I once heard someone say that if you’ve never been to England before, just seen the films and read the books, this town is what England must look like in your head. I’m not sure about that; the estates are a bit grim, and you have to really hunt if you want to see anything old, like those wooden beams crisscrossing old-fashioned houses. The real ones, I mean, not the ones they paint on the posher estates. There’s a stone archway and crest above the entrance to the shopping centre. Not much else. On the high street there’s a few shops amongst the coffee chains. Beyond that, there’s the estates. Then it’s mostly just fields. Occasionally, some traveller families set up just off the bypass and everyone talks about it for weeks, reminds you to double-lock your doors, sheds, cars, wallets. They say things like ‘Give ’em an inch…’ and everyone knows what they mean, whether they agree or not.

There’s a lady who used to do the washing and ironing for Mum. She’d put the ironing board up in front of the TV and watch the news in our living room. She revelled in telling the TV what she thought. ‘Foreigners’ this and ‘immigrants’ that. Her husband lost his job at a local factory that was closing down. They made light-fittings, or something like that. Whatever it was she was, angry about his job being ‘taken’ and seemed to be blaming ‘them’. She’d always ask if there were any of ‘them’ at my school. She’d heard lots of stories about ‘them’, what ‘they’ got up to, what ‘they’ ate. ‘We’re as English as the hills around here,’ she used to say to anyone else in the house, then make some comment about the white horses carved into the hillsides. So, I guess people around here are very ‘English’. And there’s a heap of assumptions thrown in with that word that you can almost hear dripping from the sides of some of their mouths. English means Natural. It means Normal. It means Native. Whatever that is.

So the word ‘terrorist’ doesn’t really fit in here, even though it’s been used a lot lately – on the news, online, in the classrooms – and I still don’t know how I feel about it. Every time I hear it, I think of Dad. Victim of terrorists, killed by an Act of Terror. And that makes me angry. Why does someone have the right to take away a person’s life for living in a different way from them?

But that’s just the point, I think. They don’t have the right. That’s what makes them terrorists.