Shooting History: A Personal Journey

Shooting History: A Personal Journey Jon Snow The compelling autobiography of one of the great and most committed newsmen of our time: full, frank, and occasionally very funny, Jon Snow’s memoirs are as revealing about the great and the not-so-good as about his own passionate involvement in the reporting of world affairs.Jon Snow is perhaps the most highly regarded newsman of our time; his qualities as a journalist and as a human being – his passion, warmth, intelligence, frankness and humour – are widely recognised and evident for all to see most nights on Channel 4 News and now in the pages of his first book.His vivid personal chronicle is filled with anecdotes and pithy observations, and delightfully records his life and times since becoming a journalist in the early 1970s. He reported widely on Cold War conflicts in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Angola and Central America before becoming a resident correspondent in Washington D.C. in the 1980s, and he has met and interviewed most of the world’s leaders.Drawing lessons from these experiences, he has pertinent things to say about how the increasing world disorder came about following the fall of the Berlin Wall; how the West’s constant search for an enemy has helped unhinge the world; and how and why the media have, in general, been less than helpful in drawing attention to key political and global developments. COPYRIGHT (#ulink_5391adc7-9fde-5cef-aef1-d140a6b44273) William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005 First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004 Copyright © Jon Snow 2004 PS section copyright © Louise Tucker 2005, except ‘Signposting History’ by Jon Snow © Jon Snow 2005 PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd Jon Snow asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Lines from ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ by Maya Angelou reproduced by permission of Time Warner Book Group UK All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9780007171859 Ebook Edition © MAY 2017 ISBN: 9780008258047 Version: 2017-05-04 PRAISE FOR SHOOTING HISTORY (#ulink_972f3eb0-4346-5fcc-a09c-74940ae201e9) From the reviews of Shooting History: ‘Snow is the closest we have to a modern-day George Orwell … A vivid, accurate, honest guide to the key world events from 1975’ Independent ‘Pacy, candid and anecdote-laden, Snow’s account of a childhood spent in awe of his father … is a delight’ Daily Mail ‘Shooting History is among my favourite memoirs this year. Snow is a thinker and a generous writer who has done incredible things and has views on them’ MATTHEW PARRIS, The Times, Books of the Year ‘Snow charts his own growth with self-deprecation and a lightness of touch … A fascinating insight into a world in flux’ Time Out ‘Will inspire anyone who wants to know what television is like at the uncomfortable end of the camera when the bullets are flying’ Guardian ‘[Snow is a] witty, mildly eccentric and utterly engaging writer … He cleverly uses his own personal experiences and insights gained while being present at some of the major events in modern world history to argue a particular point … His anecdotes on the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Idi Amin are spot on’ Birmingham Post ‘Opinionated, eloquent … As one man’s take on the history of the past 30 years this is an impressive piece of work. Snow is good at teasing out the often terrible ironies of our times … A well-written, engrossing and surprisingly passionate piece of work’ Sunday Herald ‘Hugely entertaining … and makes you think’ Manchester Evening News ‘Fascinating … this book puts history into startling clarity’ Irish Examiner DEDICATION (#ulink_95ce03e3-a26b-53d5-8eeb-a8e93e94c632) To Madeleine, Leila and Freya CONTENTS Cover (#u1aed2003-5b4c-5796-9559-071d065802fc) Title Page (#u92b9b187-52ed-5ac6-a06b-b75d73be7cb1) Copyright (#ulink_7e07fc91-bb05-5a07-aca8-7743d7cfe68e) Praise (#ulink_6be7b03e-68f5-5436-9a43-60bf163a04fb) Dedication (#ulink_c39f8aa3-d4f4-5eb0-b20e-6370407a6770) List of Illustrations (#ulink_c72e42d2-0947-55db-b4da-b6b0ba00031c) Prologue (#ulink_5bc5ce95-c253-57f4-9c39-be4864d7f63d) 1. Home Thoughts (#ulink_27983633-da20-50d2-88e3-32838ea36bb0) 2. Africa, Revolution and Despair (#ulink_9aacc63d-18a8-543b-a7e7-fa7b802dbb06) 3. Of Drugs and Spooks (#ulink_166cc70e-93d2-59f2-9703-23cfd0cc5ee6) 4. Tea with the Tyrant (#ulink_e3cefe1b-2de3-53f6-a30c-9c4804e41fec) 5. First Brick Out of the Wall (#litres_trial_promo) 6. Of Oil, Islam and Moscow (#litres_trial_promo) 7. Uncle Sam’s Backyard (#litres_trial_promo) 8. Potomac Fever (#litres_trial_promo) 9. Talking with the Enemy (#litres_trial_promo) 10. The Whole Lot Comes Down (#litres_trial_promo) 11. Hey, We Never Expected to Win! (#litres_trial_promo) 12. Shooting at the Messenger and Coming Full Circle (#litres_trial_promo) Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) P.S. Insights, Interviews & More … (#litres_trial_promo) About the author (#litres_trial_promo) About the book (#litres_trial_promo) Read on (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) ILLUSTRATIONS (#ulink_6f1e8991-a72c-520c-9cdb-9f16ca30c3b5) (Photographs are from the author’s collection) General Tom, my twice-knighted grandfather, who hung above the mantel and seemed to have inspected every boiled egg I ever ate. War wedding. My father and mother met and married in a matter of weeks. My father’s Hudson Terraplane Eight configured as a wartime fire-tender. The damage caused by a Second World War bomb on the lawns of Charterhouse School; my father’s one moment of ‘action’. A sunny Sussex childhood. Growing up in the aftermath of war. No particular talent. Following childhood encounters with Harold Macmillan, my earliest ambition was to be a Tory MP. My father with Macmillan at Ardingly. ‘Do you know what a Prime Minister is?’ he asked me. ‘Are you married to the Queen?’ I responded. With Tom and Nick in the Terraplane; a happy contrast to the dining-table warfare. The Queen visiting Ardingly. My mother had been to Harrods to buy a pair of Crown Derby cups and saucers from which the royal lips could sip their afternoon tea. As a chorister at Winchester Cathedral in 1958. My father, every inch a Bishop – eight feet tall in his mitre. Back from Uganda. VSO had radicalised me, and one reason I wanted to become a journalist was in order to return there. India in the summer of 1969, singing ‘Hey Jude’ in the Liverpool University close-part harmony Beatle band. Pre-mobile-phone reporting for LBC in 1973, on a clunky old Motorola two-way radio. An exchange with Ugandan dictator Idi Amin on the 1974 trip with Jim Callaghan to rescue Denis Hills. Vietnamese boat people below decks on the refugee boat on which we found ourselves stranded in the South China Sea in 1976. The shell of the Vietnamese refugee boat beached in Malaysia. Interviewing the Somali President Siad Barre, a grumpy Moscow-educated ideologue running a classic Cold War Russian client state, in 1976. With Mohinder Dhillon in Somalia. Mystified British viewers were treated to a travelogue in which an excitable white man jumped up and down talking about the threat to world peace. Back to Uganda again in 1977, this time for ITN armed with Edward Heath’s book. Interviewing US President Jimmy Carter and Prime Minister Jim Callaghan outside Lancaster House in London, 1977. Preparing to conduct the first ever English-language interview with a Pope, aboard John Paul II’s plane in January 1979. Afghanistan, 1980. With the Mujahidin in mountains above Herat in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet invasion. Filming with Charlie Morgan at ‘Desert One’ in Iran in April 1980 amid the wreckage of Jimmy Carter’s catastrophic attempt to rescue the American hostages. The Iran–Iraq War in 1981. Wearing no body armour and no flak jacket, I was less than well prepared to survive the conflagration in which I was caught. With President Reagan in the White House, February 1985. Interviewing Nelson Mandela the day he became South Africa’s first democratically elected President in 1994. On the line in northern Ghana, exploring the Greenwich meridian in a classic ‘Yendi smock’ in 2000. With cameraman Ken McCallum in Baghdad, November 2003. Advertising Channel Four News, with trusty steed on Euston station. Prologue (#ulink_f7906fe9-c16f-5429-93a6-91347429e356) THE BOAT stood proud against the horizon, its curved bow and stern silhouetted on the skyline. We had been looking for it for a day and a night. As we drew near, what we had thought were ornate outcrops from the deck of the boat materialised into the bobbing heads and shoulders of a mass of human beings. The vessel was no more than forty feet long, but there were hundreds of people packed aboard it. We had set out that morning in November 1978 from Trengganu on Malaysia’s north-eastern coast aboard a fast local fishing launch. I was with my Swedish cameraman Claus Bratt and, somewhat unexpectedly, the books editor of the Daily Mail, Peter Lewis. Our quest was to encounter one of the myriad craft bearing refugees out of Vietnam across the South China Sea. These were the ‘boat people’ who in the previous few months, in their tens of thousands, had left the Vietnamese coast aboard almost anything that would float. The Vietnam War had ended three years earlier, but the flow of refugees was undiminished, orchestrated by traffickers and by the myth that America was waiting with open arms for any who fled. The boat was well down in the water, with no obvious accommodation beyond a wheelhouse and two corrugated sheds at the back which were clearly lavatories. I urged the fisherman who’d brought us to take us closer so that I could engage the captain in conversation. Eventually we came alongside, and Claus and I boarded the boat. At that precise moment our fisherman panicked, fearing that some of the Vietnamese might try to jump onto his vessel. He suddenly thrust his engines to full, pulled away from us, and sped off whence we’d come. I could see the Daily Mail’s books editor remonstrating furiously in the stern. Soon the fishing boat was but a speck in the distance. There was almost no room to move on deck. We peered down into the cargo holds, and dozens of faces, young and old, boys, men and women, looked up expectantly. Many seemed to be very sick. Claus and I were led with difficulty towards the captain, who was at the wheel in the stern. I calculated that there were at least 350 people aboard a vessel that might have comfortably carried thirty. They had been at sea for the worst part of three weeks. The smell was overpowering; the dead body of an elderly woman wound in a sheet lay against the gunwale. The boat people seemed to assume that we were the advance guard of a welcoming party headed by the US Ambassador that would be waiting ashore with passports ready to usher them all to their new lives in California. We’d been sent by my editor at ITN in London to find out how this huge exodus of people from Vietnam operated, and who was facilitating it. Until now, such boats had been seized the moment they made landfall in Malaysia; the boat people aboard would be rounded up and carted off to a kind of concentration camp run by the UN further up the coast on the island of Palau Badong. Consequently it had proved impossible to get to the root of how their journeying had come about. The captain, a rotund ethnic Chinese, spoke excellent English and was candid about how much each person had paid – the equivalent of $2000 a head, extracted mainly from gold dental fillings and melted-down family heirlooms. He was more vague about how or where they were going to land in Malaysia; indeed, he thought he might even be off the coast of Indonesia. I asked him if anyone could swim; he thought not. There appeared to be no food on board, and the lavatories had become a foetid disaster zone, from which we tried to keep as far ‘upship’ as possible. Towards nightfall we had our first glimpse of land. The captain decided to make a run for the shore. Within moments we were greeted by a hail of rocks and sticks, hurled by irate ethnic Malays who seemed to come from nowhere and swarmed out along the beach. The defenceless Vietnamese trapped on deck were being cut about their heads, and worse. Our boat turned broadside across the rollers, and threatened to capsize before finally making it through the surf and back out into the open sea. We advised the captain to try further up the coast at first light, in the hope that any reception party would not yet be about. A ghastly night passed before we renewed our run at the beach. I suggested to the captain that he rev the engine to its maximum, and try to burn it out as the vessel beached. This way I hoped we could avoid being pushed back out to sea again. Claus had by now secured remarkable film of everything that had happened, an unprecedented record of the tribulations in the lives of fleeing Vietnamese boat people. The noise of the screaming engine summoned a new batch of Malays down the beach, and another fusillade of projectiles. The engine blew, sure enough, but before the captain had succeeded in beaching the boat, which was now skewing dangerously in the surf. I grabbed a rope from the bow and leapt into the water, trying to lug the waterlogged hulk ashore. Gradually the sea itself seemed to bring it in. Suddenly I was grabbed from behind and thrown beneath the water. Someone took hold of a hank of my then long hair and dragged me to the beach. I was spreadeagled on the sand while one man stamped on my arms and another beat me about the chest with a pole. Claus, still cradling the wreck of his camera, blood pouring down his face, was thrown down beside me. Malaysian soldiers stood idly beneath the palms at the top of the beach, watching the Malays assaulting the boat people. Nearly all the victims were ethnic Chinese. I learned later that the Malay/Chinese balance in Malaysia was fragile in the extreme, and that Malays would go to any lengths to prevent the expansion of the Chinese population. After what seemed an age, the police came and arrested Claus and me. Snapping handcuffs on our bruised wrists, they threw us into the back of a caged pickup truck. At Trengganu’s police station, the chief informed us that we were to be charged with aiding and abetting illegal immigration, an offence that carried a twenty-year jail sentence. We found ourselves in a disgusting fifteen-foot-square concrete cell with a steel door and a small barred window. The floor was awash with urine and faeces. In the gloom I counted eight others already inside. One of them turned out to be our battered captain, Lee Tych Tuong. Mr Tuong, it turned out, was a former printer who had never touched a boat in his life before. It had taken him and some of the other escapers eight months to build the vessel. He told us how they had become completely disorientated upon leaving Vietnamese waters, and how dysentery had claimed half a dozen lives during the voyage. It was a good six hours into our ordeal before I heard the heaven-sent voice of the Daily Mail man in the passageway beyond the cell door. Peter Lewis had somehow not only tracked down our vessel, but had also managed to arrange the intervention of the First Secretary from the British High Commission in Kuala Lumpur. Our freedom came at the expense of most of the film we had shot. We were free to leave, so long as we boarded the next plane to London. It was a salutary introduction to the vagaries of investigative journalism. I came of reporting age in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, one of the defining periods of post-Second World War history, when the Cold War warmed to major bloodshed. A quarter of a century later I would be reporting on the war on Iraq, one of the watersheds in the evolving new world disorder that in turn followed the end of the Cold War. Both conflicts were essentially American unilateralist pre-emptive responses to what Washington perceived as threats to US interests. Like many of my generation, as a student I had protested against the war in Vietnam, and I felt frustrated never to have had the opportunity to report on a war in which many of my older colleagues had cut their teeth. To be dispatched as a reporter, at least to try to explore the war’s legacy, even fully three years after its end, was some small recompense. Our Malaysian adventure was set amid the prevailing certainty of global balances and security. Vietnam was now avowedly Communist, allied to the Eastern Bloc. Malaysia was emerging from the post-colonial era with its fledgling tiger economy, becoming an equally committed member of the Western capitalist bloc. It was possible to choose almost any place in the world and establish its position within the great Cold War tussle for control. In 1978 I was thirty years old, and my whole life had been set in the confident certainty that the ideological battle between left and right, between Communist and non-Communist, would prevail for all time. The world was relatively neatly divided. The idea that the Berlin Wall would ever come down, that Communism itself would ever fail, was simply inconceivable. We did not know that this order was about to suffer its first major violation, in the form of a radical Islamic revolution in Iran. Western imperialism had all but decolonised Africa and Asia; now the main point of friction was whether the emerging post-colonial states would tilt towards Moscow or Washington. So I was privileged to start my reporting career in Africa, and to observe a state like Somalia move from British and Italian influence to independence under first Soviet and then American patronage. Somalia was only one of a number of developing countries I watched drift into the chaotic status of ‘failed state’, wide open as a recruitment and training ground for al Qaida. The disengagement of the West from countries like it was matched by a corresponding failure by the Western media to remain committed to reporting them at all. Somalia’s decline was mirrored by Angola, Sudan, Zaire, Uganda and others as we ceased to understand what was happening in them, and worse, ceased to care. We in the West never expected to win the Cold War, or to lose it. When we did win, we were totally unprepared, and lost a huge opportunity to recast international institutions to fit the reality of a new world order dominated by one all-powerful superpower. Similarly, when Saudi militants attacked America on 11 September 2001, our response was militaristic and inadequate, and international solidarity with the United States degenerated very quickly into diplomatic warfare between much-needed allies. This book is the record of a personal journey that starts in the cosy years after the Second World War and treads the key stepping stones since, to arrive at that great pre-emptive action that was cast as an endeavour to strike down a very immediate threat to our own survival, the war on Iraq. Six months after that conflict began, I was at Amman airport in Jordan waiting for one of the rare flights into Baghdad. I found myself surrounded by pale British ex-servicemen trying to find ways into the country to take up jobs as bodyguards, and by heavy-set, unfit Americans who seemed never to have travelled outside Texas, carrying plastic bags filled with wads of hundred-dollar bills. The Americans were contractors on danger money coming in to fix the oil, water, gas and electricity infrastructure of a devastated country. It did not feel comfortable being among them, but they fitted well with my wider tale, one from which this reporter emerges at least as blemished as anyone he reports on. ONE (#ulink_9072fa37-9e01-5221-9917-927f1236c747) Home Thoughts (#ulink_9072fa37-9e01-5221-9917-927f1236c747) ‘THEY’RE COMING!’ my elder brother Tom screamed. ‘Run!’ The wailing siren sounded close as he and my younger brother Nick fled out of the beechwood hollow. I was slow, wading through the leaves, my legs like lead weights. We had been playing on the edge of the school grounds in a towering section of the beechwoods called Fellows Gardens. Amongst the three of us, the identity of foe tended to settle on me. As they ran that day, my brothers were the friends. But there was a darker sense of an enemy beyond. Somehow the wailing siren seemed to signal the presence of a larger threat at hand. I burst into tears, stumbling to a halt, and found myself standing alone knee-deep in mud and leaves. Still the siren sounded. I suppose in retrospect it signalled only a fire, but then it sounded more eerie, more menacing. I was born in 1947. My childhood was spent in the headmaster’s house of Ardingly College, a minor public school set in the most green and rustic wastes of Sussex. Woven in and out of the sense of recent war and lurking threat were primroses, wood anemones, bluebells, and the sumptuous peace of countryside. From my bedroom window high up in the Victorian mass of red brick and scrubbed stone stairs I could see the lake, the woods, the rolling fields, and away in the distance, the long viaduct that bore the Brighton steam train to London and back. In the woods I, my brothers and the few other children that this isolated place could muster would play our own warfare. My childhood swung between feelings of absolute safety and daunting vulnerability. The episode in the wood, when I was perhaps five, took place in 1952, when the war still cast a long shadow over our lives. The syrupy yellowy substance that passed for orange juice, in small blue screwtop bottles, still came courtesy of ration coupons. When I stood in the X-ray machine in Russell & Bromley’s shoeshop in nearby Haywards Heath, where toxic rays revealed my dark feet wriggling inside green irradiated shoes, the ensuing purchase still attracted talk of shortages. In the early fifties, the Germans were still the oft-mentioned core of enemy. The adult talk was of military service, of doodlebugs, of blackouts and loss. Hence the rumble of planes, the crack of the sound barrier, and that siren spoke with such clarity of present danger, and of the newer Russian threat and atomic war. My father had not fought in the Second World War. Had he done so he would never have met my mother. This absence of service signalled early that he was different from other fathers. Too young for the First World War, he was too old to be called up for the Second. Besides, the fact that he was a cleric somehow seemed to seal the idea that he would not have been allowed to fight. His age – he was fifty when I was five – and his lack of experience in warfare were among the rare issues that rendered him slightly inadequate in my childhood. While others boasted of fathers who had bombed Dresden, I could only plead that mine had led the auxiliary fire brigade at Charterhouse School, where he had been chaplain. Of this he would talk endlessly. The responsibility had brought with it precious petrol coupons, as his eccentric open-topped Hudson Essex Terraplane Eight became the fire tender. On so many family outings in the self-same car he would recount how ladders were lashed to a makeshift superstructure, and he would roar around the privileged boarding school in search of bombs. And then, one blessed day, he found one. A bomb had fallen on the school’s hallowed lawns. Even now I’m not clear what fire he may then have had to fight. But it became my father’s moment of ‘action’. Freud might argue that my own subsequent exposure to all-too vivid conflict was some kind of attempt to make up for George Snow’s absence of war. My father showed no inclination to fight, although his great height and booming voice gave him an intimidating, almost threatening presence. If only he had refused to join the armed services; but in our house in those days conscientious objectors were regarded as being as bad as the enemy themselves. His lack of a war record also represented a strange contrast to the military paraphernalia amongst which we grew up. In our own childish warfare there was more than a whiff of class. The few children of the teaching staff who lived near enough qualified for our war games. Oliver was one of these, a dependable friend who generally took my side against my two brothers, squaring up the numbers. But the children of the ‘domestic staff’ did not qualify for such sport. Susan lived across the road from Oliver, but she was the child of the school’s Sergeant Major. Although enticing and blonde, she was to be kept at a distance, and so almost became a kind of foe – unspoken to, mysterious. Her father had charge of the school guns, of which there were many. I have vivid memories of boys strutting around in military uniforms in large numbers, and of invasions staged in the school quadrangles. They were a further signal of that persistent sense of the overhang and threat of war. A remote rural English boarding school is at best a strange and intense environment in which to grow up. My father, as headmaster, was God. He was an enormous man, six feet seven in his socks, and at least sixteen stone. He wore baggy flannel suits in term time, and leather-patched tweed jackets in the evenings. In the holidays he embarrassed us all with huge scouting shorts and long, tasselled socks knitted by my mother. His hands were large and handsome, the skin cracked and tanned. He was old for as long as I can remember. To me he was strict, dependable, and at times remote. I was a very inadequate son of God. In the ever-present school community, I felt exposed and commented upon. Many of the domestic staff who lived on the school grounds seem to have been drawn from prisoner-of-war or internment camps. There were Poles, Italians, and others who appeared to have recently been released from mental hospitals. We knew them all by their first names. Among them was Jim, a kind man who was often to be found standing outside the kitchens having a smoke. One day, on one of my regular tricycle circuits of the school, Jim stopped me and asked if I’d like to come up to his room for some sweets. I was five or six. I left my tricycle and followed him up the dark staircase. Inside he sat me down and started to talk. Very soon he was undoing my brown corduroy shorts. I was worried that I’d never be able to do up the braces again – I couldn’t handle the buttons on my own. Suddenly I had no clothes on. Jim undid his trousers, and produced something which to me seemed absolutely enormous. At that very moment from beyond the door a voice shouted, ‘Jim! Jim! Come out here.’ ‘Quick!’ said Jim. ‘Under the bed!’ He hoisted his trousers and left the room. I could hear raised voices. I recognised the voice of the other man – it was the school bursar, an ex-Wing Commander who often came to lunch at home. Home, three hundred yards away, suddenly seemed a very long way away indeed. Jim returned, and peered at me under the bed. It seemed he’d been spotted abducting me. ‘You’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘What about the sweets?’ I asked. ‘Next time,’ he said. ‘Will you help me with my braces?’ I asked anxiously. He did. I was never to see him again. My brother Tom told me some time later, when I cautiously asked, that Jim had been sacked. No one ever spoke to me about what happened. Yet I can’t imagine that the bursar didn’t tell my parents. The next time he came to lunch he didn’t look me in the eye. I felt something bad had happened, but I didn’t really know what. Beyond the prison-camp feel of the domestic quarters there was one other place where there was evidence of war: Ardingly village, a long walk from the college. Most walks, most day care was in Nanny Rose’s hands. She was a solid, dependable, working-class Kentish woman, with an irresistible laugh. We had two regular walks with her. The first would take us down past Collard’s farm and the ageing foot-and-mouth warning signs on the gates, to the Avins Bridge Hotel, which straddled the little railway line that ran from Ardingly to our nearest town, Haywards Heath. This walk was always a treat, because Nanny would time it to coincide with the arrival of a train. The steam engine would let loose just under the bridge, and for an age our world would be enveloped in dense white cloud. After the train had gone we would wipe the sooty residue from our faces. The second walk took us in the opposite direction, to the village. And there we would see them: men in invalid carriages, one with a hole where his ear had been, another with an open hole in his forehead. There were younger men too – men with white sticks and eye patches, back from the Korean war. There was a large war veterans’ home in the village. Nanny said these crumpled humans were ‘shell shocked’. They frightened me, and I wanted to know what had caused those holes, but Nanny’s Daily Sketch seemed to have left her more comfortable talking about the royal family. While hints of war lay around many corners, there was also the balmy, backlit sense of security that the harvest and the annual crop of Cox’s orange pippins from the orchard yielded. The reaper binder tossed the corn, and men made stooks in the field beyond the herbaceous border. The wind caught the scent of the magnolia on the terrace wall, and bumblebees hovered around the delphiniums. My distant parents seemed at times to display more affection for plant life than for us, while in her own way Nanny loved us as if we had been her own. The contrasts of my childhood world mirrored those in the life of my family. My father’s lack of experience in the trenches was more than compensated for at the dining table by the exchange of verbal grenades with my older brother Tom from behind The Times. For as long as I can remember, Tom was on the warpath. He was a revolutionary almost as soon as he knew the meaning of the word, and his targets were my parents. Tom was to become a lifelong committed trade union official, representing some of the lowest-paid people in the country. From an early age he asserted that he intended to break with family tradition. For three centuries each eldest son had fathered a son, and each George had named that son Tom; each Tom had followed suit with George. But this Tom was most assertively never going to call any son of his George. The Toms and Georges from three hundred years dominated the walls not only of the dining room of our home, but the drawing room to boot. Most prominent of all the portraits was that of my grandfather, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas D’Oyly Snow KCB, KCMG, who hung scowling above the dining-room mantel. I never ate a boiled egg that he didn’t seem to have inspected. He was a massive presence in the home, despite having died seven years before I was born. My father spoke of him with reverence and not a little fear. My brother Tom regarded him as a monster, ‘one of so many in the ruling classes who had led their unsuspecting serfs to wholesale slaughter’. From time to time our table warfare would be joined by my first cousin Peter – destined one day to lead many a sandpit war for both ITN and the BBC. Peter was ten years older than I, and in a better position to take Tom on. His father was a serving Brigadier, and Peter himself possessed more than a streak of the old General, our mutual grandfather, in his make-up. His main contribution to the table tensions was at critical moments to reach for, and upset, the overfull and highly unstable sugarbowl, scattering the stuff across the entire battlefield. Whereupon, of course, hostilities had to be suspended while Nanny was summoned to clear it all up. Throughout the First World War General Tom, like so many of his time, had resisted mechanisation, believing in the value of the horse long after the tank had come to stay. I was perhaps six years old when my father recounted how his father had gone to Khartoum in 1885, after the failed attempt to break the siege in which General Gordon had been surrounded for ten months by the Mahdi. Tom had arrived too late to prevent Gordon’s shooting on the steps of his residence, but soon enough to acquire a chunk of the step upon which he’d died and to cart it home. It was to languish in his home at 3 Kensington Gate in London until the Blitz struck the house in 1940 and the ‘Gordon step’ was rendered indistinguishable from the rest of the rubble. As far as I could divine as a child, General Tom had been knighted twice, at least once for leading a retreat. Commanding the Fourth Division during the First World War, it seems his actions in sorting out the retreat from Mons in 1915 saved many lives. My brother Tom of course preferred to dwell on the lives the great man had caused to be lost, and of these there must indeed have been very many. General Tom was a large and austere man who ended his days in a hand-operated invalid carriage. His horse had been shot from beneath him in 1917, smashing his pelvis. He was probably one of the last British generals ever to ride a horse into battle. Further round the dining-room walls from my grandfather the General hung the family black sheep. He was a yet earlier Tom, who had made a killing of a somewhat different kind from the South Sea Bubble in 1720. He had presided over Snow’s Bank, which stood on the street named after him to this day, Snow Hill on the edge of the City of London. Of this Tom little was said – so little indeed that at one point I thought he was such a black sheep that he was in fact black. Either it was a very dirty painting, or he appeared to be of an unusually dark complexion, with black curly hair. There was no representation of my mother’s family anywhere in the house. Like everything else about her, her forebears stayed obscurely in the background. The most interesting thing about her father, my maternal grandfather, Henry Way, was that he had been born in 1837 and sired her at the age of seventy-three. He was an estate agent in Newport, on the Isle of Wight. My mother was the last of nine children born to Henry’s three wives, two of whom died in childbirth. Her eldest half-brother was fifty years older than she was. Beneath the daunting images in the dining room, our family gathered for prayers at the start of every day. Adamson the butler, his wife the cook – always known as ‘Addy’ and ‘Mrs Ad’ – and Nanny Rose would join us three boys, my mother and the eternal conductor of this solemn moment, my father. We would stand in line in order of importance. Mrs Ad always saw to it that her husband came at the end of the line. She was a formidable woman who regarded herself and Nanny Rose as at least as good as those they served. Poor Mrs Box, who did the cleaning, and Mr Webster – ‘Webby’ – the gardener, didn’t get a look-in. They were so far below stairs they never even got to glimpse the dining-room floor until it came to cleaning it or bringing in the logs. ‘Our Father, which art in heaven …’ intoned my father. This formal, ordered start to the day, which included the collect and a brief reading from the Bible, was part of the absolute security and order amid which I grew up. From the moment I could stand, I was in that line for prayers at eight in the morning, prompt. Then, while my mother and father and Tom took to the large oval dining table, my brother Nick and I, always referred to as ‘the little ones’, would go to the folding square table in the corner. My father would erect a home-made newspaper stand and settle to reading The Times. Tom would sneer at some upside-down headline that he’d caught from his vantage point, and the first salvoes would be exchanged. Sometimes, on a really good day, my mother would burst into tears, pleading with Tom to stop. ‘Your father is right, Tom, he’s not to be upset,’ she would cry. Sometimes the fusillades would be so frightening that Nick and I would cry too, and then the proceedings would have to be halted as we were ushered from the room for making too much noise. Happy days were those when some preacher or family friend had come to stay. This invariably stilled the warfare. Tom would be on his most charming behaviour. There was Aunt Rhoda, my father’s sister, who’d married and then been immediately widowed by Alec Begg, a hugely rich New Zealander thirty years her senior whom she’d met on a cruise. She would talk of war, and how safe New Zealand would have been to live in had her husband not died. She was over six feet tall, thin as a birch sapling and mad as a March hare. She lived on her beloved Alec’s money in a series of rambling hotels along the south coast. When she came to stay, we ragged her rotten. My father had another sister, Mary. Confusingly she was called Sister Mary, and looked like a seriously overgrown penguin. At some stage the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, conferred an MA on her, allowing her to enjoy the title ‘Church of England’s top nun’. She must surely have been the tallest. Over six foot like her siblings, she visited only rarely, and then eternally adorned in her white head-dress and black habit. Deeply austere, she would talk of high-flown ecclesiastical matters with my father, and of little else to any of the rest of us. Among the many preachers who came to stay were people like the Bishop of Bradford, Donald Coggan, one day to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Dad was an excellent Bishop-spotter. He always seemed to know who was on the up. This mattered because, as was often discussed at the table, my parents assumed that he would sooner or later be ‘preferred’ and elevated to some bishopric or deanery before his time as headmaster came to a close. Because Ardingly College was part of a religious foundation of schools, he was required to be both teacher and ordained churchman. Even as a child, the ‘Church’ felt to me like something of a war machine. The Church militant seemed to have an officer class – plenty of generals, with suitable quantities of gold braid – and my father was somehow, one day, bound to take his place in their ranks. Among the big-shot visitors who came to stay were people of genuine humility. Standing out from all others was Father Trevor Huddleston, who was at the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. His Church seemed to be the total opposite to my father’s, although of course it was the very same Anglican. Father Trevor wore a habit with a rope around the middle. His sandals were open, and I clearly remember his knobbly toes peering at me from beneath the dining-room table. My father was taken with his simplicity and holiness. I cannot imagine that he had a clue about Father Trevor’s politics. Certainly he never raised with us the suffering of Africa or anywhere else. It was through Trevor Huddleston, sitting at his knee at the age of six, that I first learned about Africa, and about an unequal world very far from the one implied by Tom Snow’s portrait above the mantel. ‘One day, my boy, you must come to South Africa,’ he said. ‘You’d be amazed by the people, by the villages, the animals. You could come with me on my rounds.’ I was to know Trevor on and off from my earliest childhood until his death in 1998. These visits, when the outside world would come to call, were sadly all too rare. For the most part we were oblivious to what lay beyond the long trains that snaked across the viaduct in the far distance of our Ardingly world. If we did go to Haywards Heath we were barred from entering Woolworth’s: ‘You may catch something,’ my mother would warn. Likewise the cinema – I didn’t see a film until I was thirteen, a double bill of Genevieve and Doctor in the House. My father listened to the BBC Home Service on the ‘wireless’ in his study, or to the BBC Third Programme in the drawing room. He was captivated by electronics. As a master at Eton College in the 1920s he had been the first member of staff to possess an electrically driven gramophone, and one of the earliest with a crystal wireless receiver. By the early 1950s, before the dawn of stereophonic reproduction, he had built a vast contraption out of light oak and plaster of Paris and set it in a corner of the drawing room. This was a state-of-the-art Voight mono loudspeaker. The sound came up from the belly of the beast, and was thrown up through an enormous plaster trumpet. It would then hit the canopy above and be splayed out into the centre of the room – theoretically, at least. I have no vivid memory of the sound, save that it was very loud, but the appearance was of a glorified ice-cream stand on Brighton pier. We had no television. Indeed, until the coronation of the Queen in 1953, I had no idea that there was such a thing. Our neighbour in the adjoining part of the school had just purchased one. Derek Knight was a housemaster. He lived alone and chain-smoked Senior Service cigarettes, which stained his long fingers orange-brown and made his sitting room stink of tobacco. His entire existence seemed to centre on cigarettes. My mother had smoking in common with him, and had rather a soft spot for him. She did motherly things like darning his pullovers. One day he called us in to observe a new invention. An enormous walnut cabinet stood in the corner. It had a little window in the middle, with a couple of brown Bakelite knobs beneath it and a lot of wire hanging out of the back. This was my first sighting of a television set. I couldn’t really make it out. After all, I had never seen a moving picture. Shortly before this I had been taken on my first trip to London, to see the preparations for the coronation. I remember a hot, sunny May day. The roof of the Hudson was fully down. As we approached Buckingham Palace through thronging crowds we passed open dustcarts full of workmen throwing boiled sweets. I caught one. ‘Don’t eat that, Jonathan,’ my mother chimed from the front seat. ‘You don’t know where it’s been.’ In the smelly, uncomfortable safety of Derek Knight’s sitting room, the thick brown woollen curtains were drawn against the summer sun. Ten or twelve of us craned at the little window to watch the great Coronation Day on 2 June 1953. The picture was a series of greys. It appeared to be snowing in London. From time to time I could detect a carriage, a white-gloved hand, and lots of men in ridiculous clothes. ‘This will never catch on,’ said my father of the walnut-facia’d contraption, and marched us out long before the service was over. The little window was certainly very small, and the picture indistinct, but to me it was still very intriguing. Monarchy and the royal succession matched war as part of the background to my childhood world. The third fixed point was my parents’ marriage. Yet even here, war had played a role. In 1942, in addition to being the unpaid auxiliary fire chief and air raid marshal, my father was chaplain of Charterhouse School. This was an institution some notches higher up the league of English fee-paying schools than Ardingly, to which he was to move as headmaster in the year of my birth. In his role as a cleric he would go occasionally to the neighbouring YMCA, and it was in the canteen there that he encountered Joan Way, serving tea from a large urn. She was thirty, he was forty. In the extensive scrapbooks in which he recorded his life I can find no hint of a woman until that night. Indeed, my father, the indefatigable scoutmaster and housemaster, seems to have been far more interested in boys. That is not to say that he was a homosexual. More a self-obsessed man – he called his scrap albums ‘Ego books’ – he seems to have spent his holidays in the company of some of the boys he had taught. He and they built and maintained a narrow boat on the Grand Union Canal. My mother’s arrival in the ‘Ego book’ is sudden, and comes with their engagement. George, the seasoned bachelor, proposed within three weeks of meeting Joan, and married her six weeks later. ‘That’s how it was in those days,’ my mother told me. ‘We were so conscious that we might not even survive the war.’ The engagement was so short that my father did not realise that my mother had no hair of her own. She had to tell him on the day he proposed to her that she had suffered an attack of alopecia totalis at the age of thirteen, after sitting her exams for the Royal College of Music. Her hair had fallen out over three nights, and never came back. ‘Your father was an absolute saint,’ she would say. ‘He asked for twenty-four hours to think about it after I told him, and he said he’d marry me anyway.’ This defined her status thereafter: her life was dedicated to his every need. It was a status which defied the reality that she was a concert-grade pianist who had studied composition with Herbert Howells, one of the great influences on twentieth-century English classical music. She knew as much about music as my father did about the Bible. For us, growing up with George and Joan, the lodestar was the war. Nothing was ever quite so good or quite so bad as it had been ‘during the war’. Deeply conservative, they both worshipped order, an order in which everyone knew their place. Yet my father was not entirely conventional, for in addition to his love of the electronic he had a passion for fast American cars. Apart from this, in contrast to the absolutely dominant role America was to assume in my own life, George never went there, and he expressed little or no interest either in the place or its people. In his mind Britain still ruled the world. The elevation from his 1920 Buick to the Hudson took place before I was born. The Hudson Essex Terraplane Eight was a rare beast indeed. Only six were ever made, and this one had been on the Hudson stand at the New York Motor show in 1931. Twenty-eight horsepower, she had a long bonnet and a very flat, almost unusable boot. My father had found and purchased the car through Exchange & Mart. In British terms, the Terraplane was like a cross between a Bentley and an MG. The dashboard looked like something from a makeshift cockpit: my father had installed an altimeter, a gradiometer and various other gadgets. The car was his greatest material joy. We would shop in it, pick up logs in it and go on holiday in it, squashed in the back, towing a vast caravan behind. My poor mother had to lash her wig down with tightly knotted headscarves. One day in 1956 my father upped and sold the Hudson for ?70 without warning. That was the moment that I discovered we were at war again. Our enemy this time was not Hitler, but someone called Nasser. It seemed funny to me how enemy leaders always seemed to end in ‘–er’. Ration books were back for petrol, and I was reduced to riding to school on the back of my mother’s bike. My father regarded Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister who had precipitated the Suez crisis, as a ‘good egg’. Many others thought he was unhinged. Certainly we now know that he was on a cocktail of antidepressant and other drugs at the time. With his white hair, tall good looks and white moustache, Eden seemed very much out of the top drawer. I was too young to grapple with the full story, but according to my father, ‘This man Nasser, President of Egypt, has taken it upon himself to seize the Suez Canal, which we built, and will have to be dealt with.’ Washington, for once, saw the adventure for what it was, and provided the pressure which forced the British, French and Israelis to withdraw. The Anglo-French attempt to flash the flaccid tail of empire had failed. All I knew was that our world had retreated still further into the Sussex countryside. There was another consequence too, for Suez delivered a new Prime Minister. From time to time on a Sunday evening I would go with my parents to 6.30 evensong in the school chapel. Sitting alone across the gangway, rather stooped, would be an old man in a tweed coat. One Sunday after Suez, my father introduced me to him. ‘This is the Prime Minister, Jonathan,’ he said. I shook the man’s hand and looked up into rather sad eyes and drooping eyebrows. ‘Do you know what a Prime Minister is, young man?’ Harold Macmillan asked me. ‘Something to do with the Queen?’ I suggested. ‘Are you married to her?’ ‘Good Lord, no!’ chortled Macmillan. ‘One day you might like to be a politician. That’s what I am.’ With that he got into the waiting Humber and purred away to his huge country home, Birch Grove, just beyond Ardingly village. Little was I to know that Macmillan’s wife Dorothy was probably at that very moment in bed with the scoundrel Tory MP Bob Boothby, with whom she maintained a torrid affair throughout her husband’s premiership. Perhaps this strikingly sad man gained solace from the chapel services while she found hers between the sheets. The only good politician in my father’s house was a Tory politician. Labour never got a look-in. My father’s Christian faith did not extend to embracing the birth of the welfare state. His faith was the Tory party at prayer: war, Conservatism and Anglicanism were the trinity upon which my father’s philosophy was founded. My mother never dissented from my father’s view; if anything she was even more conservative. But my relationship with her was of an altogether different texture. I enjoyed her femininity, her Blue Grass scent, her pearls, tweed skirts and Jacqmar scarves. It was not until I was eight that her greatest burden, the loss of her hair, was shared with me. Consequently she was reserved, and never let me clamber about her or run my fingers through what I still thought of as her hair. It was not until after my father’s death twenty years later that she discussed her loss of hair openly. The piano was our thread of contact throughout my childhood. My mother was a wonderfully bold performer, in stark contrast to the retiring role she played within the family. Her long, slender, beautifully manicured fingers ranged powerfully across the keys as she played her beloved Brahms. She did not play often, and never without sheet music. I longed for her to extemporise and light upon some of the tunes I knew. She never did. Instead, from perhaps the age of four I began to pick up themes from her playing, and hummed or sang along with her. I was concerned that my brothers, who spent their time buried in my father’s workshop soldering solenoids, might tease me for this, but gradually, by the age of about seven, I began to sing with more gusto. It was in this activity alone that my mother revealed her most demonstrative maternal delight. Her eternity ring would clink about on the ivories as I, who could only vaguely decipher the clusters of notes on the page, waited for the nod that would signal me to turn it. ‘I say, Joan.’ It was my father calling out from behind The Times one day at breakfast. ‘Yes, darling?’ ‘There’s a notice here about a voice trial at Winchester Cathedral to select new choristers. Shall we put the boy in for it?’ So began an intensive few weeks of arpeggios, harmonics and music theory. On the appointed day in April 1956 I turned up at Dumb Alley, a musty rehearsal room in the Winchester Cathedral Close where all the choir practices were held. Almost immediately I found myself standing next to the seated figure of the man who would be my choirmaster for the next five years, the aptly named Alwyn Surplice. After a rendition of the carol ‘Oh Little Town of Bethlehem’, I was in. I became a choral scholar at the Pilgrim’s School in the cathedral close. My father was visibly pleased with my achievement. ‘You can have anything you want, under a pound,’ he announced. This was an extravagant gesture for him, in response to my saving him some severe school fees for the next five years. It was well after five o’clock as we headed for the shops. ‘You don’t need to spend it now,’ he said. But I wanted it right now, quick, before the shops closed at 5.30. Instant gratification, when we found the toyshop, came in the shape of a pale-blue Dinky Toy car transporter. It cost sixteen shillings and sixpence – no mean sum in those days. Within three months I had arrived at Pilgrim’s School as a very full-time boarder, my holidays truncated and term times extended by saints’ days and high days, for which the sixteen members of the choir had to be present even when the other boys had gone home for vacations. The parting from Ardingly, treehouses, warfare with my brothers, music with my mother, was unutterably painful. At eight years old, I felt abandoned and inadequate. ‘He can’t do up his shoelaces, you know,’ my father had called over his departing shoulder to my new headmaster. Yet within weeks I found myself becoming part of the medieval weft and weave of the cathedral. Snaking across the close two or three times a day, we sixteen choristers were with Trollope, and Trollope was with us. We had stepped into history and joined with the characters of Barchester: dry old Canon Lloyd, with long strands of oily black hair draped across his naked pate; fat, jolly Canon Money, who didn’t seem to have any because his cassock was full of holes; and deliciously eccentric Dr Lamplugh, Bishop of Southampton, who still had a Christmas tree in the hallway of his house come July. These were the decaying generals of the Church militant, presided over by learned Dean Selwyn and the remote Bishop of Winchester, Bishop Williams. We choristers were in thrall to Alwyn Surplice, our organist and choirmaster, who smacked the backs of our hands with a ruler whenever he wanted better of us. The fingers of Alwyn Surplice’s right hand had become closely clustered as a result of years of Morse-tapping and top-secret code-breaking at Bletchley Park during the war. This heroic condition was said to excuse the occasional duff notes in his organ playing. In reality, he played the organ like a demon. Practically all the staff at the school had been to the war. Principal amongst them was the dashing Rodney Blake, who was to run off to New Zealand with the piano teacher, deserting a wife with large ankles and two children, to the scandalised gossip of the cathedral close. Rodney taught me a love of the English language in general, and of the adjective in particular. He was a man full of mystery who had served on ships in the Atlantic, and his stories of derring-do had me ready for action any time. I soon discovered that the entire cathedral was a kind of mausoleum to unbroken centuries of the direst conflict. Right in between the choir stalls where we sang lay the second proper King of England, William Rufus, with an arrow in his back. High on the side screens that led to the rood screen above the high altar were funny-coloured boxes in which the powdery remains of even earlier Kings lay, among them Canute and Ethelred the Unready. There was hardly a man interred in the building who had died peacefully in his bed. On either side, all the way down the nave, the transepts were festooned with officers who had died from Afghanistan to Zanzibar. The two World Wars seemed to have taken half the population of Hampshire with them. Everywhere there were memorials incorporating guns, cannon, stone-cast flags, swords and worse. Every day we were amongst this stone-entrenched certainty of war. To crown it all, the great west window stood testament to the results of a cannonball fired by Oliver Cromwell from the hill overlooking the cathedral. Every piece of glass in it had been smashed and rescued. The result was a jumble that left a cat’s head on a slice of human armour, a sword under the upside-down leg of a horse. Even the language of faith included words like ‘defender’, ‘sword’, ‘shield’, ‘armies’ and ‘victory’. Outside the cathedral, school in term time was a Dickensian nightmare: ghastly food, sour milk in small bottles, a potted sick-like substance called ‘sandwich spread’ on curling bread, regular beatings, cold showers and endless inspections of our fingernails. The headmaster, Humphrey Salway, was a former Guards officer with a fearsome capacity to inflict psychological and physical pain, the latter at the hand of a wooden ‘butter pat’. This was a flat, spade-like object with a leather tassel attached. It had the facility to produce blue-black weals on your buttocks, laced with red slashes. We would stand in line in our shivering pyjamas outside the headmaster’s study after being caught talking after lights-out in dormitory. The decision as to whether or not we would be beaten was entirely arbitrary. If we were, we would not be able to sit painlessly for a week or more. In a very rare act of theft, at thirteen years of age, I stole the butter pat on my last day at the school. I have often thought of old Salway, on the threshold of inflicting a sound beating, marauding around his study searching for the weapon and failing to find it. These days his motives would be questioned, but then he was a celebrated and feared figure in the cathedral close. On 8 June 1958 I was summoned home from school to meet the Queen and Prince Philip. This was a huge event. The whole of the downstairs of the house had been decorated. The lavatory – euphemistically called ‘the garden room’ – where my father sat reading the traditionalist magazine Time & Tide for unreasonable quantities of time had been gutted and refitted against the possibility that one of Their Majesties would need a pee. My mother had made a special trip to Harrods in London to secure two Crown Derby cups and saucers from which the royal lips could sip tea. The Queen and Prince Philip had opened Crawley New Town and Gatwick Airport in the morning, and were now descending upon Ardingly as part of the school’s centenary. Suddenly my father and mother were not in their usual posts at the top of the social tree. The Queen’s secretary, Sir Edward Ford, whom my father had taught at Eton, arrived early to see that all was in order. My father spoke of Harold Macmillan having played a part in securing the moment. At 3 p.m. prompt, the biggest Rolls-Royce I’d ever seen steamed through the archway and onto the quadrangle in front of our house. My brothers and I stood at the top of the steps outside the front door. Our hands were shaken. The Queen was rather small, pleated, hatted and stiff. The Duke of Edinburgh burbled, but I couldn’t understand what he said. Then they were inside, and I began to think about the garden room. Even if not sitting there, the royal bottoms must by now be sitting on some of the cushions that I knew and loved so well. Soon the Queen was gone, and I was on the train back to Winchester. Mr Salway treated me briefly like a conquering hero. At breakfast the next day I was allowed to sit next to his wife Lorna, a warm and affectionate woman who let me eat her fresh toast and marmalade instead of the usual soggy white bread and spread. But very soon normal sadistic services were resumed by her husband. This was, after all, term time. Yet once the holidays dawned and the ‘ordinary” boys went home it would be all smiles, and we sixteen who constituted the choir were never tyrannised or beaten. We were cast loose upon the town to spin out our tiny five-shilling budgets. We had absolute freedom in those days, and gained absolute sympathy too. We were spoilt rotten, people in both school and town taking pity upon us for our enforced separation from our families as we lingered on to service Christmas, Easter, Ascension and the rest. These days sowed a love of music and of the cathedral, and if not of religion, certainly of peace and contemplation in a great building. But they were also central to the destruction of our family lives. Holidays amounted to only four or five weeks a year for the five years of my time at Winchester. My father was so rarely encountered, I called him ‘sir’ by mistake. From this familial wreckage emerged a confident, independent child of thirteen – primed for adolescence, or so I was indirectly told. For Humphrey Salway’s parting shot was an obscure account of the ‘facts of life’. These centred on the ‘golden seed’, which at some point I was going to wake up and find in my bed. Beyond rust spots inflicted by the mattress springs beneath, though I searched, I grew up minus ‘golden seed’. Indeed, I left the choir school with my voice still unbroken. The letter to my father from Number Ten Downing Street arrived at Ardingly just before I returned there from my last day at Pilgrim’s: ‘The Queen has been graciously pleased to appoint you Bishop Suffragan of Whitby.’ The signature at the bottom read ‘Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister’. The new Archbishop of York, in whose domain my father’s territory lay, was to be his friend Donald Coggan. All my father’s ducks were in a row, and the longed-for preferment had come on the very eve of his retirement from Ardingly. The Church, political, militant, ecclesiastical and old-boy network, had done its stuff, and we were all thrilled. We now had a new status in life, and after Ardingly a grand new home in darkest North Yorkshire. The Old Rectory in South Kilvington, with its own little Saxon church in the garden, was as near paradise as the Bront?s would have dared imagine. My new bedroom looked south and west over the garden. I was not to pass much time there, but I spent enough in that first summer to talk hungrily with the remarkable octogenarian who tended the garden. Joe Clarke had only ever left Kilvington once in his life, and that was to go to Egypt in the First World War to dig pit latrines for victory. Joe was conscripted into the First City of London Sanitary Corps. Wherever Allied man had to do his duty, Joe was there to facilitate the needs of the lower bowel. He served for five years. ‘I tell you, master Jon, I had to give up on digging the waste to bury the dead, there was that many.’ Joe, who had dug his way through Europe after Egypt, burying the war dead, now dug his way through the Old Rectory’s rhododendrons. The carnage of the Great War was fifty years before, but Joe’s memories were as vivid as if it were yesterday. I wanted nothing more than to garden and learn with Joe, but I had a music exhibition to St Edward’s, a minor fee-paying school in Oxford. The headmaster, Frank Fisher, was the son of yet another prelate, Geoffrey, Archbishop of Canterbury. He took pity on my father’s high-born impecuniousness and secured me an ill-deserved cut in fees in the form of a choral exhibition. So on the one hand here was Joe giving me the side of war from the ranks, of which my family knew nothing, while through my father I was able to observe the insidious methods of the upper classes in securing hegemony in matters military, educational, ecclesiastical, even episcopal. Three Bishops were ‘done’ on the day my father was consecrated in York Minster, and a grand affair it was. Eight feet tall in his mitre, my father was every inch a Bishop. The Whitby nuns had toiled through the nights to spin and embroider his voluminous cope. The silversmiths had beaten his pectoral cross and crosier out of some dead Bishop’s leftover silverware. Fully adorned, my father was some spectacle; and the minster bounced with sound and colour. It was as an innocent abroad that I arrived at St Edward’s, a seriously Victorian environment. The first three weeks were spent mugging up for an initiation test, essentially a compendium of names and concepts that were peculiar to the school: ‘chaggers’ for changing rooms, ‘beaks’ for masters, ‘boguls’ for bicycles, and some ludicrous piece of ironwork on the chapel roof was ‘the boot scraper’. Sixteen years after the Second World War, here was an institution still ordered around the ball and the gun. Games were everything, and when we weren’t playing rugby, we were square-bashing in full uniform on the parade ground. I didn’t mind playing games, although my gangling form meant that my brain seemed to be too far from the extremity of my limbs. Messages as to when to kick the ball failed to connect adequately with the foot in question. In short, my hand–eye co-ordination was abominable. Watching games left me both physically and mentally cold. Yet the pseudo-military hierarchy of the place depended on hero-worshipping those who excelled in games. Because I failed to watch, or worse failed to concentrate when I was watching, I failed hopelessly at the hero-worshipping. When matches were being played I preferred to hide in the art room and paint, or strum on the piano in a practice room. One day after a rugby match, still only fourteen years old, I returned to the day room, where perhaps twenty ‘horseboxes’ were arranged around the walls. The ‘horsebox’ was your own personal space – a small contained area with a seat, a desk, shelves, and somewhere to stick up pictures of Mummy, Daddy and the dog. On this particular day I made towards my horsebox, only to find that it was completely naked – the curtain, the photos, books, cushions, possessions, all gone. Suddenly I was jumped on from behind by half a dozen of the other horsebox-dwellers. Grabbed by the hair, I was shoved into the large wastebin in the corner. In the bin already were Mummy, Daddy and the dog, all ripped to shreds, while Quink ink and the Blanco used for greening our military webbing had been smeared on what remained of my precious possessions. The bullying was institutionalised. The housemaster, a shy, dysfunctional bachelor, lived next door to our day room, and must surely have heard all the noise. Sexual activity between the boys was also commonplace. Boys were talked about as sexual objects. Blond, blue-eyed newcomers – as I had been – were trouble from the outset, importuned by bigger boys for mutual masturbation. I remember how a prefect in the neighbouring boarding house, who was building a canoe in the basement, lured me down to see it. Before I realised it, he had his hand down my trousers, and demanded mine down his. Fagging, or acting as unpaid servant, was almost as exploitative as the sex. I fagged for a diminutive seventeen-year-old prefect who demanded that the insteps of his shoes be polished so they would glisten when he knelt for communion. It was a rocky and wretched introduction to adolescence, so far from Nanny and the backlit fields of stooks that I still dreamt of from childhood. Yet it also made me political, and made me yearn, if only subconsciously, for change, and later to campaign for it. Some of us went under. I remember one boy called Prythurch – I never knew his first name – who was teased mercilessly for his pink National Health spectacles. One term he simply never came back. Academically, I was a failure. In a sense, the teaching mirrored the sport. If the school decided you were bright, you secured the best teachers, and were pushed. If you were deemed ‘thick’, you got either the rugby coaches who had to fulfil their teaching quota, or the straightforwardly unemployable. One of these was Stan Tackley. Stan was perhaps the most boring and uninterested teacher of Latin, English and French of his generation, and I had him for all three subjects. He taught with an elderly, flatulent golden Labrador at his feet. My year with Stan and his dog Brandy delivered me bottom in Latin, bottom in English, and bottom in French. I was in the bottom fifth form, 5f; my brother Nick, two years my junior, was already ahead of me in 5b. Things were looking bad, and my father took me into his study when I returned home. ‘Sonny,’ he said, causing me to wonder if he used the word because he couldn’t tell which of us was which, as we had been away so long, ‘Sonny, your mother and I have decided you should leave St Edward’s and become apprenticed at Dorman Long in Middlesbrough.’ ‘Crumbs,’ I said. ‘Me a steelworker?’ Dorman Long had a vast series of steelworks on Teesside, and my father admired the heavy industry in his diocese, never having been exposed to it before. ‘One more year, Dad,’ I pleaded. When I returned to school, Stan was still teaching me some classes, but fewer of them. In the afternoons, Stan was Major Tackley, and ran the Combined Cadet Force. The school would suddenly become a sea of khaki and air-force blue. Boys would run about brandishing bolt-action Lee Enfield guns. We were tutored in war. The staff’s wartime exploits were the iconography of discourse at the dinner table. But no member of staff could hold a candle to the school’s most famous old boys. These included Guy Gibson VC, who led the original ‘Dam Busters’ raids against German dams and was one of the greatest pilots of the Second World War, but died in action, and the legendary Group Captain Douglas Bader DSO, of 242 Squadron, RAF, who was very much alive, but literally legless. Bader was a living legend who had had both legs amputated when his fighter plane crashed during a stunt. He fought back to fly again in combat, wearing artificial pins. Now, in the early 1960s, he would rock around the school grounds, stickless and unaided, a lesson to us all. He had no job there, he was just a professional old boy. Bader in many ways typified the politics of the school. If they were ever mentioned, the Labour Party, the burgeoning ‘Ban the Bomb’ anti-nuclear movement, socialism and, of course, Communism were the enemies of what we were about. It was a political culture that chimed with that of my parents. My first memory of an ambition was indeed, at the age of fifteen, to be a Tory MP. Whether this aspiration derived from my early brush with Macmillan or from the school I don’t know, but it was certainly there. My sense of the outside world depended almost exclusively on the Daily Mail. We were only allowed the radio on Sundays, when we would listen to Forces’ Favourites, yet another reminder that all over the world there were British troops ranged against ‘the enemy’. Otherwise we listened to Radio Luxembourg, the only pop station then in being. We had no access to television. So our knowledge of world events was narrow in the extreme. I was fifteen at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. Bearded Castro, dictator of Cuba, and bald-headed Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, were depicted as exceptionally unpleasant and dangerous men. Never more so than when the latter repeatedly banged his shoe on a desk at the UN General Assembly in New York in October 1960. By contrast the handsome and clean-shaven American President, John F. Kennedy, couldn’t put a foot wrong. And Harold Macmillan had by now been transmogrified into ‘Super Mac’. The argument that Cuba might need Russia’s nuclear missiles to guard against, or even stave off, another American invasion was simply never made. Russia wanted to put her missiles on Cuba to attack America, that was the only interpretation we were ever offered. This was the Cold War, the East–West standoff. As the missile crisis deepened, we went through our nuclear protection exercises on an almost weekly basis – under our desk lids, heads in the brace position. It wasn’t until much later that I began to learn about the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, in which Kennedy had sent 1500 US-trained Cuban exiles to try to overthrow Castro. For a time the world was on the edge of the abyss of nuclear war, but I cannot pretend to have been aware of the true magnitude of it at the time. By November 1963 the world had changed again. Adorned as a woman, I was strutting my stuff on the school stage. I was playing Eva in Jean Anouilh’s comedy Thieves’ Carnival. Of my performance, the Oxford Times wrote: ‘the only giveaway is the too-masculine stride’. On the twenty-second of that month my mother and father drove down to watch the play. Act One passed without incident, but something happened during the interval. Somehow members of the audience found out that Jack Kennedy had been shot, and was dying in a Dallas clinic. The belly laughs of the first half of the performance were not repeated in the second. There was much whispering and talking low. People scurried away at the end. It was as if innocence itself had been shot. My parents were overwhelmed with gloom. ‘Super Mac’ and Jack had bonded like father and son. There had been a new optimism abroad, a new sense of Camelot and magic. And now this spirit was all but dead. With Kennedy gone, the wheels started coming off Macmillan’s wagon. The sixties began to swing. The Daily Mail revelled in telling us who was having whom, and where and how. Suddenly the where was Cliveden, and the who was the Minister for War, John Profumo. Profumo, who had had the misfortune to make love to a woman who was already sleeping with a Russian diplomat named Ivanov, a Soviet spy, was unhorsed for being economical with the truth about the matter in the House of Commons. We boys, reading this stuff, simply couldn’t believe it. The entire British Establishment had its collective trousers round its ankles, and we were thrilled by it. One day I would encounter John Profumo myself, in a very different guise. We, with our posh accents, sneered at the Yorkshire-accented Harold Wilson, who became Labour Prime Minister in 1964 with a wafer-thin majority. But he won us over the moment he set fire to his jacket pocket with his pipe. Few other outside events impinged upon our lives. And then, one bleak winter’s day in January 1965, Winston Churchill died. Every living Field Marshal and more than sixty world leaders, led by former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, attended the funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral on 30 January. Classes were abandoned for the day, and we were allowed to cluster around the few black-and-white television sets near the school. The lying in state, the swarming crowds, the vast procession, the gun carriage and the service in St Paul’s were all on an epic scale. Eisenhower, when he spoke, made my backbone tingle. I can presume to act as spokesman for millions of Americans who served with me and their British comrades during three years of war in this sector of the earth. To those men Winston Churchill was Britain … I, like all free men, pause to pay a personal tribute to the giant who now passes from among us … We say our sad goodbye to the leader to whom the entire body of free men owes so much … and now, to you, Sir Winston – my old friend – farewell! We weren’t to know it, but this was almost certainly one of the last times that collective America ever looked up to a politician who was not an American. One much later exception might prove to be Nelson Mandela, who at the time of Churchill’s death had already been in prison for treason for over two years, and still had twenty-four more to go. Churchill’s coffin was borne by barge to Waterloo. Hearing on the wireless that it had departed for its final resting place at Bladon in Oxfordshire, hundreds of boys from the school set forth, swarming across the playing fields, down across the swing bridge on the Oxford canal and across to the side of the railway line on the edge of Port Meadow. There, exposed to the full might of the mad January wind, we stood in our grey-flannel uniforms and waited, straw boaters in our hands. Bladon was only ten miles up the line, close to Blenheim Palace where Churchill had been born. And then we heard it, far down the stilled line. Soon we saw the belching steam pumping into the brittle blue winter sky. Then the great Battle of Britain class locomotive was upon us. Irish Hussars flanked the catafalque. The sturdy, flag-draped coffin was clearly visible. We bowed our heads in genuine awe. As suddenly, it was gone. However brief, it was a passing of history that would inform my sense of Britain and America, and war, for the rest of my life. America for me was still more than a decade away. That summer of 1966, at the age of eighteen, I went abroad for the first time with two friends from school. We bought a Bedford Dormobile for ?50, converted it, and headed for Greece. Belgium, Germany, Austria and Yugoslavia yielded up an effortless tapestry of history and geography. More importantly, they generated a real thirst in me to go much further. It was that summer that confirmed in me the desire to spend a year in Africa or India, or some far-flung Pacific isle, to learn more about the world. At the same time, having just left St Edward’s with only one ‘A’ level – a C pass in English – I had to set about getting educated. That autumn I ended up at Scarborough Technical College, on the edge of my father’s diocese. I was suddenly translated from dunce to intellectual. Fewer than twenty-five people out of the thousand at the college were taking ‘A’ levels at all; most were doing ‘day release’ courses in plumbing or bricklaying. Seven of us signed up to do law and economics at ‘A’ level. We had one lecturer, Bob Thomas, a wise and down-to-earth Welshman, and I learned more in a year with him than in five with the entire staff at St Edward’s. He even saved me from a disastrous affair with a beguiling older member of the administrative staff. After I was spotted disappearing out of the grounds at lunchtimes in her car and coming back more than a little dishevelled, Bob sat me down and suggested that I had a long and successful life ahead of me, and that it might not be such a good idea to be caught in flagrante with a married woman on the Scarborough downs. I left the Tech after only a year with two more ‘A’ levels, having done much to redress the ravages of private education on my confidence, ready to strike out into the world. My application to do Voluntary Service Overseas had been accepted. I was ready to go, but far less prepared than I knew. TWO (#ulink_0ce2b2b8-eb35-520e-8465-7fdd161bd242) Africa, Revolution and Despair (#ulink_0ce2b2b8-eb35-520e-8465-7fdd161bd242) TWO TUMBLEDOWN CORRUGATED HUTS at the side of the runway seemed to be the beginning and end of Entebbe Airport. The VC10 that had carried us via Rome and Tripoli appeared to be the only operational aircraft on the entire airfield. The terror that was to seize this place and inaugurate a new world of violence, in which the passenger became pawn, was still nearly a decade away. It was September 1967. I had never been on an aircraft before, never been out of Europe, and only once out of England. I had felt compelled to shake my father’s hand upon leaving home in Yorkshire, for I feared he might be dead before I returned. It was the only physical contact with him I can remember. He was still the Bishop, my mother still his ever-faithful retainer. I knew he would be impressed if I won selection for VSO. I knew too that it would offer me an escape from his world. In the build-up to my departure, Africa had seemed an exotic and distant place, Uganda even more so. But had committing myself to a year of Voluntary Service Overseas been such a sensible idea? Aboard the claustrophobic plane, on balance I was beginning to think not. As the door of the aircraft opened, the wet heat and the brown-green smell summoned me from my seat. The sound of the engines had roused the few customs and immigration officials from their slumbers. Father Grimes, chain-smoking in black, nervous, very white, with thinning hair, waited on the other side of the sheds. His greeting was unmistakably Yorkshire: ‘Welcome to Uganda! You’ve a long journey ahead of you, so let’s be going.’ There were two of us VSOs, David James and me. David was what I would call successful public school, strong in the areas where I was weak – sporty and academically bright. It was important that we didn’t fall out. Father Grimes was the head of the Catholic mission school where we were to teach for the year. The posting seemed more or less random, although we had been allowed to express a preference as to which continent we would be sent. I had never known such soakingly wet heat. We got into Grimes’s Volkswagen and set off. Lake Victoria shimmered invitingly, but the Father told us we could never swim either in it or in the river Nile that flowed from it. ‘Not just the crocodiles,’ he said, ‘it’s the snails. Bilharzia, rots yer liver.’ People were everywhere. There was nothing a bicycle could not carry. A husband pedalling, his wife sitting sidesaddle behind with one small child in her arms and a baby on her back, lengths of timber, sacks of corn, even a small coffin. I was overwhelmed by both the heat and the sights. The men were in cotton shirts, the women in elaborate and voluminous brightly printed dresses. In Kampala, the capital, Asian shops spewed their wares out onto the pavements, mopeds roared, cars tooted, dogs, goats, even cows, wandered aimlessly. On the outskirts of the city the low urban sprawl gave way to tall tropical rainforests. Then suddenly as we rounded a bend, armed men scattered across the road ahead, flagging us down. ‘It’s nothing,’ hissed Grimes. ‘Just the state of emergency.’ ‘State of emergency? No one said anything about that,’ I hissed back. As one of the armed men peered into our stationary car, Grimes added, ‘It’s King Freddy, you know, the Kabaka. He wants a comeback role. Obote, the President, wants it for himself. Freddy’s gone off to the UK in a huff. Drinks a lot, you know.’ After only five years’ independence from British rule, things in Uganda were already sounding shaky. Yet after the military men had waved us through, as we headed out across the Owen Falls, source of the Nile, and then the great hydroelectric dam, Uganda still looked at peace with itself. The waters beneath the road churned ferociously. Crested cranes stooped on the river banks, terns sat on the backs of cows taking their ease at the calmer water’s edge. Once we were clear of the dam, jacaranda trees splashed unexpectedly potent blues along both sides of the road. More than a hundred miles from Entebbe, and with the light fading, the tarmac gave way to the compressed red clay they called murum. In the dry season the road was hard as concrete, with a thick film of dust across it. In the wet season it became slithery mud. This night it was dry and spooky, the car’s headlights picking out tall, dark organic forms on either side. Small animals darted back and forth across the murum, their eyes glinting in the lights. ‘Only fifteen miles to Namasagali,’ said Grimes. Those fifteen miles took nearly an hour to negotiate. And with each passing mile my heart sank further. It felt so very far from anywhere. I thought of home, of people and places I loved; for once I envied my brothers, and even missed my mother and father. I was not enjoying my entry into Africa. But although I was unaware of it at the time, this journey, and so much of the ensuing year, was to prepare me for far more harrowing and taxing trips through Africa in years to come. Not just prepare me, but radicalise and change me more than I could possibly imagine. Kamuli College, on the banks of the Nile, was set in an old railhead at Namasagali, which had once been a trans-shipment point for cotton heading north. The engine sheds were now the school hall and the bookless library. The cotton warehouses had been broken up into classrooms. There was little fight when we arrived at Grimes’s house, which was where the station manager had lived. Inside, the four other ‘muzungus’, or European teachers, were waiting. Tom and Anne Welsh were a radical, committed Scots couple. Gus was a don’t-care Scotsman on the wild side. The fourth was another priest, a warm and engaging Dutchman called Father Zonnerveldt. These, and the fourteen indigenous teachers I would meet in the morning, would be my isolated family for the next twelve months. The house itself spoke volumes about what we were in for. A bare bulb dangled from the ceiling, the netted door frame opened onto a veranda where I could glimpse old boxes and cupboards scattered about. There was an ageing suitcase on a rickety table, with clothes tumbling out of it. Unrelated bits of furniture littered the living room, and through another door I could see the dining table, with ancient British consumer goods at one end: a discontinued line of Gale’s honey, a jar of Marmite, and a Bible sticking out from under a box of Corn Flakes. This was going to be a challenge. I went to bed in Grimes’s house that night feeling profoundly homesick and rather sorry for myself. I suspect David felt the same. Feeling very white, the next morning we gathered around the flagpole for assembly. Grimes barked at the children. They were all crisply turned out, and seemed to know every word of the Ugandan national anthem, ‘Oh Uganda, the Land of Freedom’. ‘Our Father, which art in heaven …’ intoned Father Grimes. Suddenly the stark contrast with the dining room at Ardingly, General Tom, even Winchester Cathedral, sprang into my head. I was a world away, amongst the children of the still-poor elite in a country the General’s cohorts had tried to run for more than half a century. That night David and I moved into our new ‘house’. It was more an outhouse, with a concrete floor, a living area, two bedrooms and a loo out at the back. There were beds but no sheets, mosquitoes but no nets. The night was a constant battle with insects and cockroaches seeking to share my bed. We employed John Luwangula as our cook and houseboy. Dear John could not cook to save his life, and was well past being classified as any kind of a boy. But he was strong and confident, and a fast learner, and he attended to our every need for the equivalent of around ?3 a week. My classes were large, one of forty souls, another of close on fifty. Many of the pupils were older than me, for as was often the case in Uganda, they had had to work for their school fees before they could take up a place. One morning while I had my back turned and was writing on the blackboard, someone made a rude noise. ‘Who was that?’ I asked. ‘That black boy at the back,’ answered Margaret from the front row. ‘But you’re all black,’ I said, somewhat mystified. ‘Ah, sir,’ said Margaret, ‘but some, sir, are much blacker than others. That boy comes from the north.’ The scales fell from my eyes. I, who had grown up in such charmed Anglo-Saxon circumstances, almost oblivious to black people, suddenly saw them as the rainbow coalition that they are: creamy cappuccino from the south-west of the country, blue-black Nilotic from the Upper West Nile region, nut-brown from the east. My new world was taking shape before my very eyes. The children at Kamuli College, precisely because they required money to attend the place, came from all over the country. The school reflected the tribal make-up of the entire nation, providing a living insight into the way the colonialists had arbitrarily decided the shape of the borders of Uganda. Having at first wondered how on earth I could escape the place, within a few weeks I was trying to find out how I could stay longer. This was despite the remnants of empire and war that still percolated through every aspect of the teaching. The school followed the imperially imposed Oxford & Cambridge Examination Board’s ‘O’ level curriculum. Thus I was saddled with teaching George Orwell’s Animal Farm. ‘What is Communism, sir?’ asked one child. ‘What’s a carthorse, sir?’ chimed another. The fact was that neither Orwell’s farm itself, nor the allegory it was intended to conjure, meant anything at all to my students. Trying both to teach the physical reality of an English farm to Africans and to interpret the book’s ideological subtext was a challenge indeed. Presumably I can thank the anachronistic imperial backbone instilled in me at school for the speed with which homesickness gave way to an enthusiasm for the whole adventure. Namasagali was beginning to get into my soul. The short evenings would find me down at the little dock on the Nile, where I would sit on the base of the rusting old crane watching the water go by bearing great chunks of papyrus. But it was not of Empire that I mused, despite the ‘made in England’ sign on the arm of the crane. It was of the half-naked children playing between the tracks that led to the dock-side and their circumstances that I thought. They had no shoes or socks. These children from the village further up the river were too poor to attend school at all; some had distended bellies, some had evident eye diseases. Over the months I lived at Namasagali I became friendly with their families, taking John, our houseboy, with me to translate. It rapidly dawned on me that the students at Kamuli College, poor by my standards, were rich beyond the dreams of the villagers, whose lives ebbed and flowed with the seasons. There was poverty here that I’d never begun to imagine. Two months into my stint at Namasagali I found myself at the wheel of the school minibus, slithering along the rain-soaked road heading out towards Kampala. I was taking six of the school’s best boxers to a nationwide tournament. Big Daddy, when I first saw him, was vast – huge in body, face, and personality. ‘I’m the referee today,’ he boomed as we neared the ring. Major General Idi Amin Dada was already head of the Ugandan army. My first encounter with a man who was to become synonymous with summary execution, massacre and wholesale deportation was relatively benign. In truth he seemed nicer than the then President, Milton Apollo Obote, who had ruled the country since independence. Amin was a former heavyweight champion of the Ugandan army, and it was clear that he loved boxing. He would dash across the ring after a bout and demonstrate, fortunately in only shadow terms, how it would have ended had he been one of the boxers rather than just the referee. He seemed to have a huge sense of humour, beaming at all times. He noticed me because, as he told me, ‘I’m not used to meeting white men as tall as you. Your mother must have eaten much paw-paw.’ Yet on the long journey through the night back to Namasagali, we all confessed to a lurking fear of the man. Too big and boisterous for comfort, we thought. Father Grimes, despite his bantam appearance, loved boxing too, and his having that in common with Amin was later to spare the lives of many in the school. ‘Amin was only a Sergeant Major in the First King’s East African Rifles, you know,’ Grimes told me. ‘The British sent him to Sandhurst for four months and he came back virtually a General.’ The British, seeing the writing on the colonial walls, realised by 1962 that Uganda would have to join the queue of their colonised neighbours to become independent. In common with so many African armies, Uganda’s had been left with few if any indigenous officers. A panicky last-minute course was put on in distant Surrey to convert Africans from the ranks straight to the higher echelons of the officer class. Almost overnight, one absurd, larger-than-life Sergeant Major was larded with ribbons and braid and elevated to a rank that no black man had enjoyed before him. Harmless enough in the boxing ring, perhaps, but what if such a man ever came to run the country? We would know the answer within three short years. In the school holidays we met up with other British and American volunteers and set about seeing more of Uganda and the surrounding countries. We hitched or bussed to Nairobi, Mombasa and Dar es Salaam. We camped on beaches, wandered amongst the wildlife and watched the Masai tribespeople crossing mud roads ahead of us. They were intoxicating times in which it still felt utterly safe to be a foreigner in East Africa. It would have been inconceivable to imagine that within three decades this sweltering, peaceful place would become a battleground for al Qaida. Among our group was Diana Villiers, whose father was running one of Harold Wilson’s new-fangled economic power levers – the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation. As so often with the British top drawer, my father had taught her father at Eton. Diana, like me, was headed in due course for an encounter with the new world disorder, but on another continent. Our next meeting would find us both in very different circumstances, with her married to the man running America’s Contra war against Nicaragua. But for now we were both at a point of transition, in Africa amid the passage to independence, and party to the massive afterburn of imperialism and colonisation. To me, surprisingly in 1968, it still felt comfortable. ‘Mr Jon,’ cried my houseboy, ‘I’m going to get married.’ ‘My goodness, John,’ I replied, ‘I didn’t even know you had a girlfriend.’ ‘Oh yes, sir, and I want you to be a best man at the ceremony.’ John’s wife-to-be, Elizabeth, came all the way from Kamuli town, at the other end of the murum road; she had a large family, and looked gorgeous on the day. Generations of the bride and groom’s families ran in and out of the open side walls of the church. Jesus wrestled with local tribal custom throughout the wedding ceremony. Long after I returned to England, I became a godfather to John and Elizabeth’s first child by mail. But their marriage, the villagers, the school itself, were all for me a part of coming to terms with a world that a few months earlier I had not even dreamt existed. Father Grimes ruled by missionary example and rod of iron, or rather of bamboo, which he wielded with great ferocity and regularity. I had upwards of 150 workbooks to mark each week. Hired to teach English, I ended up with both biology and technology added to my workload. In both subjects I would have to swot the night before to keep one step ahead of my pupils. I was constantly outsmarted by some of the brighter kids. Whatever happened to Noah Omolo, who wrote so lyrically and who, had he been tutored, could have made it into any top-flight Western university? ‘I want to come with you when you go, sir,’ he said to me once. ‘I will be your servant, and look after you for the rest of your life, and your wife and children too.’ Noah was to prove one of the very few Ugandans I would meet again. Or Margaret Nsubaga: ‘Dance with me when you leave, sir.’ Adding, ‘Come live with me in Uganda.’ Or Praxedes Namaganda, who came for a few weeks’ teaching practice from Makerere University. We kissed on the banks of the Nile, but she was a good Catholic, and anyway the relationship was not to survive the unpredictabilities of the postal service. On Saturday nights I had to organise the enormous disco in one of the former engine sheds, where I would dance rather too enjoyably with the older girls. On Sunday mornings I would set sail in the battered school bus for the twenty-seven-mile run to collect the Protestant padre – despite the Catholic mission status of the school, more than half the children were Protestants. Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to find the man, who was frequently inebriated, and I’d return empty-handed to the engine shed, by now transformed from disco to matins, and have to take the service myself. ‘Our father, which art in heaven …’ ‘Thank you, God,’ I thought, ‘for those dining-room prayers at Ardingly. Thank you, Jane Austen, for lying undisturbed in the nave of Winchester Cathedral while I intoned the Te Deum.’ So ‘to the manor born’ was I that the kids asked me eventually not to bother with the padre, and to continue taking the services myself. And so I became an inseparable part of this Nile-side community, talking liberation theology with the priests or Communism with Gus and the Welshes at night and working by day from 7.30 a.m. to 7.30 p.m., with an afternoon siesta. There were no newspapers. Early and late I would listen to the crackly BBC World Service fading in and out of the ether on our old valve-mains Marconi wireless. World events took on a new poignancy. I was beginning to set them in the context of my own new world. This was how, in April 1968, I heard the devastating news of the assassination of Martin Luther King, an event that was to impinge so forcibly on both my old and new worlds. Fruit and flowers abounded naturally, as did sweet potatoes and every kind of banana. Wild dogs ran about, goats and chickens wandered aimlessly, and there was eternal talk of a leopard I never saw in the nearby forest. This was my isolated Utopia. My daily rations came from two identical Asian shops in Namasagali. Both were dusty and seemed to be collapsing under the weight of what they tried to sell – huge bags of rice and flour, small bags of smelly spices, batteries, spare bicycle tyres, elderly dry biscuits, cotton, and rusty tinned peas. Ugandan boys toiled for their Asian employers in the back of the shops. In earlier imperial days the British had brought many mainly Indian workers to East Africa to build the railways and staff the civil service; later they diversified into more entrepreneurial activities. The locals regarded Asian shopkeepers as exploitative. Even in remote Namasagali there was evidence of the low-level racial friction that Idi Amin would soon trade on for post-coup popularity. Parting, when it came, was sore indeed. Each day towards the end of my time in Namasagali, as I walked from my little house to the classroom beneath the mango trees, looking out to the wide river beyond, I would think, ‘I shall never come here again. This is almost the last time I shall tread this path.’ On the final Sunday afternoon, putt-putting in the battered old school boat with its flat corrugated-iron roof along the Nile with a line draped over the stern – heaving in the massive Nile perch, enough for lunch tomorrow – I felt the tears of impending departure welling. No more tomorrows, I thought. On my final night I pledged to my students that I would return, little thinking I ever really could or would. In the event, I was indeed to be in Uganda again within a few years, although I wasn’t to make it back to Kamuli College for three more decades. I wrote to my parents of my last day at Namasagali, having gathered with the school to sing ‘Oh Uganda’ one more time around the flagpole: Transport at the best of times is virtually non-existent. One or two taxis from Kamuli had heard that it was the end of term. 320 students waiting for transport at 7 a.m. By 9 a.m. a ramshackle forty-eight-seater bus and three 195oish Peugeot estate car taxis deigned to appear. The bus managed to accommodate about ninety-five students with their boxes. With some of the other students heaving and shoving and with more than a little persuasion, it began to move. Needless to say, the starting mechanism had long since ceased to function, and it seems that it is an accepted part of one’s fare to get out and push. The taxis, boxes piled dangerously high on the roofs, had their doors finally forced shut by gangs of students. Inside there were at least fifteen visible bodies, with doubtless more underneath. The remaining students began to surge down the murum road, each trying to overtake the other in order to be the first to meet the returning bus or taxi. In this fashion several must have reached Kamuli on foot. My own departure was embarrassingly luxurious inside Grimes’s Volkswagen with all our bags, a Ugandan drum, a spear, and a mere seven people filling the five available seats. I left Uganda determined that whatever path my career took would bring me back there. I had not yet concluded that it would be journalism that would provide the means. Liverpool University in the autumn of 1968 was a strange disjunction of active, potentially angry students, and a deeply conservative institution. My unremarkable ‘A’ level results, a C, a D and an E, in English, law and economics, had not tempted any university to offer me a place, despite my having penned many flamboyant application letters postmarked ‘Uganda’. In the end, a chance meeting on a train between my father and the Dean of Liverpool’s law school clinched an underhand entry to do legal studies, and delivered me within a week to Merseyside. Maybe there is a God in heaven, I thought. Liverpool was a stark and sudden contrast to the remote banks of the Nile. By the time it reached this northern industrial city, the Mersey was as wide as the Nile at Namasagali. However, even without the African blight of Bilharzia, it was far less inviting. The university was very much part of the city. It sat high on Brownlow Hill, nudging Paddy’s Wigwam, the Catholic cathedral, at one end of Hope Street and within sight of the vast Victorian Anglican pile at the other. Unusually for a British university, some two thirds of the students lived at home, and the place had something of a nine-to-five feel about it. In October 1968 we were ‘seizing the time’. It was an era of revolution on the streets of Paris and London, and within more limited Liverpool confines I soon turned to revolt. There was a core of extremely active students. In my first few weeks I began to discover that my small pre-Uganda ambition to become a Conservative Member of Parliament had given way to a much larger one, to change the world altogether. It was a bit of a shock. I won election to the Executive of the Students’ Union as First Year Representative. Politically, Liverpool was a sea of red that was well beyond the wilting rouge of Old Labour. There were almost as many acronyms as students – IMG (International Marxists), IS (International Socialists), SLL (Socialist Labour League) and more. There were anarchists, Trotskyites, Maoists, British Communists and International Communists. I had little idea what most of them really stood for, save that they were hard-line and inflexible, and sold papers like Big Flame and Socialist Worker. The university was awash with issues that fought daily pitched battles with the sheer fun of simply being there. Where else in a year could you see the Who, the Animals, Georgie Fame, George Harrison, the Supremes and the Stones live in concert? The enormous entertainment budget of the Students’ Union, combined with the very name ‘Liverpool’, home of the Beatles, had terrific pulling power. The raves were all staged in the capacious Mountford Hall. And there, amid the detritus of the Who’s guitars, smashed the night before, we would gather in political solidarity and protest – protest that ranged over a whole gamut of disparate causes. One of the most energised campaigns was in support of Biafra in the Nigerian civil war – an attempt by the country’s most oil-rich region to break away from Nigeria altogether. We backed Biafra with a passion, even after we saw images of the Biafran leader Colonel Ojukwu’s ostentatious white grand piano being hoisted from the dockside onto the ship that was transporting his possessions to some safe haven out of the country. Idealism overcame everything. Vietnam was in the air, and our protests were generally more pro-North Vietnamese than hysterically anti-American, although large numbers of us marched on the US embassy in Grosvenor Square. To my shame, my own personal journey of revolt had not yet evolved far enough for me to make the effort to travel down to the London demonstration, although my brother Tom did. Indeed my cousin Peter, already working for ITN, held a shouted dialogue across the street with him on the evening news as he disappeared off with Tariq Ali’s breakaway group in a bid to storm the embassy itself. It was around this