On the evening of Halloween 2015, 20-year-old Morgan Hehir was stabbed to death in a random, frenzied attack in a park in Nuneaton, Warwickshire following the most trivial of altercations. His killer, 21-year-old Declan Gray, had been released from prison just four months earlier, having already served time for manslaughter. Between his release and murdering Morgan, Gray was arrested three times.
David Whitehouse: Certainly in the mid-to-late 90s, when I was coming of age there, there was a culture of violence among young men. Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays were drinking nights in the town centre. The pubs were packed, and you’d always see fights. Real violence. People getting glassed and stuff. It’s only after you get older and leave that you realise how extreme and grim that is.
DW: I’d known about Morgan’s case already. When it happened, it’s the sort of thing you’re immediately sent by people you went to school with. I used to walk past the place he was murdered every day on my way to college. [Later] I received the diary through a friend of mine called Claire Harrison, who’s a journalist at the Nuneaton News. It’s a totally unique document, like nothing else I’d ever read. It’s so intensely personal, so open and honest. Colin wanted to know what he should do with it.
Also, it let me zoom out a little and tell the story of the town and the effects of tragedy upon it. I was thinking about Hankinson’s book and [also] about Gordon Burn. And I know how people from Nuneaton speak, I know what jobs they do and what their concerns might be. I know what it’s like to be skint growing up there. The second person felt like the way to tell the story.