Our fear is palpable and the dark forces of the far right feed upon it

IT NEVER seems right after a death that all around not connected just carry on as normal. How can they, we ask? God knows, it’s a universal question, as numerous poems testify. Almost banal in the asking. I remember leaning against a fivebarred gate in the Scottish countryside watching the sun come up just a couple of hours after I’d left the body of my mother in hospital.

As life awoke all around me – uncaring that I, in my misery, found no comfort in the birdsong or the deer closing in on my stillness – I felt the bland indifference of the Universe. It was the first time I truly felt a speck; a nothing, a tiny, soon-tobe-forgotten spark in a mystery that came long before and would continue long after.

It was the first time I really understood that the dead could only be carried in the hearts of those who loved them. Nature, our earth, our world, has only one aim – to survive. It cares little for us.

Returning to my house, ready for the calls to make, the questions to be faced from my seven-year-old child, was the loneliest walk I have ever made. Though a mother, I had become an orphan, and it was meaningless except to me.

And so when dawn broke in Nice the day after the truck horror, and the sky lightened into that intense southern blue, pulsing warmth, I did not question how it could all still continue.

Forgive me if this seems to be about me. It’s not. But the scale of the slaughter – 84 dead at the time of writing – has to be reduced in some way for all of us.

The totality of it, not just in numbers but, like the Bataclan, in youth, in childhood annihilated, forces us to look into the well of our experience.

Something truly dark and monstrous has come with these murders.

Something that didn’t steal in with the Toulouse shootings or the Charlie Hebdo assassinations or the Paris music theatre atrocity.

Something that, for the first time in all of these past couple of years has, I believe, made us all in France agonisingly afraid.

In some ways it matters little whether Mohamed LahouaiejBouhlel will be exposed as a mass murderer or a tool of Daesh. The Islamic State has claimed him as another soldier in their war against us. As they would.

What matters is that they have given a purpose, a form, to the haters, the enraged, the deranged, and there is ultimately nothing our uniformed guardians can do to protect us against those.

With the use of a lorry as a weapon, France and the rest of the world have awoken to that terrifying reality.

Our defiance is muted this time round, unlike when, even in my own tiny village, people gathered to proclaim: “Je suis Charlie.”

Then the French marched arm in arm and lit candles to snuff out the evil wisps swirling around.

We thought we’d driven them back; meeting their barbarism with the right, the might of goodness: used their warped biblical references against them.

But now, our fear is palpable and the other dark forces – those of the far right – are already feeding upon it and leading many into following them.

As always, because of publishing times I am writing several days ahead.

It is only four days since scores of people were scattered like skittles by the fiend who zigzagged down the Promenade des Anglais, aiming for the children in particular. Witnesses said he had the look of a man thoroughly enjoying himself.

Our senses have been further battered by the attempted coup in Turkey, the police slayings in Baton Rouge and the axe attack in Germany, to the extent that a sense of hopelessness and helplessness seems to be the prevailing mood.

From politics to mass murder, whether committed by a terrorist or not, we feel we are losing our grip on all that keeps us civilised and therefore safe.

The mood for revenge is strong in France now. It would take little to spark ugly confrontations where, as is always the case, the innocent will be the ones again maimed.

And worse, in another way, is the deadening of the spirit – the increasing acceptance that acts like this will continue, each time (if possible) more violent and more headline grabbing than the last.

To be in France at this time is to feel unbalanced; to feel both wary and vulnerable.

It’s fine to say our way of life won’t be changed; they won’t beat us. Live as normal. But who among us would now take a child to a mass gathering in a French city square? So we retreat further inward, fuelled by suspicion and fear. This is how it must have felt here in the early stirrings of the Second World War. We feel at war and have done since the first attack, and our politicians tell us so.

And we are not as one. France is divided. No one has an answer. At the moment there is only despair.

In Nice, the yachts are back in the sea, the tourists are walking along the promenade already and the blood has been scrubbed from the pavement.

Life does go on but, oh, at what a cost to our souls.