My next adventure overseas was far less successful, a useful lesson that travel is not always undiluted joy. A year after my visit to France, Gwyn Evans had offered to drive my classmate Richard and me to Spain for the Easter holidays, leaving us to spend a couple of weeks improving our linguistic skills while he and a friend went off camping. Richard stayed with a friend of Gwyn’s in Bilbao, while arrangements had been made for me to stay in Madrid at the home of a friend of my aunt Dora, who had lived in Spain in the 1930s. The friend was a single woman of advanced years, and although she had evidently agreed to offer me a bed as a favour to my aunt, she saw no reason to take any further interest in my welfare. So for two weeks, with just two terms of Spanish lessons to my name, I was left entirely to my own devices.
My first letter home reported that I was ‘completely miserable and extremely unhappy’. My hostess did not regard it as her responsibility to make sure that I was fed, so for the first couple of days I ate nothing. Eventually, I plucked up courage to go to a restaurant and ordered the only thing that I recognised on the menu: huevos revueltos (scrambled eggs). I lived on little else for a fortnight and spent most of my time being a lone tourist, visiting the Prado museum, El Escorial and Toledo, but talking to no one and therefore learning little Spanish. My main achievement was to spend £5 (equivalent to about £85 now) on a rather bad oil painting of a Madrid street scene from a seller outside the Prado.
It is no bad thing to have learned at the tender age of sixteen that wandering the streets of a strange city on one’s own can be a rewarding way to spend some time. I did plenty more of it when I found myself back in Madrid as a foreign correspondent five years later, and it is still one of my favourite pastimes whenever I have an hour or two to myself. So my ideal timetable when arriving in a new city is: first, check in to the hotel, establish that the Wi-Fi connection works and check emails, then venture forth to explore, sniff the air and get a feel for the place (which includes getting an idea of which promising restaurants are in the vicinity). The reality of life as a reporter, alas, is that all too often I would hit the ground running and be hard at work long before I had even found my way to the nearest street corner.
By the time I left school, I realised that the world was a big and fascinating place and that I had a burning desire to see as much of it as I could. Gap years had not yet been invented, but I discovered that it was possible to apply for a university place and then defer it for a year. A teacher told me about an organisation called Voluntary Service Overseas, which sent keen eighteen-year-olds to spend a year in one of the world’s poorest countries doing useful work for no pay. It was exactly what I was looking for. Unlike what tends to happen with modern gap year placements, volunteers were not expected to pay their own way – flights were paid for and I even received a small monthly stipend which left me with about £5 a week after paying to rent a room in a student hostel.
First, though, I had to get a university place. Much to the disapproval of my headmaster, I refused even to consider applying to Oxbridge – much too fuddy-duddy for my taste; this was, after all, the 1960s – and I applied only to so-called ‘plate-glass universities’, the new institutions like Sussex, York, Essex and Kent that were making a name for themselves as go-ahead and unstuffy, more in keeping with the spirit of the age than the boring old Oxbridge. When I told my headmaster that I had made Sussex my first choice, he sniffed: ‘From what I hear, the biggest department at Sussex is their public relations department.’
He had a point: Sussex was rarely out of the newspapers, often in the gossip columns, helped by the presence among its first student intake of two highly photogenic and well-connected sisters, the Jay twins. For a time, Helen and Catherine Jay, daughters of the Labour Cabinet minister Douglas Jay and sisters of Peter Jay, later to become British ambassador to the US and economics editor of the BBC, were the faces of the ’60s. Photographed by David Bailey and written about in Tatler, they were – at least as far as tabloid newspaper editors were concerned – the epitome of what ’60s students were all about: Sussex, sociology and sex. But they were not the reason that I wanted to go to Sussex and, even if they had been, they had gone by the time I got there.
