Shooting History: A Personal Journey

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.’