unlight pours through glass doors into the London restaurant where Frank Gardner is having his picture taken. It is Monday, late afternoon. He would like the photograph to be of his face. He would prefer his wheelchair not to be part of it. He does not want to be seen looking out of a window, in a reverie, as if in an old people? home. He is determined to continue to be himself.
The face he presents to camera is fine and unusually still ? perfect for a BBC television correspondent: undistracting. He is 44. He looks and sounds elegantly English. His voice is upper class, suggestive of another age. There is a slight edge to everything he says.
It? good when he laughs, it transforms him. But sunlight exposes his profound fatigue. And the residual look in his eyes is ?unsurprisingly ?of endurance.
It is almost two years since Gardner, the BBC? security correspondent, and his cameraman, Simon Cumbers, were attacked by Saudi extremists. They went to Riyadh in pursuit of a story ?an analysis of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia ?and became the story themselves.
Cumbers, a charismatic Irishman, was murdered. Gardner was shot six times but, against seemingly hopeless odds, survived. His heroism ?not a word he will countenance ?is overwhelming. And, unfortunately, he continues to need it. There is a sense in which he will always be fighting for his life.
He is a paraplegic (he uses the word often, as if to fix the bitter truth of it). He has suffered so much (eight months in hospital, 12 operations, his body one great wound) that, reading his splendid autobiography Blood and Sand, I tell him, I felt like biting on a rag during the chapter describing his rehabilitation.
He laughs. His humor is a saving grace.
Cumbers and Gardner were under the ?rotection?of Saudi government minders in Riyadh. This was unusual for Gardner, who prefers to work on his own. Six months earlier there had been a shoot-out in al-Suwaidi, the suburb they were visiting, between Islamist fundamentalist militants and the security forces, but the risks were judged to be negligible.
They had almost finished filming ?five more minutes and they would have been done. But it was in those last moments that a man in traditional white dress got out of a car and strolled up to them.
Al-Suwaidi is a quiet, unexceptional area with creamy villas, flowering bougainvillea. The killer seemed similarly innocent, at first glance.
?e had ? nice smiling face and looked as if he knew me,?Gardner said. ?e said, ?ssalaamu aleikum?[Peace be upon you/I mean you no harm], before pulling out his gun.?P>
? always tell Westerners they must offer this greeting,?he continued. ?or me, it has always been a passport to a conversation. This time it was a betrayal of everything I held dear in the Middle East.?P>
Gardner shouted: ?o! Don? do this!?in Arabic ?which he speaks fluently.
The first shot went through his shoulder ?he ran. The second went into his thigh bone and felled him. A further group of persecutors then put four more 9mm bullets, at point-blank range, into his back, smashing his pelvis, spinal nerves and abdomen.
His attackers then plucked from his trouser pocket a miniature edition of the Koran (Gardner kept these to give as presents).
Did the holy book save his life? He does not know. But the men drove off, leaving him bleeding in the dust.
He remembers screaming for help: ?y cries were of base, animal pain. I was emitting sounds I did not even recognize.?
A crowd gathered. No one lifted a finger. Nothing ?not a pillow, a glass of water, a sympathetic word ?was offered. He felt a fundamental loneliness. It is, perhaps, the most terrible part of his story.
Left alone
And it was the opposite of everything Gardner had come to expect from the Arab world, in which he had lived and which he continues to champion. I ask if he had come any closer to explaining why nobody came to his aid (he gives a faltering explanation in his book) and he says he has.
?t was a strict, conservative area. Most local people thought we had no business being there. Or people did not dare come near in case I died in their arms and they got sued. But that still does not excuse the total lack of sympathy,?he said.
It was not until he was in hospital that Gardner heard what had happened to Cumbers, and it was months before he learned from an official investigation ?with which he concurs ?that the attack was opportunistic.
?t was very bad luck that this al-Qaeda cell happened to be driving past, saw us, pulled into a side street and decided to execute us,? he said.
But it has not led him to reflect on the randomness of fate. He pointed out, levelly, that it was random only up to a point.
