by Adrian Levy
As Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings began to plot their Kashmir plan in the spring of 1995, Julie and Keith Mangan, from Teesside in the north-east of England, were packing for the trip of their lives, one that would also lead them to the Meadow. Casting their eyes around the world for somewhere to explore in the run-up to their tenth wedding anniversary, Julie and Keith, both aged thirty-three, had decided on India. This would be their first time in the subcontinent. In fact, it would be their first exotic trip together anywhere, a holiday they had long promised each other, having married at a time when they had been too broke to have the kind of dream honeymoon they had both wanted.
India, and Kashmir in particular, sounded very far from the close-knit and hard-working Teesside city of Middlesbrough, where Julie and Keith had grown up. With its flinty vistas of pipelines and cooling towers, it wasn’t pretty, but Middlesbrough people seldom left. They worked in the vast foundries and industrial plants of companies like British Steel. Among them had been Keith’s father, Charlie Mangan, a British Steel plater whose punishing working life had left him with a miserly pension and a host of chronic ailments.
Julie and Keith loved their families, and they loved the north-east. They scorned people who denied who they were, people who overwrote where they came from. But they needed a change. Keith had hankered to see the world since he was nine, an itch he had got when he had gone to Lake Garda in Italy on a school trip. His mother Mavis, a school dinner lady originally from Brambles Farm council estate in the east of the city, still had photos of him larking around at the water’s edge with Neil Jones, his best friend. It hadn’t been the greatest adventure in the world, but it had set something off in Keith, and after he married Julie he had got her thinking about travelling too.
Middlesbrough had seen its best days. When Julie and Keith were growing up in the seventies it was impoverished and struggling. Times were tough for everyone, including Julie’s parents, Anita and Robert Sullivan, who lived in Eston, a working-class suburb to the east. Keith’s parents had moved to up-and-coming Brookfield, in the south, where they lived with their three sons in a tidy post-war bungalow, its pristine garden being Charlie’s pride and joy.
Julie and Keith had met as fifteen-year-olds at the local comprehensive, Bertram Ramsey. Keith was not particularly interested in Julie, but that changed when he bumped into her again five years later, inside the blue double-doors of Madison’s, a dive of a nightclub in Middlesbrough town centre, better known to locals as Mad Dog’s, where a famed cloakroom attendant called ‘Queenie’ took the coats. Julie, full of life, her hair a cascade of brown curls, and Keith clicked in a way they had not at school. By then, lanky Keith, the oldest of Charlie and Mavis Mangan’s three boys, had set himself up as a self-employed electrician, one of a group of school pals who had all gone into trades. Julie already had a sensible head on her shoulders, and she could see that unlike many other young men she knew, Keith was determined to do something with his life.
His mates described him as level-headed and laid-back, ‘a good bloke to have around in a storm’, while his father Charlie, who had barely ever left his native Teesside, was proud of his eldest son’s inquisitive nature, saying to anyone who would listen that Keith ‘soaked up new experiences like a sponge’. Keith was also, Julie now noticed, tall and good-looking, sure of himself but not arrogant. When they met at Mad Dog’s she was working in Clinkards, a Middlesbrough shoe shop. Chatting in a corner by the bar, they found they had many friends in common. By the time Keith celebrated his twenty-first birthday six months later, on Boxing Day 1982, at the Central pub on Corporation Road, Julie knew she had found the man she wanted to marry. Keith made her laugh. He was dependable and loving. And both of them had a geeky thing for Star Trek.
Three years later, they became the first in their group to tie the knot. The wedding was a traditional affair of red carnations and frothy white chiffon at St Barnabas church in Linthorpe. Their white-leather wedding album shows Keith, dressed in a silver suit and winklepickers, towering above his new bride. After a make-do honeymoon, Julie became the daughter Mavis Mangan had never had. Straight-talking and easy-going like her new mother-in-law, Julie enjoyed a laugh, and embraced her new family, ringing up Mavis for a chat most days, always starting the conversation the same way: ‘Hello, Mrs Mangan, it’s Mrs Mangan here.’ That’s why Charlie and Mavis were so taken aback when Julie and Keith announced out of the blue in 1989 that they were leaving for London. Nobody in either family moved away, especially south.
