LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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