?e were in Saudi Arabia to report on the terrorist situation. If we had been doing a report on market gardening, we would not have been in that place at that time,? he said.
He has never been a war reporter (too risky: he has a young family).
He spoke briskly: ?here was never a time when I gave up hope, whether lying mortally wounded on the streets of Riyadh or coming to terms with being partially paralysed. But that is not to say there have not been some very depressing times. And there are immense challenges ahead. Paraplegia, unfortunately, is a tunnel which you don? come out of,?he said ?but only because I ask.
? am not out of the woods yet. I am faced with a whole catalogue of medical conditions that do not usually afflict people until their 70s and 80s. I have got osteoporosis, for example, for not weight-bearing on my legs enough,?he said.
?ut the flipside is that, from the knees up, I function reasonably well,?he said.
He can now move his legs a little (he demonstrates).
In hospital, he jokes grimly, he was driven mad by the Nina Simone song that accompanies an advertisement for Muller Lite yoghurt: the one that goes ?ot my hands/Got my legs/Got my feet/ got my toes ...?
Gardner can walk with callipers but sounds discouraged, finds them pretty useless (his ?alking piece to camera?for the BBC may have been impressive, as was his advance along the red carpet to receive an OBE from Queen Elizabeth last year, but callipers cannot return him to the active man he was).
There is only one thing that can work that magic: his book. One of the pleasures of reading it, I tell Gardner, is that between the first chapter about the attack and the last about his rehabilitation, it puts him back on his feet. It is a way of fighting his own war on terror. He was quick to agree.
?he whole point is that this is not a horror story,?he said.
He is a man with a highly developed appetite for life and all its sensual pleasures. He loves food (iced grapes, mint tea), adventure (he has climbed a live Sumatran volcano, he told me), landscape (there is a beautiful photograph in the book of his wife, Amanda, running across the Wahiba sands in Oman), friendship (he re-imagines long afternoons in Cairo cafes, playing backgammon). He has lived all over the Middle East, including a stint with the Bedu in Jordan, another in the medieval slums of Cairo.
? have always been ?maybe it is an only child thing ?outward-looking,?he said.
Perhaps being an only child makes for a better journalist. Certainly, Gardner is no ordinary journalist. He is unfashionably keen to emphasize the positive. And he is so even-handed he often sounds apolitical. I?e been speculating about whether this might be an inherited characteristic. If he appears now to be a self-appointed ambassador for the Middle East, might it have to do with his parents, who were both diplomats?
With reluctant diplomacy, Gardner does not disagree.
But he adds: ? went far further in going local than either of them did.?
Diplomat or soldier?
And besides, he does not take neutrality too far. He was opposed to the Iraq war. And he was so vocal about the terrorist threat to London before the July 7 bombings last year that he was thought alarmist and nicknamed the BBC? ?nsecurity correspondent.?P>
If not a diplomat, in another life Gardner would have made a good soldier. He has an almost military bearing. He even comes up with the standard army line, after any disaster, about wanting to get ?ack to the job.?
He has been back at the BBC since April last year. He sees his job as a chance to explain the ?omplexities of the Middle East, of extremism, of terrorism and of international security to a Western audience.?
He loves his job.
? get a tremendous kick out of it. It is such a privilege to broadcast to so many people. I take it seriously, though I might sound casual and light-hearted on air. I need to make sure that what I say is fair and balanced. And most important of all that I have got all the facts right.?P>
But it is not surprising to learn that it was a great explorer and travel writer, not a journalist, who first drew him to the Arab world.
Over tea in Chelsea with Sir Wilfred Thesiger, an acquaintance of his mother?, the 16-year-old rank was as enchanted among Thesiger? beaten-up camel saddles and curved daggers by the romance of the Arab world as Thesiger was, by that stage, disenchanted. And the afterglow of the tea party lasted.
Gardner left Marlborough for Exeter University to read Arabic and Islamic studies. But on graduating he did not climb on to the nearest camel. Instead he became an investment banker in Bahrain with a Mustang convertible.
