bedroom, study and bathroom were undisturbed. Only in his mother?s blood flowing across the bathroom tiles could be seen the smeared prints of Alexander?s rubber-cleated shoes, left behind as he was seized and swept away by his abductors. The police video continues on its grim and matter-of-fact way. The camera leaves Garfield seated in his Mercedes and gazes across the tranquil lawns at the next macabre tableau. As the two constables outside the Reade house (No. 1, The Avenue), step back from the colonnaded porch, the camera reveals the lavish interior of the property tycoon?s home, so filled with French furniture and objets d?art that it resembles one of the larger rooms at the Wallace Collection. Yet not a glass cabinet has been rifled, not a S?vres plate shattered, not an ormolu clock toppled from its pedestal. Indeed, Mr and Mrs Reade sit at their breakfast table in the dining-room, lying back in their chairs at opposite ends of the lacquered oblong as if momentarily overwhelmed by the calm and richness of the life they have arranged for themselves. Both have been efficiently shot by assailants who have crept so close to them that the cutlery beside their napkins is undisturbed. Only the place settings of the Reades? daughters, Annabel and Gail, have been scattered to the floor as these orphaned children made a desperate attempt to resist their kidnappers. The camera resumes its melancholy tour. By the time it reaches the third house, the Gropius-inspired home of a distinguished concert pianist, the sequence of entrances, deaths and exits begins to resemble a nightmare exhibition that will never end. House by house, the assassins had moved swiftly through the estate on that quiet June morning, killing the owners, their chauffeurs and servants, before abducting the thirteen children. Husbands and wives were shot down across their still-warm beds, stabbed in their shower stalls, electrocuted in their baths or crushed against their garage doors by their own cars. In a period generally agreed to be no more than twenty minutes some thirty-two people were savagely but efficiently done to death. However, as the film ended, with a visit to the perimeter guard post where the second security officer had been killed by a single bolt from a crossbow, I was struck by the way in which Pangbourne Village remained aloof from this day of death. The owners of these elegant houses had been dispatched with the least damage to the fabric of their homes, as if the fa?ades of professional and upper-middle-class life were their most solid and lasting substance. Indifferent to the lives, and deaths, negotiated within its walls, Pangbourne Village would endure. Once the mystery of this mass-murder and kidnapping had been solved, a seemingly impossible task with which I had now been charged, a new cast of tenants would soon be recruited to fill these calm drawing-rooms. For some reason, as I left the viewing theatre and stepped into the traffic-filled clamour of a Whitehall evening, I gave a small shudder for those new arrivals. Pangbourne Village Having exhausted my central nervous system with the police video, I returned to my office at the Institute of Psychiatry and tried to calm myself by looking at the origins and creation of Pangbourne Village. The small Berkshire town of Pangbourne lies five miles to the north-west of Reading and approximately thirty miles to the west of London. Despite its title, the Pangbourne Village estate was not built near the site of any former or existing village. Like the numerous executive housing estates built in the 1980s in areas of deregulated farmland between Reading and the River Thames, Pangbourne Village has no connections, social, historical or civic, with Pangbourne itself. The chief attraction for Camelot Holdings Ltd, the architects and property developers, was the proximity of the M4 motorway, and the ready access it offers to Heathrow Airport and central London, an ease of access that might well have benefited the assassins and kidnappers. All the residents of Pangbourne Village worked either in central London or in the silicon valley of high-technology computer firms along the M4 corridor. Pangbourne Village is only the newest (completed 1985) and most expensive (the ten houses, all with swimming pools, projection theatres and optional stables, each sold for approx. ?590,000) of a number of similar estates in Berkshire which house thousands of senior professionals ? lawyers, stockbrokers, bankers ? and their families. Secure behind their high walls and surveillance cameras, these estates in effect constitute a chain of closed communities whose lifelines run directly along the M4 to the offices and consulting rooms, restaurants and private clinics of central London. They remain completely apart from their local communities, except for a small and carefully selected under-class of chauffeurs, housekeepers and gardeners who maintain the estates in their pristine condition. Their children mix only with each other at exclusive fee-paying schools or in the lavishly equipped sports clubs sited on the estates. Pangbourne Village is remarkable only for having advanced these general trends towards almost total self-sufficiency. The entire estate, covering some thirty-two acres, is ringed by a steel-mesh fence fitted with electrical alarms, and until