The Towns

The argument has towns. Before anything else, say the towns.
Rotherham. Rochdale. Oldham. Telford.
Ordinary towns, ordinary high streets, the middle of England.

In one of them — Rotherham — an inquiry sat, and counted,
and the figure it reached was one thousand four hundred children,
across the years nineteen ninety-seven to twenty thirteen.
Sixteen years. A whole childhood, and four years over.

What was done to those children is set down in the reports,
and it will not be set down again here —
not from delicacy, but from purpose:
this is a play about a country,
and a country does not show itself in the crime —
crime is everywhere, in every country, in every year —
a country shows itself in what happens after the crime is known:
in the meeting, and the minute, and the box left unticked,
in the file stamped no further action, in the word not said.

Eleven years after Rotherham, in twenty twenty-five,
a second inquiry — Baroness Casey, rapid, commissioned,
a hundred and ninety-seven pages — reached for three words
to name what the towns had done to their own daughters:
blindness. ignorance. prejudice.
and said the sentence the towns had been too frightened to say —
that it is not racist to ask who is doing the harm,
and not the opposite of racism to refuse to look.

Now hold the hardest fact, and the play will hold it with you.
The failure had a reason, and the reason was not nothing.
Many of the men who harmed those children shared a heritage,
and to say so plainly, in two thousand five, was to hand a gift
to people who never cared for a single child — only for the heritage.
So the careful and the decent and the frightened looked away from the children
to keep the gift from the cynics —
and the cynics received the gift anyway,
and the children were harmed, and harmed, and harmed.

This is the third thing in the air on Belmont Road.
Not the crime — the failure.
Not the men in the dock — the meeting that did not call them in.
A country that learned, the hard way, that kindness without honesty is a kind of cruelty,
and is still, eleven years on, trying to learn the other half:
that honesty without kindness is also a cruelty,
and will, given an audience, become one.