Shooting History: A Personal Journey

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.