But Keith and Julie lived for each other now. Leaving their home in Ingleby Barwick, a residential estate south of Middlesbrough town centre, they rented a small flat in Tooting, south London. It was a big wrench for both of them, leaving a real neighbourhood where they were surrounded by friends and family to live far away, among strangers. Middlesbrough was always only a phone call away, Julie would say to herself whenever she was alone, but in a new city as vast and anonymous as London, she struggled to make friends.
To start with, the Tooting flat didn’t look much, but Julie tarted it up. Keith, already planning their next jump, hopefully to somewhere hotter, put his energies into developing his business, and began picking up contract work all over Europe. It wasn’t the kind of travelling he had had in mind: without Julie, just a bunch of lads who rarely saw anything but the inside of one project or another. But the money was good, and he started to save. Left behind in Tooting, Julie wasn’t going to sit on her hands. She trained as a nursery nurse, took cake-decorating classes and got herself a job.
In 1994, Julie and Keith got the break they were looking for when a Sri Lankan friend invited them to Colombo to meet his family. At first it was just pub talk, a crazy idea bandied about over a few pints. But the more they thought about it, the more they realised they wanted it. They didn’t have kids yet. They had worked hard, saved well, and now they were ready to leave it all behind. It wasn’t intended to be a permanent break, just eighteen months travelling around the world, chasing new experiences. Sri Lanka would be a soft landing for the voyage into the unknown. Just the thought of giving up Tooting for the South Asian island sent a shiver through both of them. From there, they could go anywhere. In early 1995 they took the plunge. They bought two rucksacks, matching petrol-blue his-and-hers bomber jackets, walking boots and travel guides. They went back up to the north-east on the train to break the news. So far only a couple of destinations, Colombo and New Delhi, were definite, but the climax to the trip would be dinner in front of the Taj Mahal on 3 August. That would be a proper tenth-wedding anniversary, Julie and Keith told their family and friends. In Eston and Brookfield, there were stunned faces.
Julie and Keith Mangan’s leaving bash at the Ship, a pub in Eston, around the corner from Julie’s parents’ house, was a proper drunken affair, even if afterwards they had a last-minute wobble. But they had already bought the tickets. Keith had sold his electrical business to a schoolmate. They’d given notice on the Tooting flat, and Julie had resigned from work. It was too late to turn back. A few days later they pitched up in Colombo, jetlagged and initially overwhelmed by the heat. But it did not take them long to realise they had made the right decision. They had the run of the golden beaches of Galle. Their Sri Lankan friend was there to show them around, and they gorged themselves on seafood. The first few weeks flew by so easily that Julie persuaded Anita to come over. Going home full of stories, Anita worked on Mavis and Charlie Mangan too. Keith’s parents had barely ever left the north-east, but now they all made plans to meet up in Sri Lanka in one year’s time. Before then, there was so much to do. Julie and Keith were ready to explore.
Having talked to other travellers, they locked on to Kashmir. What struck them when they entered the Indian Consulate in Colombo were the posters. ‘Paradise on Earth’, one declared above a photograph of rosy-cheeked Kashmiri women picking saffron in a crocus-filled meadow beneath a dramatic, snow-capped Himalayan skyline. Emblazoned across another scene of gaily-painted wooden shikaras sk
imming across Dal Lake were the words ‘Garden of Eden’. As the sweat trickled down Julie and Keith’s backs, the images of Kashmir’s spectacular peaks seemed to offer the prospect of welcome relief from the humidity of Sri Lanka. The Kashmiri people were welcoming, they were told, while the floating hotels of Dal Lake provided luxury for only a handful of rupees a night. Julie and Keith were keen for a change of scene.
They were going to Kashmir. They did not know where in Kashmir. They did not know anything about Kashmir. Perhaps they would stay on a houseboat before heading off on a mountain trek. Nothing too exhausting, just far enough to see the flower-filled pastures they had been reading about in the Lonely Planet guidebook – and of course the Meadow. It sounded idyllic. But when Keith rang home to wish his father a happy sixtieth birthday and mentioned their plans, Charlie was horrified, and did his best to dissuade him. Mavis tried to reassure her husband. ‘Keith’s a sensible lad,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t go off the beaten path.’ ‘Ring the British Embassy if you get into trouble,’ was all she could think to say to her son.
