Steel
Better than Stalin
I am now Steel. That is, my name is now Steel. Or at least that is what Carlos thinks. Carlos is the porter at our apartment in Condesa. I have tried to tell him my name is Stanley, not Steel, but either he can’t remember it or can’t pronounce it. So, I’m stuck with Steel. It could be worse. The last time I ordered a takeaway coffee at Starbucks, the barista wrote ‘Stalin’ on the paper cup. As you can imagine, I didn’t respond at first when my name was called, but there were only two of us waiting and the other customer was a young woman who looked more like a Maricarmen than a Stalin.
Sapphire and Steel Being called Steel reminds me of Sapphire and Steel, a 1970s British TV series. Steel was played by the actor David McCallum. McCallum is best known for playing Russian secret agent Illya Kuryakin in the 60s TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. The character he played in that series was a spy working for a multinational secret intelligence agency, able to slip in and out of foreign countries without being noticed. In real life, on his first visit to the city, McCallum got lost in New York’s Central Park and had to be rescued by the police.
I’ve never been rescued by the police, but I was once assigned two armed police bodyguards back in the 1980’s. I was a juror on an armed robbery case at the Old Bailey that featured a notorious London gang and the court was worried the jury might be tampered with. We must have been a sight to behold the day the twelve of us walked out of the building, each with our two plainclothes police following discreetly behind us as we walked to St. Paul’s tube station.
When I got off the train at Kilburn and saw the number 32 bus, I’d forgotten I was being tailed and started to run and jumped on the back of the red Routemaster as it moved away from the stop, grabbing hold of the silver pole on the rear entrance. I turned around to see the two policemen sprinting to catch up with me. They made it onto the bus, red-faced and angry. What did I think I was doing? Trying to shake them off? This was real life, not a spy movie.
We weren’t supposed to talk, me and my police escort, so I could have reported them for breaking cover, but I was amused and oddly, felt important. I imagined being approached by gang members and having to duck behind a Ford Escort while my police bodyguards grabbled with them and wrestled them to the ground, making an arrest. By the end of the week, however, I was bored with what had at first appeared to be an adventure. With no end to the trial in sight, I was feeling very uncomfortable with being watched by the police everywhere I went. I went for a drink with friends and knew there were eyes on me, watching everything I did. I took the bus to Hampstead to visit my then girlfriend at her hall of residence in Hampstead and they came with me, hanging around outside while I went in to see her.
My girlfriend was curious and insisted on talking to my police bodyguards. Using the cold weather as an excuse, she insisted we took the men some mugs of tea, and we chatted to them for twenty minutes. I wasn’t supposed to talk to them because the gang members who had carried out the robbery had shot and wounded a policeman. He was in the hospital and the judge didn’t want to risk a chance that the members of the jury could be influenced by his colleagues.
Fortunately for me, the case was thrown out at the end of the week, and I narrowly avoided being done for contempt of court. After four days of being cooped up in the tiny jury room all day and not allowed out at any time during the day, we were reluctantly allowed to go for lunch on the Friday, but told to split into groups so our bodyguard wouldn’t be so obvious, and told not to go anywhere near the courthouse in case there was anyone from the public gallery who might recognise. I went with three others to a local pub. We had a pint and a sandwich and played pool. It felt good to socialise with some of the other jurors.
Just before we left to return to the Old Bailey, one of the jurors thought he’d recognised some ‘dodgy bloke’ at the bar, believing the man had been in the gallery. He reported it when we got back to the court and the judge hauled us all up and berated the jury for disobeying his orders not to leave the courtroom during the trial. He dismissed the case and the next day we were headlines on the front page of the national newspapers. Jury Nobbled! was the headline in The Sun, which went on to claim the actions of the jury would be costly and the trial would be reconvened in three months with a different jury.
Although not many people remember it now, David MacCallum also played the title role in the short-lived 1975 TV series The Invisible Man, which I was fascinated by as a child. It captured my eleven-year-old’s imagination. If I were able to have a super-power, then I’d choose invisibility. I wanted to disappear then, although, as the show revealed, invisibility was more of a curse than you’d first imagine.