Life sounds as if it was a non-stop party, with all the essentials: a villa, a swimming pool and, after a bit, Amanda ?who would later become his wife.
?t was good fun,?he said.
But back in Britain, as a director of the bank? London branch, the party was over.
? found myself surrounded by people who were genuinely interested in accounting,?he said.
Eventually, the bank did the decent thing and fired him. He was free, at last, to become a journalist, something he had, for years, wanted to be.
His book is as much a travel writer? as a journalist? ?a thank you letter for all the good experiences he has had in the Middle East. We talk about his special fondness for Egyptians.
?rits and Egyptians have this in common: they laugh at themselves,?he said.
And it is easy to see how this bond developed: Gardner delights in sending himself up. My favorite story could be called the Tunisian Debacle. He relives the embarrassment of mispronouncing the traditional greeting laa bas (meaning ?o harm,??o evil? as libas, which turns out to mean underwear.
As he said, ?ouring a country saying ?ants?to everyone you meet is not the best way to ingratiate yourself.?
My hunch is that he ingratiated himself anyway. He gets his schoolboy humor from his father apparently a virtuoso on April Fools?Day. Gardner is devoted to his parents. The first thing he did when they visited him in hospital was to apologize. It sounds typical of him.
In the same way, Gardner? lack of anger about his attackers seems to border on the saintly. Can it be real?
? am able to compartmentalise the people who did this and separate them from the Arab world,?he explained.
He made a point of giving interviews to Saudi newspapers to spell out that he did not blame the Saudis for what had happened to him.
Damage limitation, then? He nods. But perhaps there are limits to being able to talk about not being angry without eventually losing your cool.
? am not turning the other cheek. I am extremely angry with the people who did this. I could never forgive them. It is not as if their parents have written to us saying: ?orgive poor Faisal, he knew not what he did.?Nobody has written. None of them care. I condemn them and their families,?he said.
And from a country not short of oil money, he has received no compensation. But the sympathetic letters he has received from Saudi Arabia, the Middle East and all over Britain, he has found enormously comforting.
He may not blame the Saudis, but he puts the Saudi education system in the dock.
?t has, for years, fostered a culture of intolerance towards non-Muslims. The people who shot us were products of a system that taught young Saudis that, in some cases, they could even go to paradise if they attacked non-Muslims. Only recently have the Saudi authorities started to tackle this, but it will take a generation to work out,?he said.
His wife, Amanda, a New Zealander, has been crucial in keeping him sane. She sounds remarkable.
?he is,?he said.
She seems to have that zestful, antipodean talent for creating a good life even in adversity. When her husband was in the Whitechapel hospital, London, she would transform his scruffy National Health Service room and arrange ?ntimate dinners for two?against all the hospital regulations (but with the nurses?blessing).
She would lay a white tablecloth, unpack their Wedgwood wedding china, light candles. They would drink iced mango juice out of crystal glasses.
He describes her as ?toic.?It is his aim in life, before everything else, to be as good a husband and father as he can.
Family
?t sounds squeaky clean, but it is true. They so nearly lost their husband and father. We are, generally, a happy family. We have come through this. We do things together, which is what being married should be about,?he said.
But he added: ? have to say it is not that easy because I am in pain a lot of the time, and when I am in pain I can? be a good husband or father. If I am having to deal with agony in my legs or am exhausted and have to lie down, I can? take part in the children? games, which is tough.?
His daughters, Melissa, eight, and Sasha, seven, are ?till coming to terms?with what happened. It was Melissa who famously asked why her father? attackers could not have chosen a water pistol instead of a real gun.
Gardner has been careful to explain that ?he people who shot us were madmen.?
He is concerned that his daughters should not adopt any racial or religious prejudices.
Is he religious himself?
?o,?he said, ?ut I believe in God.?
Muslims write to him, saying, ?od spared you for a reason,?but Gardner said, ? don? buy into that. If there was a reason for me to be spared then, for heaven? sake, Simon Cumbers should have been spared too.?P>
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