time that I had my own first brush with broadcasting. BBC Radio Merseyside wanted a regular weekly half-hour of student news, and I was deputed by the Students’ Union to provide it. I would cycle off to a shabby office at the back of Lewis’s department store to talk about the week’s events. Somebody at the station had already written my scripts, and while I did tinker with them, to say anything very radical seemed unnecessarily risky, particularly as I knew no one who ever listened to my broadcasts. Thus they were epic in their dullness, and certainly left me with no sense of romance about the career I would one day pursue. In amongst the politics I got on with my law course, thrilling to cases that defined negligence like Rylands v. Fletcher, over who was to blame when a reservoir flooded a neighbouring mine; or Donoghue v. Stevens, over what duty of care a drinks company owed an innocent drinker who found a snail in his ginger-beer bottle. I learned much of public international law and nothing at all of tort, or personal property. Every one of my fellow law students wanted to join the legal profession. I thought I didn’t, but that I might drift into becoming a barrister anyway. I passed my first-year exams with flying colours in June 1969, and left the next day for the most extraordinary adventure by road to India. It was to take every day of the long vacation until the end of September. We who were to travel had to raise the money ourselves. One of my fund-raising stunts had been an attempt to break the world record for sitting on a lavatory. My bid was staged on a platform in the front hall of the Students’ Union. Twenty-five hours I sat on the thing, with my trousers round my ankles, only to discover that the prudes at the Guinness Book of Records would not accept it. In truth I was never able to establish that it was a record anyway, but certainly no one else seemed to be fool enough to claim it. I raised ?1200 from sponsors including Armitage Shanks, who made the thing, revealing an unexpected sense of humour. In the final hour students were allowed to buy eggs for 20p each, and reduce me to a ripe old mess. Our passage to India was courtesy of Comex – the Commonwealth Expedition. This was a mad escapade run by an eccentric who we knew simply as Colonel Gregory. Gregory’s dream was for every university in the land to send a busload of students on a cultural exchange to India, and for as many Indian universities as possible to do so in reverse. It was a brilliant and idealistic way of attempting to give new life to an institution – the British Commonwealth – that already had an elderly, even patronising air of imperial legacy and UK dominance. I was to be one of our two drivers, so I had to train for and pass my bus driver’s licence in between demonstrations and exams. We twenty-five souls aboard had to decide what our cultural offering should amount to. We suspected that many in India, if they had heard of Liverpool at all, would have done so because of the Beatles, so we lit upon the idea of a four-part close-harmony Beatle band with guitar and drums. In addition to driving, I was to supply the bass harmonies. I was spared involvement in Sheridan’s eighteenth-century play The Rivals, which the rest of the crew proposed to stage. Somehow the Colonel had cajoled the manufacturers Bedford to supply all the shortened single-decker buses on some kind of subsidised lease-lend basis. When we gathered in Ostend for the first leg of the overland dash for India there were more than two dozen cream Bedford Duples lined up, one each for twenty-five universities, sporting the green-and-gold Comex livery. They looked like an advertiser’s dream. But it was the last time they would. If they returned at all from their ten-thousand-mile odyssey they would have more than lost their sheen. Once we were under way, countries I’d never expected to visit in my life fell before us like ninepins: Belgium and Luxembourg went without a stop. My whole sense of political geography was changing. Our first night, and first concert, was at a castle above Stuttgart. I found a Germany very far from the one I’d heard my parents talk about in childhood. It felt more prosperous than home, and more energised. ‘Hey Jude, don’t be afraid …’ The close harmony worked beautifully, and the castle walls rang to the applause of the locals who’d turned out to hear us. The Rivals went less well, its complicated plot lines hanging heavy on the German night air. We slept en masse in a gymnasium. I had never slept in the company of so many women. But for our hippy appearance, the expedition had all the hallmarks of a travelling British holiday camp. Crossing into Yugoslavia from Austria, we tasted the only Communist regime of our journey. Tito was everywhere, or rather his bespectacled image was. The country felt surprisingly mellow, and beyond the somewhat monotone look of the traffic, gave little sign of being very different to the rest of Western Europe. On the wide road running south from Zagreb to Belgrade all twenty-five buses stopped on the hard shoulder to remember the members of an earlier Comex expedition whose bus had crashed at this spot. Seven or eight of them had died, and many more had been injured. It introduced a sombre note to our continuous fast driving and youthful overtaking. That first glimpse of Yugoslavia was to stand me in good stead later in life, when the ethnic tensions beneath the surface burst into frenzied hatred and killing. In Belgrade, Tito himself turned out in the stadium for our concert. Tough, burly, beaming a warm welcome, he was clearly and massively in charge. I didn’t get near him, but I did catch sight of his foot tapping as I belted out the bass line to ‘All You Need is Love’. It wasn’t until we reached eastern Turkey that the buses began to pay the price for their large expanses of glass and glinting chrome – too much of a temptation for the locals, who extracted stones from the decaying roadway and hurled them with great accuracy at our passing cavalcade. We lost our back two windows, Cambridge lost all their glass down one side, Aberdeen lost their windscreen and East Anglia most of their windows on both sides. Crossing into Iran, the convoy had taken on a billowing aspect, with curtains and possessions blowing out of assorted openings. Somehow, without the benefit of mobile phone or internet, Colonel Gregory had lined up replacement glass to await our arrival in Tehran. With nine years to go until the Iranian revolution, this was the time of some of the Shah’s most ostentatious consumption. Persepolis was littered with the paraphernalia of his attempt to mark the supposed millennium of his phoney dynasty. Everywhere were the signs of Westernisation and Americana. The Shah’s Tehran was more than ready for the Beatles, even the somewhat inadequate line-up we had on offer, and we played to packed houses in the basketball stadium. We left Iran along the coast of the Caspian Sea. Gazing up at the hills overlooking the water, I spotted the telltale giant white golf balls of the early-warning station that the US maintained here against Russian missile tests in the Urals. I knew what they were from having seen a similar installation at Fylingdales, in the heart of my father’s Yorkshire diocese. In a magical kind of way I was laying the superficial building blocks that would assist me later to track the evolving new world disharmony. Yet as we voyaged on towards Afghanistan I still had no idea of becoming a journalist, or of ever retracing my steps here. The western Afghan town of Herat slumbered in the late-afternoon heat. Old men sat on their white-robed haunches, sipping tea at the roadside. Their hennaed beards and brown features stood out against the tea stalls beyond. Camels and mules fought for street space with ancient bicycles and the occasional highly decorated, heavily overladen truck. The main roads were the best we encountered east of the Bosphorus, for Afghanistan was the archetypal buffer state. They were so straight that they were only marred by frequent head-on collisions induced by sleep and mesmerisation. The international power play here was tense indeed. The United States had built the road from the Iranian border to Kandahar, the Russians had built the rest most of the way to the bottom of the Khyber Pass. By now our caravan of suburban British buses had broken up into much smaller convoys, having become separated by punctures and breakdowns. Although our own bus was the nexus of our travelling lives, some of us had forged relations with people on other buses. By now the Aberdeen bus held a special attraction for me. I had fallen into easy conversation with one of their crew, Liz, but it was almost impossible to keep track of her; her wretched vehicle rarely coincided with ours. But trying to find her, and then unexpectedly encountering her, provided an extra frisson to an already incredible journey. Kabul was the capital of the hippy kingdom. There were Western dropouts and druggies everywhere, some in an awful state. Others had simply merged into the scenery. The city was a mellow and tolerant place. What it lacked in tension, though, it made up for in mystery. Whatever the warlords were up to, it certainly didn’t seem to be war. Opium appeared to be present more in the consumption than in the trade. This was a buffer state that, while operating at a barely tolerable level of existence, seemed to work nevertheless. It was hard to see why anyone would want to change it. Yet we were less than a decade from the Russian invasion that would herald the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, and would sow the seeds of the Taliban and eventually of al Qaida. Sitting round our campfire near the British embassy on our third night in town, smoking marijuana and most definitely inhaling, we thought all was well with the world. The Khyber Pass, on the other hand, had a distinct presence of the old world disorder: bandits. ‘Passage only between dawn and dusk: military escort mandatory’ read the notice at the bottom of the pass. We decided to divide our buses into convoys of five, with military vehicles between each. It took so long for us to wind up through the Khyber that dusk had turned to absolute darkness for the last stretch. From time to time we would stop while scouts up on the escarpments looked out for bandits. We could hear the Pakistani army and the bandits calling to one another across the valley. It had taken us five weeks to reach Pakistan, where we travelled past the bustling arms and drug dealers of Peshawar on to Rawalpindi and the seething streets of Lahore, ending up pony trekking for a day in the Murray Hills to the north of the country. India arrived gradually, its approach reflected in the evolution of the bread through our journey – upright Hovis in Britain, giving way to lower, rounder breads in France, flatter still by Turkey and Iran, until we reached the chapatti and the nan in India. She was to prove an inspiring climax. This was one of the last periods in the drift to disorder when such an overland trip could be undertaken relatively safely. Our first stop was the sumptuous, and in those days peaceful, Kashmir. Land of mountains, lakes and wildflowers, and to this day one of the most beautiful places to which I have ever been. Thence to Nanithal, an old British hill station possessed of the most spectacular views of the mountains leading to Everest. Sikh waiters served us tea and cucumber sandwiches on the lawn of the Nainital Rowing Club. By the time we reached Delhi we were feted as if we were the Beatles. A hundred thousand people packed the main city arena that night to hear us in concert with local Indian musicians. We were mobbed, our hair pulled, our ears deafened by the screaming. Our final destination, however, was not the Indian capital, but the University of Benares. Benares, the Hindu burial centre of the Ganges, was teeming with people. The funeral pyres burnt brightly on the banks, the mourners cascading into the water, boats bearing yet more pyres. Bodies were carried head-high for incineration. Unfortunately, by the time we reached it the University of Benares had been closed by the police after riots on the campus. It was an odd anticlimax to so spectacular an adventure. Three weeks later we had raced back across Asia and Europe to return to Liverpool for the first day of my second year. In our absence, man had walked on the moon, Vietnam had suffered another massacre, and Nelson Mandela had passed his sixth year in jail on Robben Island. We were angry, stirred by injustice, shaken by other people’s wars. We could afford to be: there was full employment in Britain then, we didn’t lie awake at night wondering how we would earn a crust when we left university. However, our anger was but a bit-part player in the larger anger that still raged across campuses from the London School of Economics to the Sorbonne in Paris. In some senses, in the autumn of 1969 we were actively in search of the issue with which to confront the authorities at Liverpool. Students at Warwick University had discovered secret files kept on the politically active; doubtless the same thing was happening at Liverpool. Nasty Nixon still had some years to go before his defenestration from the White House, and Vietnam simmered on, but that did not involve either the British or university authorities. Indeed Prime Minister Harold Wilson had wisely, and somewhat courageously, refused active British involvement on the American side. It was Peter Hain, subsequently a Labour Cabinet Minister, who finally identified our cause. Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had spent the previous months preaching ‘change through economic engagement’ with the South African apartheid regime. Wilson and others had gone soft on economic sanctions, and the apartheid state was consolidating its hold amid calls from Nelson Mandela’s beleaguered African National Congress (ANC) cohorts to black South Africans to burn their passbooks. British culpability and collusion with apartheid were clear, but what was Liverpool’s connection? Even in those days, the presence of the great Tate & Lyle sugar empire on the Liverpool dockyards was unmissable. Liverpool was effectively Tate & Lyle’s British capital. The university had sizeable investments, and a goodly portion found its way to investments in South Africa, where Tate was still big. Hey presto! We had our cause. ‘Disinvest from South Africa’ became our clarion cry. The only bank on campus, Barclays, with its notorious presence in South Africa, became a target too. The sheer size of my overdraft rendered me embarrassingly unable to withdraw my funds to join the protest, but join I did, with my Barclays chequebook festering in my back pocket. Liverpool at the time suffered from a kind of staff/student apartheid which meant there was no provision for resolving such issues through dialogue. The students had no representation on any of the university administrative or governing bodies, which meant that before we could demand disinvestment, we had to demand access to power and representation within the university itself. These were heady days, when students of every political complexion and none would gather to plot and manoeuvre. One of the most active staff members was Robert Kilroy-Silk, a junior lecturer in the Politics Department, one day to become a Labour MP, later to host the BBC TV daytime sofa show Kilroy, later still to be sidelined from it for making allegedly racist comments about Arabs, and still later to rise again as an anti-Europe Member of the European Parliament. But in those days no one was more enthusiastic in his support of the students; no member of staff talked more earnestly of delivering revolution in their ranks. Kilroy was a rabid revolutionary. In November 1969 Peter Hain, himself South African by birth, came north with his ‘Stop the Seventy Tour’ campaign. The South African Springboks rugby team were already in Britain, while a cricket tour was to take place in the summer. Hain’s ultimately hugely successful campaign recognised that sport was very close to the heart of the apartheid regime. It was the public, competitive and white face of South Africa. We might not be able to spring Mandela from Robben Island, but we could at least stop his jailers from playing sport in our green and pleasant land. Hain’s target was the Springboks’ match at Old Trafford in Manchester. ‘Come on, Jon, we need you over there today.’ The call came from Dave Robertson, the Prince of Darkness, eternally turned out in black. He was the most articulate student operative on the left, the leader of the university Socialist Society, well to the left of anything I could have subscribed to. Nevertheless, I was flattered that he wanted me along for the ride to Manchester. Dave is now Professor of Politics at John Moore’s University in Liverpool, but in those days he regarded me as ‘a bloody public-school pinko liberal’. Several hundred of us hit the East Lancs highway bound for Old Trafford. Our job was to try to prevent that afternoon’s match from taking place at all. I noticed some of our number carried less than discreet spades with them. Old Trafford was set for war. There were police and demonstrators everywhere. Hain stood on a flatbed truck outside the ground together with other luminaries urging a peaceful protest. The men with the spades were already worming their way into the ground. It didn’t take long for things to turn nasty. The police started trying to corral us into sectors further away from the gates, so that spectators could get in. The idea that someone had taken the decision to come and watch the match delineated them for us as out-and-out racists and supporters of apartheid, which in a discreet kind of a way I guess they were. Fights broke out. The police charged, and I felt a knee thrust hard into my groin. I thrust back, and within seconds I was pinned to the ground by three Mancunian cops and carted off in a paddy wagon to Old Trafford police station. ‘Jonathan George Snow, you have been arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer.’ ‘Damn me,’ I thought, ‘that’s my law career up the spout. No more barristering for me. Is this a criminal record I see before me?’ ‘Have you anything to say?’ ‘Not guilty, sir!’ It was six in the evening when I was taken down to the cells. The police wanted ?100 bail for me, and I had no money to get back to Liverpool. I counted eleven others in my cell, and one bucket in the corner. There must have been ten cells, which meant maybe over a hundred arrested in this police station alone. Despite our numbers, I felt daunted by the charge hanging over me, and by the thought of what my father and the university authorities would say. My turn for the solitary pay phone came at 4.30 a.m., by which time, having spent the night slumped on a concrete floor, I was in far from the best of spirits. In those days I lived in a flat on Liverpool’s Mount Street next door to the poet Adrian Henri, a sweet place opposite the old College of Art where John Lennon had studied. My flatmate Simon Polito was a charming but completely apolitical character. He proved utterly dependable in a storm, however. He leapt out of bed in response to my plaintive call, summoned legal assistance in the inebriated student form of John Aspinall, later a judge, and hurtled down the East Lancs in his VW to our assistance. Simon fixed the bail and was not in the least judgemental, and John set to with how we would run the defence. I was remanded to appear before a stipendiary magistrate in a week’s time. The Liverpool law faculty had the decency to accept the basic tenet of English law, ‘innocent until proved guilty’. My father hadn’t found out. So for the moment I was in the clear, but it was a serious charge, and if found guilty I knew everything would change. I decided to defend myself, and to go for the old chestnut of appealing to the magistrate’s sense of social justice. In other words, to leave him in no doubt that we were of the same social class. I appeared with my shoulder-length hair neatly kempt, and my body in a suit borrowed from Simon, who fortunately was as tall as me. PC Wilson was a small man for a policeman, perhaps five foot eight. I was six foot four. ‘Officer, is it possible that your knee came into contact with my groin?’ I asked straight off. I had thought he would deny it, but no. ‘Yes, sir, quite possible, in the act of perambulation, on the move, quite possible,’ he said. ‘Officer, could you please walk between the witness box and the dock?’ For a moment it looked as if the magistrate might refuse my request, but PC Wilson walked. ‘Officer,’ I asked, ‘I wonder if we could estimate the height to which your knee rises in this act of perambulation?’ ‘Two foot I should say, sir.’ I addressed the magistrate. ‘I think the court should know that my inside leg measures thirty-six inches. For twenty-four inches to collide with thirty-six inches would require a deliberate upward thrust. I would submit that it was I who was assaulted.’ I felt a pang of remorse for PC Wilson as the magistrate intoned, ‘Case dismissed. You may leave the court.’ I knew that if I’d been a working-class lad he’d have got me – after all, I most certainly had booted PC Wilson back. My legal career survived another day, but not for many more. The university had been carrying on regardless in the meantime, refusing to discuss anything with its revolting students. The authorities were more concerned with the opening of the new Senate Block, an administrative preserve reserved for themselves. Princess Alexandra had been tapped to come and do the opening. Fired with renewed zeal by the Hain campaign, we had turned our attention to this event and to the impending arrival of the university Chancellor to officiate. Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, fifth Marquess of Salisbury, had been Chancellor of Liverpool University since 1951. He was no friend to South Africa’s black majority, and perhaps too much of a friend to Ian Smith’s illegal seizure of power on behalf of the white minority in neighbouring Rhodesia. His speeches in the House of Lords were positively inflammatory. As the date for the Senate Block opening approached, hundreds of students gathered on a daily basis in Mountford Hall. The campus was alive with debate. Several thousand students marched to protest against the Chancellor continuing in office, particularly given that there were now some forty students from southern Africa on the university roll. Still the university refused to entertain even a meeting with the elected student body. So it was proposed that one of us be deputed to go to Lord Salisbury and tell him that his presence on campus could cause serious trouble during Princess Alexandra’s visit. We also wrote to her to request a meeting when she came. ‘You’d be the best to do it, Jon,’ opined Richard Davies, who as President of the Students’ Union might have been expected to talk to Salisbury. ‘He’ll understand you better, with yer public-school accent. Anyway, yer dad’s a Bishop, that’ll appeal to him.’ So it was that on the afternoon before the opening I found myself standing on a platform at Lime Street station in the best clothes I could muster, awaiting the London train. The Marquess stumbled out of his first-class carriage with a straggling retinue. ‘My Lord,’ I said, ‘may I have a word?’ He was charm itself. ‘Now, young man, who are you?’ Where now the rabid racist? In his place I had found a stooped old aristocrat. Could I bring myself to do it? It all came blurting out in one run: ‘My Lord, my name is Jon Snow, and I’ve come to tell you on behalf of the Students’ Union that if you venture onto the campus, your presence could ignite a riot.’ ‘Now,’ he said, ‘why don’t you come and take tea with me at my hotel, and we can talk about it.’ So the Marquess, his travelling staff and the long-haired boy from the Students’ Union made their way in a curious-looking crocodile to the neighbouring Adelphi Hotel. There amongst the marble pillars we were served Earl Grey tea and cucumber sandwiches. We talked for what seemed like an age. I was afraid one of the other members of the student executive might be lurking somewhere, and would spot me so conspicuously supping with the devil. ‘Very well,’ said Lord Salisbury at the end of it all. ‘I shall not come to the university. Indeed, I shall never come here again. I shall resign. I tell you frankly, Mr Snow, I’ve never much liked coming to Liverpool anyway. It’s an awfully long way from home. I am relieved to think that when I board the London train in a few minutes’ time, I shall never have to do it again.’ And with that he and his retinue paid the bill and departed. I walked back up Brownlow Hill towards the university, both depressed and elated. Depressed that I’d abused my roots, and been rude to one of those I’d been brought up to believe were my elders and betters. Elated because I’d scored a hole in one. Not just sent him home, but persuaded the old rogue to resign altogether – although I couldn’t pretend it had been hard. Here writ large were the conflicting loyalties of my old and new worlds. The university authorities were enraged. They only heard that the Chancellor had resigned through us. They knew it had been our doing. They had lost the one nob the place had been able to sport for all these years, and they felt reduced by his going. Thousands turned out to demonstrate when Princess Alexandra came the next day. She was grace incarnate, waving regally and smiling. We thought none the worse of her. We knew we had messed the entire event up already. The Vice Chancellor continued to refuse to speak to us, the Registrar likewise. These days we’d probably discover that they were of the finest, but then they had fangs. ‘Loathsome apartheid supporters’, ‘anti-democrats’, ‘fascists’ – there was no limit to the abuse we were prepared to heap upon them. They in turn had marked us down. They would get their revenge soon enough. But now we were on a roll. Having got rid of the Chancellor, we prepared to force the rest of our demands upon the Vice Chancellor and his cohorts. ‘Representation on university bodies’, ‘no secret files’, ‘a say in who the next Chancellor will be’, and, more important than anything, ‘disinvestment of all the university’s holdings in South Africa’ – and of course ‘no victimisation of those who had pressed for these changes’. The demands were carried over to the Vice Chancellor’s office in the new Senate Block the day after Princess Alexandra had opened the building. They were dispatched by a mass meeting attended by more than two thousand students. The emissary returned, having been refused entry. I got up on the stage and bellowed, ‘Occupy!’ We all streamed out across the quad and stormed into the Senate building. The staff within were terrified, and fled. Suddenly, against all expectation and with no planning, we found ourselves in possession of the seat of the university’s power. Fifteen hundred students had begun what in those days was termed a ‘sit-in’. The sense outside was that dangerous revolutionaries had seized the place. This was only exacerbated by the action of some of the more committed leftists in raising a red flag on the pole on the roof of the building. The truth below was more complex. The vast majority of the students had never been involved in direct action before. The formally ideological represented less than a hundred of our number. ‘What the hell do we do now?’ I asked the President of the Union, Richard Davies. ‘Keep meeting, keep talking, and organise,’ he replied. So while he summoned the first of many mass meetings in the sumptuous new Senate meeting room, I set about organising the practicalities. The logistical problems were massive, from food to lavatories. Apart from anything else, we had to raise funds fast. Students came up with what cash they could, and the Liverpool Trades Union Council sent in more. Food runs were organised. Others started to devise an ‘alternative university’ that would run in parallel with our proper studies. The far left did their best to hijack the proceedings, but while Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn from the LSE came up to lecture, there were simply too many occupiers for any single sect to prevail. The occupation lasted several weeks. The numbers gradually dwindled to under a thousand, still sizeable in a university which in those days held seven thousand students. Negotiations with the authorities were sparse and unproductive. In the end the approaching Easter holidays called a halt to our small revolution. I was determined that we should leave the building exactly as we had found it, as to do so would rob the authorities of a propaganda coup that we had in some way defiled the place. An epic clean-up lasting two days and a night preceded our exit. In the end, a single cracked lavatory window was all the damage the authorities could find. As we filed out, we were all filmed and photographed. Three days later ten of us, mostly elected officers of the Students’ Union, were charged by the authorities with bringing the university into disrepute. Of Robert Kilroy-Silk, so voluble at the start, there was no sign. In the middle of the holidays a kangaroo court of seven professorial staff was summoned to ‘try’ us. Naturally there was no legal representation for any of us. The university’s case was prepared and prosecuted by a local QC named Stannard. We looked in vain for anyone who would defend us, scouring the empty campus for witnesses, not least for Kilroy, but alas he must already have been ‘tanning up’ for his TV career. Pete Creswell, a committed member of the Socialist Society, drew a water-pistol during the proceedings, and at least had the pleasure of seeing the kangaroos dive for cover. All ten of us were naturally found guilty of the charge of ‘bringing the good name of the university into disrepute’. Creswell and an anarchist called Ian Williams were expelled, the rest of us were rusticated, or sent down, for one year or two. In my case it was for a year, on the grounds that my tireless efforts to sustain the fabric of the Senate building counted in my favour. The whole charade was so blatant a denial of natural justice, and the expulsion so large even in those rebellious days, that the national press picked up on it. Even the Telegraph led its front page with it. Buoyed up, we decided to appeal. Suddenly the offers of legal help came forth. John Griffith, the celebrated Professor of Law at the LSE, came up at his own expense and slept on one of our floors. E. Rex Makin, a controversial local solicitor, nicknamed ‘Sexy Rex/, offered his help to me. Even my dear father unexpectedly weighed in, writing a top-of-column letter to The Times, signed ‘Bishop of Whitby’. It was somewhat undermined by his omission of the detail that he was the father of one of the students. Despite apparently sharing no common ground with any of our demands, he remained steadfastly supportive. On the day of the appeal, the local unions called a one-day strike and demonstration on our behalf at the pier head. It had been called for 3 p.m., which we thought would be safely after the appeals had ended, so that we could join the protest. But Professor Griffith and Sexy Rexy entered so spirited a defence that it was five to three by the time the last four of us had presented our appeals. ‘Never mind,’ said Makin, Til get you to the pier head. My car’s round the back here.’ We had not bargained for a gold Rolls-Royce. ‘We can’t possibly travel in that load of capitalist trash,’ said Ian Williams. ‘I’m walking.’ ‘You’ll miss the whole thing,’ I said. ‘It’s a demo in aid of the Liverpool Ten. We can’t leave them with just six of us.’ So we all piled in. As we neared the demonstration, the projectiles began to hit the Roller. Poor old Rexy: no fee, and damaged bodywork to boot. The next day I left Liverpool with a very heavy heart. I did not know it then, but I was never to return to the university. My vast ambition, built on slender academic achievement, to secure a degree, and choices, and eventual return to Uganda, had crashed. I wasn’t even a member of any political party. I had no ideology that might provide answers to what I perceived to be the unjust and archaic actions of a supposedly liberal seat of learning. Things couldn’t have looked worse. I felt that what I had done had come from my heart, had sprung from the African bush, from an innate sense of justice. At just twenty-two years old I felt very wronged, and very broken. THREE (#ulink_b42949f4-9b37-5ff1-b183-4bfc7b5bcc3d) Of Drugs and Spooks (#ulink_b42949f4-9b37-5ff1-b183-4bfc7b5bcc3d) I DID NOT SEE HIM AT FIRST, it was so dark. The seventh Earl of Longford sat in one of the little cubicles that lined the walls of the New Horizon Youth Centre in London’s Soho. It was early May 1970, in a dingy room in which it was impossible to tell the staff from the young drug addicts who had dropped by. But even in a room full of odd people, Frank Longford stood out, with his erect rim of wiry hair around his famously bald, bright, but eccentric head. Recovering from the ashes of my enforced Liverpool departure, I had sought another overseas volunteering experience, but no one would have me because of my student past. So I set about trying to do something like VSO inside Britain. I had heard through the grapevine that Lord Longford was looking for a new director for his drop-in centre for homeless teenagers in London’s West End. The previous incumbent had suffered a nervous breakdown. His main qualification for the job, in Longford’s eyes, seemed to have been that he had been thrown out of Hornsey College of Art following a riot. Longford had intended to run the centre himself following his resignation from Harold Wilson’s Cabinet over the government’s failure to raise the school leaving age to sixteen in 1967, but unfortunately his combination of age and eccentricity had rendered him the daily victim of robbery and battery at the hands of those he sought to aid. ‘Lord Longford,’ I said, ‘it’s me. I’m here about the job.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘I think your father must have taught me at Eton.’ Even in this godforsaken place the old class connection chimed. ‘Yes, that’s probably true,’ I said half-heartedly. Here was I, I teased myself, gone to the very barricades for the black majority in South Africa, and yet still apparently trying to secure a job in the scruffiest of day centres simply by dint of birth. But it was as if old Longford could read my mind. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’m going to hire you anyway. Your predecessor was a success, so I’m going to appoint you. Your expulsion alone ensures you’ll be a success here. You’ll just have to see a couple of other members of the management committee first.’ It was agreed that I would return in a week to meet them. I was off the scrapheap. The two men were waiting in a nearby Soho coffee bar. Both wore trilby hats, large greatcoats and suede shoes. Sir Matthew Slattery, tall and bespectacled, was chairman of BOAC, forerunner of British Airways. He was rather direct, and I was afraid he’d find me wanting, but I survived his scrutiny. He clearly saw my expulsion from Liverpool as very much a disqualification, only ameliorated by my social class, which was probably the same as his. He clearly didn’t like my politics, and neither did the other man. Slattery didn’t introduce his colleague, who seemed vaguely familiar, seriously dapper and precise. He proved to be John Profumo, the disgraced ex-Minister for War, now working out his redemption at a settlement in London’s East End. ‘Hello, Jon,’ said Profumo. ‘Do call me Jack.’ I felt an immediate affinity with him, for I too intended to purge my sins and work my redemptive passage. It was only seven years since Profumo’s fall, but he manifested such humility, and yet such confidence. He was a considerable contrast from the wretched wreck that I had presumed a man who had suffered such public humiliation would have become. Lying to the House of Commons about an affair with a woman who had slept with a Russian spy may have shocked the nation, but it had also resulted in Profumo’s coming to work for New Horizon. And work he did, ceaselessly, to get the funding and profile that the centre needed to survive. But the British Establishment had been so bruised, and was so far up its own class-consciousness, that to this day it has remained incapable of recognising the far more important role that he now occupied. Profumo seemed almost to have walked out of my ‘A’ level English text, Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. Like the fictional arms dealer Andrew Undershaft before him, John Profumo, Minister for War, had determined to move from armaments to working with the poor. Domestic Britain was still in transition from the unquestioning post-war, post-imperial order to something more multicultural, more egalitarian. Slattery, Profumo, even Longford were all of the old order. The new was still formulating. It was going to be a struggle, and New Horizon wouldn’t be a bad place from which to observe it. What I was to see was the harshest evidence of the consequences of upheaval and neglect. The steps down to the underground station at Piccadilly Circus were wet, and stank of urine. Bodies slumped on the lower steps. The cubicles in the lavatories were littered with discarded needles. Blood was spattered on the dirty white wall-tiles. This was the epicentre of Britain’s burgeoning heroin crisis, a stone’s throw from St Anne’s church in Soho, where New Horizon occupied the ground floor. We were open to anyone under twenty-one. Hard drugs played a role in most of the problems we dealt with. The NHS drug clinics had just started dishing out legal heroin in an attempt to see off the Chinese Triad gangs that were taking hold around London’s West End. The black market was rife, and we caught glimpses of it all the time in the day centre. Fifteen-year-olds would come in having injected Ajax scouring powder that had been sold as heroin. Teenagers already dependent upon the drug were cranking up barbiturates intravenously to blunt their withdrawal symptoms. The casualties were on a huge scale, too many for us to deal with. There was also nowhere for us to house them. What hostels there were wouldn’t take anyone with a drug record, and without improving their living circumstances there wasn’t much we could do about their habits. In the first year Longford, Slattery and Profumo managed to raise enough money to expand and move the centre to Covent Garden. A caretaker’s flat went with the place, and I was unwise enough to move into it. From the three staff I’d inherited, we grew to fifteen. We opened a hostel of our own in north London, together with an emergency night shelter. In some senses I felt I was reconnecting with something that had lain beneath the surface of my time in Uganda: the consequence of great poverty. Forty per cent of the kids at New Horizon came from local authority care schemes. The word ‘care’ was a pretty gross misnomer. Many had passed through a dozen or more foster homes or institutions; almost none of them had any educational qualifications. The state had nurtured them for the refuse tip, or at least for jail, where I spent increasing amounts of time visiting our clients. Many of the other young people we saw had come from abusive or broken homes. It was through working at the centre that I met Madeleine Colvin. She came in one afternoon, a stunning curly-haired lawyer in a summer dress who abandoned her white Fiat 500 at the door. She would come once a week to give voluntary legal advice. We started going out almost immediately, but it would be years before we settled into any kind of partnership. Living ‘above the shop’ in the caretaker’s flat became increasingly problematic. I well remember escaping with Madeleine one night, and driving off to a party in Oxford. At the party there was a particularly seductive-looking strawberry flan, and we all devoured it. Not long after, I began to feel queasy. Driving home along the M40 with five of us in my Mini, I began to hallucinate that the car was too big to fit beneath the bridges. The white lines became aggressive. Someone had spiked the flan with acid. I was tripping out. Only one of the five of us in the car had not eaten of the flan, and she took over and drove us home. Once Madeleine and I were back in the flat, the acid trip crowded in on us and we swigged orange juice to try to assuage it. But every time the Jacques Loussier disc on the record player stopped, we tripped out again. I supposed I had become party to the so-called ‘drugs revolution’. The next morning I staggered down to the day centre and blearily took up my usual position with the register at the door. The room swam before my eyes as familiar figures swayed into view. Had I joined them? Was this the beginning of my end? It took me a few days to recover, and while the experience did not put me off cannabis, it made me very wary of anything stronger. In a world with no experts, I soon became a ‘drug expert’. I was even invited to appear on a television programme called The Frost Debate which involved David Frost debating the big issues of the day. On this occasion drugs were the issue, and I remember a heated argument with the great man. It was the first time I had ever appeared on television. Some of the young people at New Horizon were virtually beyond hope. Jimmy King was just sixteen. He’d so mashed his veins that one day I found him unconscious on the loo, having been trying to fix barbiturates into the veins of his penis. Others had suffered gangrene and amputations. It was hell. But from it emerged Chris Finzi, who gave me hope that it was all worthwhile. He was almost as far gone as Jimmy, but he had one glorious talent: he was an artist of considerable ability, a brilliant cartoonist. ‘I have no sense of who my parents were,’ he told me. ‘I was in homes and fostered, and then I hit sixteen and no one would have me any more.’ I agreed to give him a home on the floor of my flat. There were many moments of failure, even a spell on remand in the secure young offenders’ prison in Ashford. But after more than a year, Chris made it. We at the centre housed him and trained him; but perhaps more critically than anything, he fell in love. He never relapsed. Kevin was another engaging boy, with tousled blond hair. My chequebook was too much temptation. He stole it with my bank cards, and ran up bills of thousands of pounds. He left my flat for jail. As soon as one went, another would come calling. Graham was a drug-free male prostitute of sixteen, who looked about twelve. He sat on the chair in my office telling me, in floods of tears, of the abuse he suffered on the streets. He named MPs, a minister and a priest as being among his clients. I had no reason to doubt him, he identified them so clearly. And then there were the young women. Jan was a regular, sixteen years old, addicted to heroin and barbiturates, and pregnant. The state could not cope with her, and she went to Holloway prison for a stretch. Then she came back to us. We got her housed in Hackney, but neither the council nor we could provide the support she desperately needed. She would come by the flat late at night, throwing milk bottles at the wall to get my attention. Eventually she was admitted to University College Hospital for the birth. I went to visit her, and for the first time in my knowledge of her young life she looked radiant, with the baby, who was miraculously unaddicted, in her arms. But within a day or two my telephone rang at two in the morning. ‘Ishhatt you, Jon?’ The slurred voice was unmistakably Jan’s. ‘Where are you? Where’s the baby?’ I asked urgently. There was no answer. I ran down to my Mini and headed for Hackney. I had never been to the flat where she lived, but we kept her rent book, which had the address. I found the place in twenty minutes. It was in a tall block, the stairway stinking of urine. There was a human form slumped on the second-floor stairs. I could hear the baby crying when I was three floors below Jan’s flat. I peered through the letterbox. No Jan, just the baby crying. I took a run at the door, and the lock gave. Inside, the baby was filthy, so I washed him. There was a tin of powdered milk, and I mixed a bit up with water. I think it was milk, anyway – I was pretty vague about what to do with babies. I fed him chaotically and swaddled him in a blanket, then ran with him to the car, reflecting that I was now, almost certainly, officially a baby snatcher. Wondering ‘What the hell do I do now?’, I headed for the only place I’d seen the baby really cared for, the UCH maternity ward where he had come into the world in the first place. Arriving at the night nurse’s table, I pleaded for help. ‘Sorry, but there really is only one way babies come in here,’ she smiled, ‘and I’m afraid this isn’t it.’ ‘Where do I go, then?’ I asked. ‘Well, where did you find him?’ ‘Hackney.’ ‘Phone the emergency service for social services.’ So I did. ‘Sorry,’ said the voice. ‘If the baby’s no longer in Hackney, it’s not our responsibility. If you’re at UCH, you’re in Camden. You’ll have to phone them.’ By the time the emergency social worker in Camden finally agreed to meet me, it was six in the morning and the baby was in distress. I wondered what would become of him. Would he too go into care and grow up like his mother? Poor little mite – how badly we were serving him. Jan was found dead of barbiturate poisoning three days later in a filthy squat in King’s Cross. There were only two of us at her pauper’s burial at the East Finchley cemetery, and I never discovered who the other person was. I cried as the scratched recording of ‘Jerusalem’ echoed in the empty chapel. I wasn’t cut out for this, I reflected. As I sat there, I felt that at least I’d had the privilege of meeting and knowing people at the far edge. I determined that if I did nothing else in life, I would try to keep my lifeline with New Horizon open for as long as I possibly could. In retrospect, this was a critical moment in the evolving welfare state. The state was clumsily finding out that there were areas in which it was incapable of offering caring resource. The voluntary sector, places like New Horizon, was better at it. In the long run the state would start to provide us with significant funding to do the job ourselves. But that would take several decades. In the meantime our day centre was a very hard place to be. However bad things got at New Horizon, the presence of Lord Longford guaranteed that there would always be bouts of light relief. From the beginning, he and I would have lunch about once a month. We were to go on doing so until he died at the age of ninety-five three decades later. Ostensibly the purpose of these lunches was to talk about New Horizon, but in reality we gossiped about current politics and about history. Though Longford was ribbed mercilessly in the media for his eccentricities, I learned a vast amount from him – about the rise of fascism in the thirties, about Ireland, about the war, about Catholicism, about the British Establishment and, more than anything, about politics and government. Here was a man who’d served as Minister for Germany under Clement Attlee in the 1940s, and Leader of the House of Lords in Harold Wilson’s Cabinet in the 1960s. There was almost no one in public life he did not know. He was determined that I would go into politics. Longford was also, perhaps inevitably, the inadvertent author of a cascade of bizarre events. One Sunday in the spring of 1972, Bobby Moore, the captain of England’s winning 1966 World Cup football team, for some reason offered us a fund-raising charity match at West Ham’s ground, Upton Park in East London. His team was going to play a celebrity side that included some Playboy bunny girls. ‘Lord Longford,’ I ventured, ‘I don’t think you should play.’ ‘Why ever not?’ he retorted. ‘I was pretty good at Oxford.’ ‘It isn’t a question of how good you were, nor even the fact that you are in your mid-sixties. It’s the fact that you are running an anti-pornography crusade, and the Playboy bunny girls are playing.’ ‘Oh dear,’ he said, rather crestfallen. Frank Longford was really pretty broad-minded, despite his reputation, and seemed to me to have been hijacked by some early neo-conservatives. He was insistent that he should attend the game, so on the day I picked him up from Charing Cross station and headed for Upton Park. Halfway there, Longford rolled up his trousers to reveal the hem of some elderly cream football knickerbockers. ‘Oh my God! You are going to play!’ I exclaimed. ‘I may,’ he said, somewhat sheepishly. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘he’s a grown man, I’ve warned him about both his age and the girls. What more can I do?’ At the ground, my worst fears were rapidly realised. The cotton-tailed bunnies did what they do, and ‘Lord Porn’, as he was by then tagged, was in their midst. The press had a field day. I don’t remember much about who won, or indeed how much money we raised. But I can still see those blue-white legs adorned in half-mast grey socks, protruding from the cream 1920s football shorts flanked by bunny bottoms. One day I was sitting in the day centre when the phone rang. ‘Mr Snow?’ asked a posh voice on the end of the line. ‘Yes.’ ‘This is Squadron Leader David Checketts, Equerry to the Prince of Wales. His Royal Highness would like to invite you to meet him at Buckingham Palace. Would this be possible?’ Although bemused and instinctively suspicious of anything to do with the royal family, I was intrigued, and agreed. It is one of the strange and inexplicable things about evolving Britain that the royal family still has such pull. At the appointed time, wearing rare jacket and tie, I set off down the Mall on my pushbike, my usual means of transport, then as now. Ushered through the great iron gates on the right-hand side of Buckingham Palace, I did as I was instructed and leant the bike against the end of the palace. The red-carpeted entrance was surprisingly dowdy and run-down. I was escorted upstairs to what I think was called the White Morning Room. It was certainly white, and sun came pouring in through the windows. There were two others waiting to see Prince Charles with me; they too seemed to work in what we called the voluntary sector. A ludicrous butler wafted in with a silver salver of biscuits, tea and coffee. Suddenly the Squadron Leader arrived with his master. We all stood up. ‘Good morning, sir,’ was the order of day, despite the fact that the Prince was virtually the same age as me. He was stiff, and even then fiddled with his index finger and the links on his cuffs. When he talked, he sounded like a forty-five-year-old. ‘I need your advice,’ he said. ‘I want to do something productive with my life, and I gather that you three are engaged in the kind of projects I think might make a difference.’ He’d been well briefed, and seemed to have an understanding of urban poverty. He’d obviously visited a number of projects. I suppose we were with him for a couple of hours. He was interested in setting up a foundation that would fund projects and people working in the poorer echelons of society. Prince Charles now says that that meeting was the moment of inception for the Prince’s Trust, which to this day is one of the biggest and most successful welfare funding movements ever established in Britain. All this was long before Diana, scandal and absurdity. For more than a year, one of the most regular visitors to New Horizon was nineteen-year-old Christine. Beautiful, with long straight blonde hair, she was partially sighted and very slightly built. She was intelligent, but had serious communication problems, and it required much patience to win her trust. I was one of the few people she did appear to want to talk to. As so often, she had come from a broken family and had experienced abuse in care. She suffered in many ways, but never took drugs. Even so, she was hard to accommodate and impossible to gain employment for. One night the police called at my flat. Would I come up to St Pancras? The officers were worried about reports from a squat not far from the back of the station. The place could barely have been termed a house. The windows were missing, much of the roof had fallen in, but there were sheltered spaces within. The detritus and filth between what passed for the door and these spaces was unspeakable. In the gloom, there she was, a hunched pile covered in a coat and an old blanket. I burst into tears. Christine had died utterly alone, unloved and in complete animal squalor. I had known her for 10 per cent of her entire life. The policewoman with us led me out. We all felt completely defeated. I had originally intended to stay at New Horizon for six months and then, having only been rusticated for a year, to return to Liverpool to complete my degree. I eventually stayed three years, and have no degree to this day. I was so frustrated by Christine’s pointless death that I wrote a piece for the Guardian. ‘Christine is Dead’ was published on 8 June 1973, and it was my first piece of proper journalism. I was emotionally drained, exhausted, and most definitely better at writing about the work than doing it. This traumatic insight into the country in which I had grown up transformed my outlook on life, as Uganda had before. But I had to move on. There were builders everywhere, carpenters putting up partitions, electricians laying cables. It was hard to find where my interview was supposed to take place. I was standing in the bowels of the building in Gough Square, off Fleet Street, where Britain’s first commercial radio station, the London Broadcasting Company (LBC), was to start broadcasting in eight weeks’ time. It’s an incredible thought these days, but as late as 1973 there was no legal radio alternative to the BBC. Radio Luxembourg had beamed in from across the Channel for years, and there were a number of illicit ‘pirate’ stations like Radio Caroline with seasick operatives broadcasting from outside territorial waters, but otherwise there was only the Beeb. A year earlier, Prime Minister Ted Heath finally changed the law, breaking the BBC’s monopoly and allowing the development of commercial radio. Now the race was on between LBC and Capital Radio as to who would be on air first. LBC was looking for a hundred or more journalists to run a twenty-four-hour news station. I suspect that I secured an interview purely on the basis that Peter Snow, by now established as a correspondent at ITN, was my cousin. They were also looking for someone who had some sort of handle on social issues. Rather riskily, LBC was going to pioneer late-night ‘phone-ins’. Experience in America had revealed that a lot of people with serious problems phoned in, and any responsible programme would have to have someone available to deal with them. In the event I seemed to fit the bill, and was hired for a salary of ?2650, double what I had been earning at New Horizon. Better still, I was veering towards a career in journalism. Maybe this would prove to be the route back to Uganda. Two days before we went on air, the station had failed to appoint any newsreaders. Given that there was to be a news bulletin every half-hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, this was a bit of an omission. The managers had a problem. Very few people from the BBC had applied to work at LBC. Most BBC staff seemed to think that our commercial venture would be short-lived, and they preferred the safety of where they were. Hence a good number of Canadian and Australian voices had been hired, but very few Brits. The existing employees were all summoned for voice trials, and somehow I got the job. The welfare back-up for the phone-ins was abandoned, and I was scheduled to make my first broadcast on the first day of transmission. Six a.m. on 8 October 1973 was an electric moment. The station hit the air running. At 10 a.m., with embarrassingly upper-class vowels, I delivered the news. ‘Israeli tanks are heading for the Golan Heights …’ We had come on air at a real instant of history, amid the Yom Kippur war, the last Middle East war in which it was possible to imagine that Israel’s very existence was at stake. The whole style of LBC was fresh, the journalism was keen, and we were constantly running rings round staid old Aunty. But it couldn’t last, and within a few months of opening the station ran out of money. Advertisers were cautious about whether commercial radio would ever catch on. People had to be sacked, and the management went for the most expensive first. I survived, but the new editor Marshall Stewart, who’d been poached after successfully reinvigorating the BBC’s Today programme, called me into his office. ‘You can go on reading the news until you drop,’ he said, ‘but if you want to make a difference in life, you’ve got to get out onto the road.’ The road in 1974 was becoming increasingly cratered. The IRA had already started its bombing campaign on mainland Britain, and for what was almost my first reporting adventure I was sent to Northern Ireland. I arrived in Catholic West Belfast on 17 May 1974, during the Protestant workers’ strike that was to bring the attempt to allow Northern Ireland to govern itself to an end. I was stunned by what I saw. I had had absolutely no prior sense of the scale of the deprivation and discrimination suffered by the Catholic population. But the poverty proved undiscriminating: the squalor and sense of hopelessness on the Catholic Falls Road were matched on the working-class Protestant streets around the Shankill Road. I’d never seen so many Union flags. Those who wished to remain British had a sense of Queen and country that I couldn’t even begin to identify with. ‘Pig’ armoured cars careered around the streets, and groups of British squaddies patrolled with automatic rifles at the ready. As the strike ended on 29 May, I remember standing outside the Harland & Wolff shipyard watching the exclusively Protestant workforce returning to their jobs. Not only had they destroyed a courageous attempt to share governing power between the two religions, but they passed through the factory gates as if nothing in their lives would ever have to change to accommodate the 40 per cent of the population who were not of their faith and not of their workforce. I could not believe that my own country had sustained and encouraged such a grossly unjust state of affairs. I had always used a bicycle in London, and now my reporting life began to depend upon one. There were no mobile phones in those days, but we had clunky Motorola radios, which within five miles of the office could transmit a just-about viable signal. So when on 17 June 1974 an IRA bomb went off in the confines of the Houses of Parliament, while other reporters were clogged in the back-up of traffic caused by the emergency I was able to hurtle through on my bike, sometimes broadcasting as I pedalled. I could dash under the police tapes that closed off roads, and be in mid-broadcast by the time the police caught up with me. This meant that throughout this year of mainland bombings LBC was almost invariably first on the secne, and developed a kind of ‘must-listen’ quality that radio in the UK had never enjoyed before. The bomb in question had gone off against the thousand-year-old wall of Westminster Hall – you can see the scorch marks to this day; the stonework remains a discoloured pink. Eleven people had been injured in the blast. The IRA clearly wasn’t going to go away. Resolving how to reach an accommodation with people the state regarded as terrorists was to be another feature of the unfolding story. The low point of the IRA’s wholesale killings of civilians came later that year, with the bombing of pubs in Guildford and Birmingham, in which twenty-six people were killed. The state responded by jailing the wrong people for both bombings. Among all the bombings, two general elections were held in 1974, one in February followed by another in October. Amazingly, I found myself co-anchoring the second. Only one year in journalism, and I was already interviewing politicians from both front benches. It was an intense and ‘on the job’ introduction to journalism. Neither then nor at any time later did I ever receive a single day’s training. I swotted up on the constituencies, the names and faces of the politicians, and the swings needed to take each seat. Harold Wilson’s Labour Party scraped in in the first election, although they failed to win a majority of seats in the House of Commons until the second election, eight months later. There were suddenly people in government that I had worked with at New Horizon. David Ennals was Secretary of State for Health and Social Security: he and I had been trustees on the Campaign for the Single Homeless, a grouping that brought all the projects working with single homeless people under one umbrella and which survives to this day, renamed Homeless Link. My contacts were growing, and rather against my will I found myself creeping onto a lowly rung of the British Establishment. In between those two elections I was dispatched to northern Portugal. Revolution had taken hold, a revolution that was going to have a huge effect in Africa. One of the seeds of the ‘new world disorder’ was being sown before my very eyes. Yet at that moment I could see no downside. Liberation it was, and heady was it to be there. I arrived on the morning of 5 April, hours after the fifty-year dictatorship of Salazar and his successor Caetano had been overthrown. All planes to Lisbon were full, but there was one seat left on a flight to the northern Portuguese town of Porto, so by mid-afternoon I found myself in the northern town of Braga. An industrialised concrete place, it proved to be an excellent vantage point from which to observe this most noisy and joyous of revolutions. I had hoped to grab a sandwich and then go looking for the revolution, but revolution was all around me. The streets were heaving with people; women pushed carnations into the barrels of soldiers’ guns. At one moment there was an enormous explosion, and I said to my translator, ‘Here comes the killing spree.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s just a gas canister exploding in one of the celebration bonfires.’ A day and night of intoxicating freedom followed. The death of empire in Britain had never witnessed scenes like this – but then, despite empire, we had at least been spared dictatorship. The overthrow of half a century of dictatorship in Portugal was completely bloodless. Which could not be said of what happened next in Portugal’s colonies. Angry Portuguese settlers in Mozambique and Angola drove their tractors into ravines, smashed key capital equipment and ruined their factories and homes. Nevertheless, their return from the African colonies to their homeland would represent little short of a modern miracle – a small European state reabsorbing the equivalent of 10 per cent of its population without serious consequence. But while Portugal seeped back into being a comfortable corner of Europe, Angola and Mozambique erupted into two of the bleeding sores that would define Africa’s emerging disorder in the 1980s and 1990s. When I returned, Britain was in the throes of the build-up to the referendum on whether or not to remain a member of the European Community. In a sense a kind of revolution was taking place here too. The Tories under Ted Heath had taken Britain into Europe a couple of years earlier, and Labour had promised a vote as a means to resolve their own ambivalence and division on the issue. Many saw the referendum as a post-imperial struggle for the soul of Britain. Should we slide off into the transatlantic alliance and take up our position as Uncle Sam’s fifty-first state, or embrace the heart of Europe and become part of the European continent? Truth to tell, I had decided to vote ‘no’, on the basis that I saw Europe as a rich man’s club that was bound to end up screwing the Third World. I was more involved than I pretended. My friend Ed Boyle, the political editor of LBC and one of the most gifted journalists I ever worked with, had agreed to put together some radio ads for the ‘no’ campaign. I guess he did it more to make trouble and to even out what he regarded as an unbalanced campaign than out of any very strong belief. He was a real original, mad as a hatter and the creator of brilliant, funny and informative journalism. His trouble was that he was too brilliant, too funny, too bright for his editors; he was therefore denied the profile and standing he richly deserved. Knowing that I was pretty strongly against EC membership at the time, he asked me to help out on the ads. The fifty-first state argument held no sway for me. It was the love of Uganda and an awareness of how the North intersected with and affected the South that combined to convince me that Europe would thrive to the detriment of the emerging markets and nations of the South. I wanted out of this kind of a Europe with a passion. Michael Foot, at that time Secretary of State for Employment, was my comfortable leader in the cause, and the ‘no’ campaign enabled me to meet him for the first time, in what was to become a friendship that still endures. My uncomfortable leader was Enoch Powell, who was further right even than Michael was left, and against whom I had demonstrated at university. But he and Michael shared a love of Parliament and sovereignty, one of the causes which bound them both to the ‘no’ campaign. The campaign itself was a complete shambles. We started with a substantial lead in the opinion polls, which we then proceeded to fritter away. Ed and I were so unpoliced that our radio ads only featured the ‘no’ views that reflected our own – references to the Third World and other ways of arranging a new Europe predominated. But the referendum itself, which took place on 6 June 1975, was nevertheless a defining moment in the emergence of post-imperial Britain. In voting to remain in Europe, which the British people did by a margin of two to one, many of us thought we had at least buried the Little Englander vote for all time – how wrong we proved to be. Alas, we never actually embraced the Europe for which we had voted. Nor were we entirely to shake off our status as America’s fifty-first state. We wanted to be for Europe, but not of it. And that condition dogs us to this day. My own position was to evolve gently from outright hostility then, to an ardent desire now to be much more a part of Europe than any British referendum has ever dared contemplate. But it has taken me three decades to travel so complex a journey. It was only a month after the referendum, in July 1975, that my foreign news editor at LBC bellowed across the newsroom, ‘Anyone ever been to Uganda?’ One hand went up, and it was mine. ‘We’ve got a free seat on Callaghan’s plane,’ he said. ‘Get your bag and go.’ It seemed that the Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, had been involved in some madcap dialogue with the by-now leader of Uganda Idi Amin over a white British lecturer, Denis Hills, who’d published unflattering references to the Ugandan dictator in a book called The White Pumpkin. Among other things, he’d called him a village tyrant’. Tyrant he had indeed become, aided and abetted by the British government. Amin had seized power in a military coup on 25 January 1971, while the democratically elected President Milton Obote was in Singapore attending a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference. Obote’s use of secret police and informers, and his intimidation and worse of his political opponents, had rendered him unpopular both inside and outside Uganda. Above all, Britain was concerned at the rise of ‘African socialism’, as espoused by Obote and by Tanzania’s Julius Nyrere and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda. The arrival, albeit by military coup, of the seemingly more pliant, British-trained erstwhile Sergeant Major Idi Amin was greeted as something of a relief. Amin can perhaps be seen as an early volunteer for Western-supported regime change’, with all its harrowing consequences. Within a year of the coup he’d appointed himself Field Marshal and ‘President for Life’, expelled sixty thousand Asians, and started killing his opponents. The Utopian Uganda of my late adolescence was fast evaporating. Amin soon took on more self-styled epithets, including ‘Big Daddy’ and ‘Conqueror of the British Empire’. Idi Amin was already renowned for humiliating the few whites still in Uganda. Denis Hills was languishing in Luzira prison, the notorious block in which Amin, and Obote before him, both kept and disposed of their opponents. Amin had had Hills sentenced to death for sedition, and had announced that unless the Queen apologised for his behaviour and Jim Callaghan came personally to rescue him, Hills would be summarily executed. Looking back today, the idea that only three decades ago some African dictator could summon the Foreign Minister from one of the G8 nations to rescue a solitary eccentric from the hangman’s noose beggars belief. Even then the trip had a distinct whiff of the absurd about it. Only a few months earlier Amin had had some of the remaining whites in Uganda carry him in a great sedan chair through the centre of Kampala. The trip was inevitably to provoke in me a strong wave of nostalgia. On 10 July 1975 the RAF VC10 touched down at Entebbe, on an airfield looking only slightly more decayed than it had on my first landing. From the aircraft I could see that the grass was still long and unkempt, but that there were many more troops and guns about. The old terminal building had shed its last remnants of whitewash. The heavenly aroma of Africa wafted into the plane as the door opened. Here I was, back in my beloved Uganda, almost eight years to the day after I had left her. There really did seem to be some divine pattern to it all. Chance had delivered me ‘home’, even if only for a matter of hours. There was no Amin at the airport. Instead we were hustled onto a bus at gunpoint by sweaty young soldiers and driven at speed to Kampala. We passed the gorgeous bougainvillea and mown lawns of State House, where President Obote had lived during my time here. Our destination was Amin’s official residence in the capital, the ‘Command Post’. By the time we reached the bustling suburbs of Kampala it was noon, the sun was high and the light outside was fierce to our unaccustomed English eyes. The Asian shops had become less tidy, less well-stocked African outlets. Amin’s wholesale ejection of the Asians three years earlier had taken its commercial toll. The smell, the sweaty greenness, the puddles, the red-brown murum roads told me that this was unmistakably Africa, unmistakably Uganda. The jacarandas were in full blue bloom, bananas dangled in ripe bunches, everywhere was lusciously productive. There were perhaps twenty journalists aboard our bus, not one of whom apart from me had ever set foot in the country before. Suddenly, as we neared the end of the road leading to the Command Post, I caught sight of a dishevelled white man being marched along by two guards. It was obviously Denis Hills. He was dressed in the fly-buttonless, stained remnant of the tropical suit he must have been taken to jail in. I told the bus driver I needed a pee and would walk from there. He stopped and let me out. I ran across to Hills and immediately started interviewing him, using the heavy reel-to-reel Uher tape recorder slung over my shoulder. ‘How does it feel to be free, Mr Hills?’ I asked. ‘Better than being dead,’ he replied, ‘which I should have been at eight o’clock this morning if Mr Callaghan hadn’t come for me.’ He seemed to have some teeth missing, but despite his run-down appearance was apparently in one piece. ‘What’s happening now?’ I asked. ‘I’m being taken to be handed over.’ Amin’s Command Post was ostensibly a simple, square-built 1930s-style suburban house with spectacular views over Kampala. The white stucco walls sporting a green mould here and there were assaulted by vivid splashes of red, pink and purple bougainvillea. But when we got closer there was a distinct air of menace about the place, radio aerials protruding out of windows, wires hanging about, and sandbagged gun emplacements peering from the flat roof. Although there were guns everywhere, and paranoid figures looking at us suspiciously, there was no formal security cordon. I was able to approach cautiously and to enter, rejoining the other reporters. Callaghan and Amin were out on the lawn at the back. No sign yet of Hills, but Amin was already thanking the Foreign Secretary for coming, booming his words of satisfaction. I recorded the lot. For almost the only time in my reporting life, my cousin Peter was one of the other correspondents on the trip, reporting for ITN. I took him to one side. ‘Peter, I’ve got everything, interviewed Hills, done the lot.’ ‘But Hills hasn’t appeared yet,’ he said. ‘Oh yes he has, and I’ve got his first interview as a free man. Trouble is, Callaghan’s people want us straight back on the bus and off to Entebbe and the take-off. But I know where the international telephone exchange is here, and I could phone this stuff through to London and get a scoop on everyone else – including you.’ ‘Go on,’ said Peter, ‘take a risk. They may leave without you, but we won’t be able even to phone until we get to the departure lounge at Entebbe, so you’ll be at least an hour or even two ahead of anyone.’ I ran back out on to the road, flashed some pound notes and got a lift to the exchange half a mile away. This was the self-same building from which whilst on VSO I had been able to phone home. Somehow I managed to cajole them into giving me a line to London. I got everything fed from my Uher, using crude crocodile clips to connect the tape machine directly to the phone line. I also recorded a description of Hills’s release. Twenty minutes later I was out on the street trying to get a taxi back to the Command Post, but no one dared go anywhere near the place, especially with a muzungu, a white man. I decided the best solution was to head for Entebbe Airport directly in a service taxi, in the hope of reaching the plane before the bus did, or at least before take-off. So with a clutch of breastfeeding mothers, two goats, and at least five or six live chickens flapping about with tied feet, I set off in battered old Peugeot 606 station wagon. The trouble was that our journey was constantly interrupted by the need to disgorge a mother, a goat, a chicken, or sometimes all three at once. Then another lot of human and animal cargo would board the taxi to inflict further stops on us. As bits of Uganda flashed past, I considered the place’s weird predicament. Here was a country that Britain had had charge of until just over a decade before. Yet Uganda had been prepared in no way for independence. What cynicism could deliver a thuggish, paranoid Sergeant Major to lead its armed forces? The colonisers had believed in an imported white officer class until almost the day of handover. The country’s institutions were remorselessly British in their make-up, and took no account of sophisticated local practice. Britain effectively prepared Uganda for failure. It’s a telling insight into the British way of doing things, which was to be repeated in every corner of Africa that was ever pink. After what seemed like hours we turned into the airport road. Proceeding in the opposite direction was our empty bus, returning to Kampala. I had nowhere near enough money to buy a ticket to London, I had no visa, the British High Commission had taken our passports upon landing, and I suddenly had visions of taking up Denis Hills’s vacated death cell at Luzira prison. For sure, honest Jim Callaghan would not make a second rescue flight. We swung round the high pampas grasses on to the airfield, and there was the plane, still on the ground. My cousin Peter was gesticulating wildly from halfway up the steps. ‘Come on, we’re going in seconds!’ he shouted above the engine roar. Inside the cabin, there was Callaghan, in his tropical hat, looking red and impatient. Hills was separated off, crumpled up in a seat well back, and then came the journalists. They looked grim-faced and angry with me. I asked Peter what the problem was. ‘Bloody phones are down to Kampala,’ he said. ‘No one got to file a sodding thing. You’ve got yourself an epic’ What a start, I thought. One year a journalist, and I’ve got a scoop of mythic proportions: ‘British Foreign Secretary Saves White Man’s Life in Africa!’ I settled complacently into my seat. Our ten-hour flight, with a stop-off in phoneless Tripoli, should keep me well ahead of the game, I thought. Fortunately the lines from Brize Norton, the Oxfordshire military air base where we landed, were working. ‘Well?’ I asked the foreign editor when my turn for the phonebox came and I got through. ‘Well what?’ ‘My scoop.’ ‘What scoop?’ ‘Haven’t you run my Denis Hills story?’ I shouted. ‘No.’ ‘Why ever not?’ ‘Yours was the only source. We knew UPI, AP and Reuters were all on the flight with you, so we waited for them, and when they failed to file we decided you’d got it wrong.’ ‘You idiot!’ I screamed. ‘I had the tape of Hills saying he was free, I had bloody Callaghan saying he was thankful, Amin booming away, what else did you want?’ ‘A second source, Jon. Now if you don’t mind, I can see the first Reuters snap coming through, so I can let your stuff run.’ With that he rang off. ‘What’s the trouble?’ asked Peter as I came out of the phonebox. ‘They didn’t run it,’ I said mournfully. ‘They couldn’t get a second source to confirm it.’ ‘Are they running it now?’ he asked. ‘Oh yes’. ‘Well, don’t worry, you’ve still got a beat.’ And sure enough, LBC and my report were used as the source for that afternoon’s Evening Standard front page. It was an early tutorial in the ways of journalism. It was a much bigger tutorial on the true condition of Great Britain. Amin, the jumped-up non-commissioned officer, had succeeded in humiliating the Foreign Secretary of his erstwhile imperial rulers. Britain was still finding her post-colonial feet, still unsure whether a Foreign Secretary should do this sort of thing. She had played an unwitting role in bringing Amin to power and keeping him there. The coup against Milton Obote had been seen as a benign and potentially beneficial development. The wholesale deportation of tens of thousands of people because of their Asian ethnicity was simply accepted. It might be argued that the office of the British Foreign Secretary seemed to have put more effort into saving one eccentric white man from execution than into preventing the abuse meted out to sixty thousand Ugandan Asians. Despite the furious immigration debate in Britain, those Asians were to prove Uganda’s crippling loss and Britain’s huge economic gain. That autumn of 1975, imperial Britain’s home-grown crisis was taking serious hold on both sides of the Irish Sea. On 3 October a Dutch businessman, Dr Tiede Herrema, was kidnapped by the IRA as he drove his Mercedes to work at Ferenka Ltd, the huge tyre factory in Limerick of which he was managing director. The kidnappers threatened to kill him unless Republican prisoners were released from jails in the Republic of Ireland. Ireland was in the throes of trying to leave her nineteenth-century backwardness and become a fully paid-up member of Europe, and the kidnap was a body blow, particularly as Ferenka’s parent company was the hugely influential Dutch multinational Akzo. For nearly three weeks no trace was found of the missing Dutchman. The kidnap made the Republic of Ireland appear a place of refuge for the hard men of Republicanism. Then on 21 October Herrema was located in a council house on the edge of Monasterevin in County Kildare, forty miles south-west of Dublin. He was being held by two IRA members, Eddie Gallagher and Marian Coyle. The discovery triggered an immediate siege. LBC dispatched me from London with almost no money and virtually no other resources. The house stood at the back of a working-class, 1950s-built redbrick estate that gave onto farmland. From the far side of one of the fields it was possible to get a view of the back and side of the house. The Irish police, the Gardai, were everywhere, and the press were kept well back. Gallagher loosed off a couple of gunshots soon after I arrived, as if to support the police in their endeavour to control the media. LBC’s appetite was voracious. At peak times they wanted a piece on the hour, every hour. Initially I was able to persuade the ITN correspondent and future bestselling novelist Gerald Seymour to let me use the back of his car as a base. The one motel in Monasterevin was already full, and was anyway too far from the siege house. Seymour was a star reporter, and I felt honoured to be allowed to use his car. That first night he slept in the front, I in the back. I remember his socks to this day. With the Irish mist hanging in the dawn light, I could just pick out the shapes of policemen wandering around the garden fence of the siege house. We were in for a long haul. By midday, trucks had begun lugging caravans into position at the top of the field. A temporary press encampment was taking shape. Gerry Seymour upgraded himself to a four-berth mobile home, and I took over the whole of his car. At the vantage point we constructed a large brazier and filled it with peat briquettes. I must be one of the few reporters who has ever put in a charge for peat briquettes on his expenses claim form. Although I spent more hours than most at the vantage point, there were times when I would retreat to the car to sleep. The problem was that the car was at least two hundred yards from the point from which you could see the house. So I went into town and bought a great length of bell wire, a buzzer, a bell-push and a battery. The buzzer was draped through the car window, while the bell-push lay near the brazier two hundred yards away. From time to time, once they’d checked I was asleep, one of the photographers down at the brazier would sound the buzzer just for the hell of seeing this half-naked hack falling out of a car pulling on his trousers in his haste to witness the end of it all. There were very few real developments during the Herrema siege, but somehow it built up into a compelling twenty-four-hour news radio event. Eddie Gallagher, the IRA man whose hare-brained scheme the kidnapping had been, turned out to be in conflict with the IRA leadership. Indeed, this may well have been one of the early signals of division in the IRA between the political and the mayhem wings of the Army Council. Gallagher’s girlfriend was not Marian Coyle, with whom he was now holed up in the siege house, but Rose Dugdale, who was later to marry Gallagher and bear him a child. Dr Dugdale was an English aristocrat and a graduate of the London School of Economics who was serving time for conspiracy to smuggle arms and explosives to Northern Ireland, and was one of the IRA convicts in return for whose freedom Herrema was being held hostage. She was also suspected of having seized a helicopter in 1974 and dropped two explosives-filled milk churns on a police barracks, where they failed to explode. Gallagher had been imprisoned after that episode, but had escaped four days after being sentenced. Technically, despite his stationary position in our sights, he was on the run. It was not just the divisions within the IRA that the siege exposed. We also saw, writ large, a preparedness on the part of both Irish and British governments to countenance an eventual deal with the Republicans. No one was prepared to go in with all guns blazing. But then, early one morning about a week into the siege, the Gardai grew impatient with Gallagher and decided to mount a surprise attack. I was at the vantage point. I buzzed the buzzer and a motley crew of my colleagues came running down the path from their encampment, led by the man from the Sun. Les Hinton was not only an excellent journalist, but good company. If I had been asked then to identify which of our band would one day become Rupert Murdoch’s British supremo at News International, I’m not sure I’d have spotted him. It’s an extraordinary journey from Monasterevin to the Murdoch summit in Wapping. We were all flabbergasted by the crudity of the Garda assault. An old ladder was leant against the bathroom window at the back of the house, and a detective scaled it and tried to open the window. BANG! A terrific shot rang out, followed by a yelp, and the detective tumbled down the ladder. Gallagher had blown the man’s index finger off. The next day I received a hand-delivered note from the editor of ITN, Nigel Ryan. He had approached me earlier in the year about moving to television news, and I’d refused. This time his note said that if I accepted, the job as a reporter for ITN was mine. I decided to talk to my own editor when I returned home. The siege dragged on for seventeen days. Eventually Herrema walked out unharmed, and Gallagher and Coyle gave themselves up. The brazier camaraderie came to a rapid end and we all went our separate ways. What we didn’t know was that five of the twenty-five or so of us who had been the core of the siege-watchers had contracted a pretty grim lurgy that would strike a short time after we returned home. Nigel Ryan was a highly regarded, patrician, Reuters-trained editor. He’d seen action in the Congo, but was also at ease in the British Establishment. I sat in his office on the second floor facing him. My editor at LBC had strongly advised me to cross to ITN while the going was good. ‘So, which college did you go to?’ Ryan asked. ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t at Oxbridge. I read law at Liverpool.’ He was rather startled, and I got the impression that if I did secure a place on the reporters’ bench I’d be breaking with the Oxbridge norm. Fortunately he never asked me what degree I got, so I didn’t have to cover up the rather serious matter of having been rusticated. To this day I often wonder whether he’d have employed me if he’d known. But the job was mine, and with three months’ notice to LBC I would start in March 1976. Two days later I woke up feeling utterly dreadful, listless and sick. I phoned a doctor friend to ask what he’d recommend for a ‘pick-me-up’. ‘Have a glass of sherry,’ he advised. I did, and immediately vomited. Looking in the mirror, I saw that I was a noxious shade of bright yellow. I phoned my GP, and by the evening I had been admitted to Coppetts Wood isolation hospital in north London. ‘Are you a homosexual?’ The man in the white coat at my bedside wafted in and out of my consciousness. ‘Have you had oral sex with another man?’ ‘Crumbs!’ I thought. ‘Is that the only way to get whatever I’ve got?’ ‘You’ve got Hepatitis A,’ the doctor said through his facemask. ‘It’s highly contagious.’ ‘No, I’m not a homosexual,’ I said eventually. ‘Well, how did you get this?’ he asked. ‘Where have you been?’ ‘The Irish Republic – covering the Herrema siege,’ I said. ‘There was a cow trough with a tap in the field where we camped. I drank some of the water.’ ‘That’s almost certainly it,’ he said. Soon it was confirmed that five of us had exactly the same complaint from the same source, and I’d had sexual relations with none of them. ‘No alcohol for six months, and complete bed rest,’ the doctor said, and left. I was sharing a flat in Primrose Hill with Nick Browne, whom I had met at university. To this day, a truer friend I could not wish for. He had taken the route I’d been expected to and actually become a barrister. The day after I was admitted to hospital he came to my bedside with the mail. ‘I couldn’t help spotting this one,’ he said. ‘On Her Majesty’s Service’, it said in black print. ‘Confidential, Personal’ was typed in red. I pulled out the contents. No wonder Nick was looking curious. He knew exactly what it was, and so did I. It read: MINISTRY OF DEFENCE, Room 055, Old War Office Buildings, Whitehall. 5 January 1976 Dear Mr Snow 1. I think it just possible that you might be able to assist me with some confidential work I have in hand. I therefore should be most grateful for an opportunity to have a talk. 2. If you are agreeable perhaps you would be kind enough to telephone me and we can discuss when it would be convenient for you to call. You should, incidentally, come to the side entrance of Old War Office Buildings in Whitehall Place and say you have an appointment in Room 055. 3. I will naturally reimburse you for any reasonable expenses. Please do not hesitate to take a taxi if you are pressed for time. 4. I should be grateful if you would treat this letter as confidential and not discuss it with anyone else; furthermore please bring the letter with you as a means of identification. 5. I very much regret that I cannot go into further explanations in a letter or on the telephone, but would naturally do so if we meet. Yours sincerely, D. Stilbury Ten days later I was at the side entrance of Old War Office Buildings, a grey, uninviting building opposite Horse Guards Parade. I had called Stilbury and made an appointment. I figured that I should at least check the thing out. I mean, how often do you get an invitation to the epicentre of Britain’s spy network? I had decided to eschew the taxi in favour of my trusted bicycle. On my way I stopped off at the main concourse of Waterloo station to photocopy the letter. I was well aware that it was both my passport to, and my proof of approach from, Her Majesty’s intelligence services. As I fed it into the plywood-boxed, freestanding photocopier in the middle of the station, the machine jammed. So paranoid was I that I had avoided photocopying the letter at LBC for fear that some stray copy would blow my cover. Now the even more public British Rail machine had the effrontery to jam. I tried again, and this time a copy spewed out onto the station floor. As I had anticipated, the man at the Old War Office reception desk took the original letter from me, never to return it. A large woman in blue Civil Service rig sailed ahead of me along a labyrinth of corridors, up a few steps, down a few more. Grey stone, blue curtains, grey stone, blue curtains; everything was the same. She showed me into a bare and austere room. And there was Stilbury. He stood up from behind his desk, which was arranged across a corner. The only other pieces of furniture in the room were two low-slung modern tubular-framed armchairs in front of the desk. He pointed to one of them. He was tall, rather pale, public-school-looking, nondescript. ‘Do sit down,’ he said. I sat and was immediately reduced by the low-slung armchair to a height considerably below that of the now seated Stilbury. I was already at a disadvantage. ‘I’m Douglas Stilbury, and I work for SIS,’ he said. I doubted that he was who he said he was, but I had no doubt he worked for whom he said he worked for. ‘Do you know what SIS is?’ ‘Not exactly,’ I replied. ‘We are the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. We are responsible for external, foreign intelligence.’ We started to talk. He had a considerable file on his desk which appeared to contain a very great deal about me. From women friends to politics, they had done their work. ‘We’d like you to work with us,’ he finally said. ‘Full time?’ I asked. ‘Oh no, we’d like you to pursue your chosen career and do bits and pieces for us along the way.’ ‘What sort of thing?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there could be someone we are interested in, a Communist, who is meeting people – we might want you to get to know them.’ ‘Sounds a bit domestic to me,’ I said. ‘But what really worries me, Mr Stilbury, is that I’m not sure you and I are on the same side.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We are accountable to the British Cabinet. As much to Mr Wedgwood Benn as we are to Mr Wilson.’ Tony Benn was the Cabinet’s unguided lefty at the time. I think Stilbury could sense that I was thinking of saying no. ‘No hasty decisions,’ he said. ‘We haven’t talked pay. You would be paid direct into your bank account, no questions asked by the Inland Revenue, and the sum would be equivalent to your current basic salary, tax-free.’ ITN was about to pay me around ?6000 a year at the time, the equivalent of ?20,000 these days. ‘Now, if you want to know more about us, I suggest you read the report by Lord Justice Denning into the Profumo Affair. It gives the most coherent picture yet published.’ ‘This isn’t for me,’ I said. ‘Any of my friends will tell you, I can’t keep a secret. I’m about to become a television journalist. Rather a public job for such private activity, don’t you think?’ ‘I’m not taking any answer from you this time,’ he said. ‘I want you to go away and think about it, then come back and tell me your decision.’ I stepped out into the sunlight, got on my bike and pedalled off down Whitehall, looking over my shoulder. To this day, I have never read the Denning Report. Instead I bought a copy of the great MI6 Cold War double agent Kim Philby’s book, My Secret War. As I was still recovering from hepatitis, I decided on the spur of the moment to go skiing in the Spanish Pyrenees. I read Philby’s book on the sun-splashed deck outside my hotel-room window in Formigal. It was clear from the book that to be a good spy – and I would have wanted to be a very good spy – you’d have to be a double agent of some kind, and that it would then completely consume your life and ultimately destroy you. I was pretty certain I’d never do it anyway, not least because Stilbury and his ilk seemed to represent the element of the British Establishment that I felt most uncomfortable with. And to be honest, I really wasn’t sure they were on my side. I wanted change, meritocracy, progress. I suspected Stilbury didn’t. But how had this approach come about? MI6 clearly felt I was a good prospect – a chap with radical beginnings who had seen the error of his ways, and was moving up the Establishment – perfect! And how was it that I was being approached now, in mid-transition from LBC to ITN? Did ITN have some kind of ‘controller’ in its midst? In which case, how many of my new colleagues were up to it? ‘How was Spain?’ Stilbury asked. I had never told him I was going. ‘I’m not going to work for you, Mr Stilbury,’ I replied, pretty shaken by how much he knew about me and my movements. Stilbury became brusque and unfriendly. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I’m naturally disappointed. I think you are making a big mistake, but that’s it then. You are never to contact us, and we shall never contact you again.’ For the last time, I left Old War Office Buildings by the side entrance and, rather frightened, beetled off on my bike, checking occasionally to see if anyone was following me. FOUR (#ulink_8a0f9e01-0fd4-5fe0-b186-fa4fbd2aa2e2) Tea with the Tyrant (#ulink_8a0f9e01-0fd4-5fe0-b186-fa4fbd2aa2e2) I DI AMIN IS IN A COMA, a few weeks from death, in Saudi Arabia. It is August 2003, and alas his unconscious condition has come a quarter of a century too late to be of much use to Uganda. An international debate rages over whether his vast remains should be allowed to be shipped home to breathe their last. In the meantime he resides all plugged up in a Saudi clinic, as pampered in dying as he was in life. It is said he has ballooned from his presidential 250 pounds to the same number of kilos. How was this mass murderer allowed to remain unprosecuted in the poolside confines of a Saudi-government-owned villa in Jeddah for so long? To some tiny extent I suppose I had a hand in his survival, but I’ll enter that admission later. Saudi Arabia had granted Amin – a rare Haj-making African Muslim President – safety, along with two of his wives and twenty-four children, in 1979, after he was driven out of Uganda by force. He was allowed to spend his days ‘fishing in the Red Sea, and playing his accordion, watching sports and CNN’, according to one newspaper report. He was even permitted to plot an attempted return to Uganda through Zaire, in 1989. When I joined ITN in the spring of 1976, Amin was at his worst. With the only ill-effect being a severe reduction of my alcohol intake, I had come through hepatitis in a matter of four weeks. It was within three months of my arrival at ITN, on 27 June, that Amin made his mark as a supporter of global terrorism. An Air France Airbus with more than 150 passengers and crew aboard, originating in Tel Aviv and bound for Paris, was hijacked after a stop in Athens. Two male members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and a man and a woman from the extreme left-wing West German Baader-Meinhof gang, commandeered the plane eight minutes out of Athens, eventually forcing it to land, with just minutes of fuel left, at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. In London once again the newsroom cry went up: Anyone got any maps or photos of Entebbe Airport?’ I had both, and started to piece together the scene from the studio. My blotchy slides of the old terminal where the hostages were herded made it onto that night’s News at Ten. Amin himself gave the orders for three more hijackers to be allowed to augment the four already in the old airport terminal. He deployed a force of Ugandan troops around the terminal buildings, and then proceeded to make a rousing speech on the runway in praise of the PFLP. To this day, this remains one of the few moments in history when a head of state has actively and publicly sought to endorse and assist an act of air piracy and terrorism. If the world ever needed a moment to draw the line internationally against a rogue state and its rogue President, this was it. But none was drawn, and Amin was either gently isolated or passively tolerated for another three years of bloodletting tyranny. The non-Israeli passengers held at Entebbe were released onto another Air France jet on the third day of the ordeal. It was left to Israel itself to spring a daring and effective raid to free the 105 remaining hostages. At 11.03 on the night of 4 July, four Israeli Hercules transport planes landed direct from Tel Aviv on Entebbe’s tarmac. By 11.52 p.m. all the hostages were in the air, heading for the safety of Nairobi airport. Less than an hour after the first Israeli plane had touched down they had all gone, taking their three dead with them. The leader of the assault, Colonel Yoni Netenyahu (brother of the future Prime Minister), died in an exchange of fire with Ugandan forces. He was instantly projected into the Israeli pantheon of national heroes, while the assault itself consolidated Israel’s reputation for invincibility wherever it was tested. Forty-five Ugandan soldiers died in the attack. There was one other notorious death, that of one of the Jewish hostages, seventy-four-year-old Dora Bloch. She had been taken to hospital in Kampala after a choking fit aboard the plane. On Amin’s orders she was dragged from her hospital bed and murdered in a forest on the way to the airport. We now know, thanks to British Foreign Office documents declassified in 2003, that Britain had a plan to invade Uganda in 1972 during the crisis over the Asian expulsion. But ‘Operation Zeus’, as it was code-named, was merely intended to save the seven thousand Britons still resident in Uganda. As a failing state – failing in no small measure due to the neglect of the former colonial power – Uganda was a forerunner, a challenge, even a potential test bed for what was to come. The whole of East Africa was to be destabilised by Amin’s eccentricity and bloodlust, a destabilisation which may well have helped create the circumstances in which US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by al Qaida nearly twenty years later. Yet Amin’s support for such groups as the PFLP, and his constant denunciation of Britain and Israel, won him enough friends in the Organisation of African Unity and the UN to ensure that he was never completely cut off from international support. Gaddafi’s Libya drip-fed him sufficient oil and money to stave off the complete disintegration of Uganda. The Entebbe crisis and its aftermath drove Amin still madder. Public enemy number one in his eyes were the British press. In mid-July 1976 I was dispatched on my first foreign television news trip to get to grips with the East African disaster that was now Amin. Standing on the banks of Lake Victoria just outside Kisumu, I looked north to the Kenya–Uganda crossing. Refugees were streaming out of Uganda with bundles of possessions on their heads. ‘There’s so little petrol in there,’ reported a smartly dressed businessman, ‘I’ve even seen the army pushing their own vehicles back to their bases.’ Within a month of the Entebbe raid, landlocked Uganda was running out of supplies. The economy was in ruins, and the country had run out of money to pay its bills. Any cash or food that materialised went straight to Amin’s army. The British High Commission in Kampala decided to close. This immediately sparked a wave of actions by Amin against the few remaining British citizens. One such was Graham Clegg, a thirty-eight-year-old British businessman married to a Ugandan. He and his wife Joyce had already escaped with their two children to a farm in northern Kenya. By the time I arrived Clegg had gone back into Uganda, and was now missing, together with another Briton, sixty-nine-year-old Jack Tulley, who’d been misguided enough to ask questions about what had happened to him. It was thought that Joyce might know more. Since foreign journalists were denied access to Uganda, and she was still in radio contact with people inside the country, she suddenly became a very important source. The BBC’s seasoned man in Nairobi was Brian Barron, and he worked with the legendary cameraman Mohamed Amin. Mo was to win every plaudit in the book for his work over the years, but he was to lose an arm in Ethiopia, and in 1996 his life in a hijacked airliner which crashed into the sea off the Comoros Islands. He, like Barron, was a charming if ruthless operator. My cameraman was the wonderful Mohinder Dhillon, a gentle, tall, de-turbanised Sikh. He was a brilliant but understated cameraman, who suffers from a very severe stammer. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/jon-snow-2/shooting-history-a-personal-journey/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.