In June 1995, Paul Wells, a twenty-four-year-old photography student from Blackburn, Lancashire, was also packing. He had planned a life-changing trip to the Indian subcontinent, but he didn’t want to be alone. He had spent much of the spring trying to persuade his reluctant girlfriend, Catherine Moseley, to come with him.
Paul had just inherited a Nikon camera and a small cash legacy from his grandfather, and he intended to use them to put together a photographic project that he hoped would launch his career as a photojournalist. For several months he had been searching around for the right location, and after seeing Desert in the Sky, a TV documentary about the Buddhist kingdom of Ladakh, the same place Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had visited in 1991, he knew it was where he would go. He had loved the film so much that his mother, Dianne, had recorded it, and still has the video today. ‘He was fascinated by the eagles turning on the thermals,’ said Dianne, who remembered Paul sitting in the family home in Blackburn, watching the film over and over again. ‘It was another world to me, but the isolated mountain region appealed to Paul, who’d developed a fascination with spirituality and reincarnation.’ Bob, Paul’s father, said: ‘Once he’d seen that bloody film, he was determined. He was off buying maps and guidebooks.’ He also spent £800 on photographic equipment. ‘After he latched on to something, there was no stopping him. That was our Paul.’
Paul wanted Cath, as he called his girlfriend, to go with him, but she was not grabbed by the idea. She was busy, she told him, committed to her demanding social-work job. Then there was the expense. ‘He told her he would cover all the costs out of his legacy,’ said Bob. ‘Paul saw it as one “last big holiday” before they moved apart. He hoped to be able to spend some time together before Cath went off to study in another part of the country, and he just nagged at her until she gave in.’ By the middle of May 1995, the trip was on. ‘In the end, she did a trade,’ remembered Dianne. ‘She’d come, as long as they went to the forts and palaces of Rajasthan, in western India, after he’d got the Kashmiri mountains out of his system.’
Paul had always loved exploring. ‘Walking, climbing up things, hanging off things,’ was how Bob put it. ‘Walking is in our family’s blood. Paul just stuck at it, and always went further than the rest of us.’ When Paul was growing up, the family moved around regularly, following Bob’s work at Debenhams department store, where he managed the gents’ suit department. Dapper Bob, originally from the West Country, had taken the family to Scotland, and then to England’s north-west. For Dianne, originally from Ealing in west London, it was an unsettling existence. ‘To be honest, wherever I was, was too far away from family and friends,’ she says. When they finally set up home in a modern cul-de-sac on the Pinewood estate in Feniscowles, a suburb of Blackburn, she had been delighted. They would not move again, Bob promised.
Paul enrolled at Feniscowles Junior School. Of the three Wells children, he was always the reckless one. ‘He spent more time outside the head teacher’s office than in the class,’ recalled Bob. ‘There was no telling Paul. If he had any idea in his head he just went for it.’ But soon after moving to Blackburn, Paul formed a steadying bond with Dianne’s father, Grandpa Seymour. With the Lake District on their doorstep, Seymour introduced Paul to hill walking, climbing and orienteering. Soon the young boy and his grandfather were off most weekends, walking a section of the Pennine Way, or climbing Low Fell or Helvellyn.
By the time Paul was a teenager, he was struggling academically at Darwen Vale High School. But he could happily guide a party up Scafell Pike, and family photos show him standing tall in an Aertex shirt against the hills, walking socks wrinkled around his bony ankles, his face sun-bronzed, his hair wind-ruffled. He dreamed of following in the footsteps of Chris Bonington, Britain’s most famous mountaineer. A former army instructor, Bonington had led a life that Paul wanted to emulate. While Dianne thought he was studying upstairs in his bedroom, his head was with Bonington, on Everest and K2. ‘The walls of his room were covered in pictures of the Himalayas,’ says Dianne. ‘He had all Chris Bonington’s books, and would read them obsessively.’
Paul’s parents knew he wouldn’t get the grades to go to university. He didn’t care. After leaving school he followed in Bonington’s footsteps, seeking out an outward-bound training course sponsored by the armed forces. But, reckless as ever, he abandoned it in favour of a last-minute climbing holiday in Spain. For two weeks he trekked alone through the El Chorro gorge in Andalusia, coming back with a new idea. ‘That time alone gave him pause for thought,’ says Bob. Grandpa Seymour always carried a camera, and Paul loved tinkering around in his darkroom. In the autumn of 1994 Paul signed on for a Diploma in Photography at South Nottingham College, finally moving out of home at the age of twenty-three. ‘“Paul Wells, the photojournalist” – he liked the sound of that,’ said Bob. ‘He was always backing the underdog, getting into the wild. It was the perfect career for him, and he chanced on the idea all by himself.’
