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182 | denis beckett<br />
couldn’t believe it. They’d yell some routine bit of abuse at some<br />
defenceless guy and Steve goes puce and his head shakes and he<br />
talks to himself, muttering that this is a not a place to be, and he<br />
gets up and walks out. No pay, no notice, gone; finish.<br />
Steve was a carpenter on epsom Downs, a fancy block on the<br />
best side of town. He wrote a gem on his workmates building<br />
a place from which they’d be evicted on sight if they showed<br />
their faces when it was running. His bosses discovered that his<br />
“missing” papers did not exist, but he was their best worker so<br />
they said he could stay if he took a pay cut. Steve looked over<br />
the foreman’s shoulder “and there was a guy wheeling a barrow<br />
of cement with his head bent over and it called to mind the<br />
pictures I have seen of egyptian friezes where the slaves did all<br />
the work and I thought: No.” That was Steve all over.<br />
Whatever genius is, Steve has it, like Van Gogh. He paints<br />
like Van Gogh, too, though urban streets and buildings. from<br />
here, he could go anywhere. That’s true of all of us, literally, but<br />
it’s extra-true for him. Will the 21st century write his biography<br />
and divide his career into Blue Periods and cube Periods? Hard<br />
to believe, but look what Van Gogh’s contemporaries believed.<br />
Steve certainly did a lot to make Frontline worthwhile, anyway.<br />
But printers don’t take worthwhiles and nor did the<br />
greengrocer. In february ‘86 I had the obituary written and<br />
photocopied and ready to mail off – pitiful little wail, too –<br />
when andrew Kenny unexpectedly delivered his experiences<br />
as an apprentice engineer in a mill in Lancashire. Lancashire<br />
is 10,000 km from Frontline’s stamping-grounds, but this piece<br />
was brilliant. Plus, full of echoes of Sa issues. The obituary<br />
was held over and my door-knocking knuckle was once again<br />
applied to the advertiser circuit.<br />
One had-to-be-published item made people puke; me, too.<br />
a soldier, from the recces, the terrorist-catchers on the angola<br />
border, told his tale. He did not seek to win friends. This was the<br />
first time that I perceived my nation’s army as not a misguided<br />
place of good intentions, but an instrument of evil. To my<br />
mind, that was the most bannable thing I ever published, and,
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