Several passages from James Rhodes’s autobiography, Instrumental, which is published next week, are quoted in the supreme court judgment that lifted an injunction barring him from publishing a full account of his life.
The court described how Rhodes writes about being groomed and abused – or, in his own words, “used, fucked, broken, toyed with and violated” – from the age of six by a man called Peter Lee, the boxing coach at his first preparatory school.
One passage included in the ruling reads: “Abuse. What a word. Rape is better. Abuse is when you tell a traffic warden to fuck off. It isn’t abuse when a 40-year-old man forces his cock inside a six-year-old boy’s ass. That doesn’t even come close to abuse. That is aggressive rape. It leads to multiple surgeries, scars [inside and out], tics, OCD, depression, suicidal ideation, vigorous self-harm, alcoholism, drug addiction, the most fucked-up of sexual hangups, gender confusion [‘you look like a girl, are you sure you’re not a little girl?’], sexuality confusion, paranoia, mistrust, compulsive lying, eating disorders, PTSD, DID [the shinier name for multiple personality disorder] and so on and on and on.
“I went, literally overnight, from a dancing, spinning, gigglingly alive kid who was enjoying the safety and adventure of a new school, to a walled-off, cement-shoed, lights-out automaton. It was immediate and shocking, like happily walking down a sunny path and suddenly having a trapdoor open and dump you into a freezing cold lake.
“You want to know how to rip the child out of a child? Fuck him. Fuck him repeatedly. Hit him. Hold him down and shove things inside him. Tell him things about himself that can only be true in the youngest of minds before logic and reason are fully formed and they will take hold of him and become an integral, unquestioned part of his being.”
Interwoven with this account of rape and trauma is the story of how Rhodes largely taught himself to read music and play the piano and his relationship with music.
Writing specifically about Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin in D minor, transcribed for piano by Busoni, he writes: “… that piece became my safe place. Any time I felt anxious [any time I was awake] it was going round in my head. Its rhythms were being tapped out, its voices played again and again, altered, explored, experimented with. I dove inside it as if it were some kind of musical maze and wandered around happily lost. It set me up for life; without it I would have died years ago, I’ve no doubt. But with it, and with all the other music that it led me to discover, it acted like a force field that only the most toxic and brutal pain could penetrate.”
Many years later, as his career developed, Rhodes gave a newspaper interview in which he spoke of the abuse he suffered. The former headteacher at the school, who had known something was wrong but not what it was, came forward and gave a statement to police. Lee was charged but died before he could be brought to trial.
“Maybe one day I will forgive Mr Lee. That’s much likelier to happen if I find a way to forgive myself. But the truth, for me at any rate, is that the sexual abuse of children rarely, if ever, ends in forgiveness. It leads only to self-blame, visceral, self-directed rage and shame,” an extract from the book reads. “But shining a light on topics like this is hugely important. And getting hundreds of supportive and grateful messages from people who had also gone through similar experiences was an indicator to me that it needs to be talked about even more.”