It was in Nottingham that Paul hooked up with Catherine Moseley, an art graduate from Norwich whom he met at a gig in Rock City, a venue whose manager liked to call it ‘an oasis of alternative culture in a desert of Gaz-and-Shazness’. Cath was a willowy blonde social worker at Base 51, a drop-in centre for troubled Nottingham teens, and her romance with Paul was intense. Paul was not afraid to speak his mind. He was only ever going to be himself. Two years older than him, Cath was quieter, having grown up in middle-class Norfolk. Paul was smitten, and as far as his parents could see, Cath too was committed to their having a real life together.
When Grandpa Seymour died unexpectedly just before Christmas 1994, Paul was ‘crushed’, according to his father. But after the funeral Paul picked himself up and went back to college in Nottingham, taking his younger brother Stuart along as a flatmate. With the money his grandfather left him, he could afford his first real taste of foreign adventure. All he talked about that spring was the Ladakh plan. And he had kept going on at Cath: ‘Please come away with me to India. It will change our lives forever.’
Even though she had finally said yes, Cath was still nervous as summer approached. She called tour agencies in Nottingham, and went so far as to contact the Foreign Office for its latest advice on travelling to India. Ladakh was part of the troubled Jammu and Kashmir state, she was told, but this eastern sector had been untouched by the conflict that rumbled on further west.
The cheapest way for Paul and Cath to travel from New Delhi to Ladakh was to take a bus to Srinagar, a grinding thirty-hour trip, before getting a connection along the Kargil road to Leh and finally to Ladakh, another two days’ journey. Like Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings, they were told that the riskiest part of the trip was the time they would have to spend in Srinagar. If they wanted to avoid travelling through the Kashmir Valley there was a more circuitous route via Himachal Pradesh, to Kashmir’s south. Or they could fly. Since the last option was too pricey, and no one in the UK
appeared to know much about the first two, they decided to make their decision in New Delhi.
Towards the end of the summer term, Cath booked the flights and a hotel in New Delhi. ‘She got their jabs sorted, too,’ says Bob. ‘Paul even went to the dentist and got his fillings fixed.’ As they waved Paul and Cath off from Manchester Airport on 15 June, Paul’s parents felt a pang of fear. Dianne wondered when she would see him again. ‘Don’t worry,’ Bob reassured her, putting an arm around her shoulder. He was pleased that his son was at last sorting himself out. ‘Paul can look after himself. He’s a strong lad.’ For Dianne, the only saving grace was that Cath was going with him.
Jetlagged and dehydrated, Paul Wells and Cath Moseley arrived at Indira Gandhi International Airport on 16 June. As Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings would nine days later, they fell prey to a tout. This one convinced them that people were rioting in the street near their pre-booked hotel, and that he should take them somewhere safer instead. Panicked and sweating, they agreed, only to find themselves deposited at the entrance to Paharganj, a swamp of squalid backpacker hostels opposite New Delhi railway station.
Lost, Paul and Cath lugged their overstuffed rucksacks past dusty roadside stalls displaying joss sticks, scarves and fake silver. Eventually they found the hotel the taxi driver had recommended, a tumbledown establishment where a handful of teenage boys lay snoring on the floor behind the reception desk. Paul and Cath gingerly stepped over them, trying to block out the pungent smells, and headed for their room.
Over the next couple of days, as they acclimatised to the heat and the lack of sanitation, they tried to make the best of it, buying homespun Indian kurtas and quizzing young travellers over banana pancakes and coffee laced with condensed milk about routes to Ladakh. The owner of their hotel turned out to be a Kashmiri, and offered to book their onward trip for a small commission. They opted for the bus to Srinagar, a journey that would involve travelling north across the New Delhi plains and into the Punjab, before striking north-west to Jammu and the Pir Panjal mountains, taking them, according to their map, alarmingly near to fractious Pakistan. As they left, the hotel owner pressed a handful of his relatives’ business cards into their hands, ‘Just in case you want to stay in Kashmir.’