the tragic murders was regularly patrolled by guard-dogs and radio-equipped handlers. Entry to the estate was by appointment only, and the avenues and drives were swept by remote-controlled TV cameras. All police officers concerned in the investigation agree that the penetration of these defences by a large group of assassins was a remarkable and, as yet, inexplicable event. The Residents I turned to the list of victims, going through the detailed dossiers that the Special Branch had compiled, in the hope that the identities of the murdered residents might suggest some elusive clue. The sets of photographs, entries from Who?s Who, the photostats of birth and marriage certificates, share portfolios and bank statements, academic qualifications and honorary degrees passed between my hands, the records of gifted lives so brutally ended. 1?The Avenue. Julian Reade, 43, chairman, Reade Investments. Dr Miriam Reade, 41, ear, nose and throat specialist, Wimpole Street. Shot. 2 daughters: Annabel, 16, and Gail, 15. 2?The Avenue. Charles Ogilvy, 47, Lloyds underwriter; hon. secretary, Pangbourne Polo Club. Margaret Ogilvy, 42. Shot. 1 son: Jasper, 17. 3?The Avenue. Roger Garfield, 52, merchant banker. Helen Garfield, 47, proprietor, Pedigree Kennels, Windsor. Shot. 1 son: Alexander, 16. 4?The Avenue. David Miller, 49, stockbroker, Elizabeth Miller, 46. Electrocuted. 1 son: Robin, 13. 1 daughter: Marion, 8. 5?The Avenue. Dr Harold Maxted, 54, psychiatrist, Harley Street. Dr Edwina Maxted, 48, psychiatrist, High Street, Kensington. Crushed by car. 1 son: Jeremy, 17. 6? The Avenue. Margot Winterton, 48, concert pianist. Richard Winterton, 57, director, Winterton Arrangements Ltd. Shot. No children. 1?The Hill. Richard Sterling, 49, chief executive, EduCable, Oxford-area TV franchise. Carole Sterling, 42, former ITN newsreader. Suffocated. 1 son: Roger, 15. 2?The Hill. Andrew Lymington, 38, chairman, Leisure Marine Ltd. Ex-racing driver, 1982 Western Australia powerboat champion. Sheila Lymington, 37, former professional ice-dance skater. Shot. 1 son: Graham, 15. 1 daughter: Amanda, 14. 3?The Hill. Ernest Sanger, 57, chairman, Sanger Finance. Proprietor, Windsor World Theme Park, Slough. Deirdre Sanger, 54, managing director, She-She Fashions, Brent Cross. Shot. 1 son: Mark, 16. 4?The Hill. Graham Zest, 46, chairman, Zest Health Foods. Beverly Zest, 42, company secretary, Zest Health Foods. Shot with crossbow. 1 son: Andrew, 16. 1 daughter: Emma, 15. The most careful research into the backgrounds of these murdered men and women has failed to reveal any common factor that might prompt a wholesale attack. The responsible character of the parents and the generous quality of family life have been reconstructed from the abundant testimony of those domestic servants who fortunately were absent on 25 June (a Saturday, and their day off for most of the staff). All testify that the murder victims were enlightened and loving parents, who shared liberal and humane values which they displayed almost to a fault. The children attended exclusive private day-schools near Reading, and their successful academic records reveal a complete absence of stress in their home lives. The parents (all of whom, untypically for their professional class, seem to have objected to boarding schools) devoted long hours to their offspring, even to the extent of sacrificing their own social lives. They joined the children in various activities at the recreation club, organized discotheques and bridge contests in which they took full part, and in the best sense were guiding their sons and daughters towards fulfilled and happy lives when they themselves were cut down so tragically. The Murdered Staff In addition to the residents of the ten houses, the following members of staff were also killed. Mrs Margaret West, Mrs Jane Mercier, Miss Iris Neame, housekeepers. John Collis, David Taylor, James Poole, chauffeurs. Krystal Werther, Olga Norden, au pairs. Arnold Wentworth, David Lodge, tutors. George Burnett, David Turner, security guards. All investigation into the Pangbourne Massacre confirms that not a single adult present in the estate on the morning of 25 June survived the murderous half-hour which began at approximately 8.23 a.m. The Missing Children I looked at the photographs of the thirteen children, a group of thoughtful and pleasant adolescents smiling out of their school speech-day portraits and holiday snapshots. All attempts to trace their whereabouts have failed, despite computerized searches of their dental records, blood groups and medical histories. Four of the thirteen were on courses of prescribed drugs (for hay-fever, asthma and tinnitus), five were receiving orthodontic treatment, and one was under nominal psychiatric care (Jeremy Maxted, seventeen, for bedwetting). Despite what was clearly over-zealous prescription by their physicians, the latter willingly confirmed that the thirteen children were well-nourished and enjoyed robust good health. ??? ???????? ?????. ??? ?????? ?? ?????. ????? ?? ??? ????, ??? ??? ????? ??? (https://www.litres.ru/adam-phillips/running-wild/?lfrom=688855901) ? ???. ????? ???? ??? ??? ????? ??? Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, ? ??? ????? ????, ? ????? ?????, ? ??? ?? ?? ????, ??? PayPal, WebMoney, ???.???, QIWI ????, ????? ???? ?? ??? ???? ?? ????.