What I most liked about Sussex, apart from the fact that it was by the seaside, was that it had done away with traditional faculties and replaced them with multi-disciplinary schools of study. On the humanities side, there was a School of European Studies, a School of English and American Studies, and a School of African and Asian Studies, the idea being that students in each school, even if studying different subjects, would take some courses together and benefit from each other’s insights. I thought, and still think, that it was an excellent idea.
I was offered a place at Sussex to read philosophy in the School of English and American Studies (I also got an offer from York to read linguistics), and then immediately told them that I wanted to delay my arrival to enable me to go overseas with VSO. I hoped that I would be sent to Latin America, where I would be able to make use of my modest Spanish language skills. In the event, I was sent to Uganda, to make use of my even more modest musical skills, to work as a music teacher in the capital, Kampala. It was not exactly what I had had in mind – teaching music was not how I had imagined saving some of the world’s poorest people from starvation – but signing up with VSO was like joining the army: you went where you were ordered, and you did what you were told.
And so it was that on my eighteenth birthday, my parents drove me to Gatwick airport and waved me goodbye as I headed off for a twelve-month adventure in east Africa. In the days long before emails, Skype and mobile phones, it felt much more than it would today as if I was heading off into the Great Unknown. But I had set myself a challenge, and I was determined to meet it.
If I survived this, I told myself, I could survive anything.
* My wife’s maternal grandmother lived to ninety-six, and her mother made it to a hundred, so we have warned our children that they should expect to live for ever.
† The Home Service was replaced by Radio 4 in 1967.
‡ Hobsbawm later became Britain’s leading Marxist historian. He and my father had been at the same school in Berlin in the 1930s; they rekindled their friendship in later life and remained friends until Hobsbawm’s death in 2012.
CHAPTER 7
FROM KAMPALA TO CAMPUS
Tomorrow has been cancelled due to lack of interest.
POPULAR 1960S STUDENT SLOGAN
UGANDA IN THE 1960S was known as Africa’s Garden of Eden. It had gained its independence from Britain in 1962 with none of the unpleasantness that had accompanied its neighbour Kenya’s similar transition from colonial rule, although the seeds of later trouble were already being sown when, just months before my arrival, the then Prime Minister Milton Obote abolished the country’s semi-autonomous traditional kingdoms and declared himself President.
The country is green, fertile and hilly, with a climate that avoids the excessive humidity of much of west Africa. Because it was never a British colony (it was one of the last bits of Africa to be reached by Europeans, and Britain designated it only as a ‘protectorate’ after it took control in 1896), it was never settled by whites, and therefore, unlike Kenya, Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia) and South Africa, did not inherit a significant white minority population.
It did, however, have a well-established Indian community, descended from some of the fifteen thousand labourers who had been brought in by the British to build a railway line from the Kenyan port of Mombasa on the Indian Ocean to the shores of Lake Victoria. Other Indians followed to set up shops and other services for the railway workers and, by the time of independence, Asians played a major role in the Ugandan economy, especially the sugar industry. (In 1972, Idi Amin expelled more than seventy thousand Asians from Uganda; nearly thirty thousand of them came to Britain.)
For me, stepping bleary-eyed off the plane after a gruelling, sixteen-hour overnight flight and setting foot in Africa for the first tim
e, it was love at first sight. We were shepherded onto a coach and driven twenty-five miles along a dusty red mud road from Entebbe airport to Kampala. That early-morning drive, the first of dozens such journeys I have made over the decades in many different African countries, remains firmly imprinted in my memory, like a first kiss. There is a special freshness of the air, a crispness of the light, in the first couple of hours after an African dawn, as villagers prepare for a new day and children in bright white shirts with freshly scrubbed faces walk along the side of the road on their way to school.
In my first letter home, I declared myself to be ‘very content, but oh so tired’. And I vowed that when the time came to return to the UK at the end of my year-long adventure, I would try to find some alternative way to make the journey. Long-distance air travel, especially on a plane packed to the gills with over-excited teenagers (it had been specially chartered by VSO), was not to my taste. Little did I imagine how many more long, uncomfortable overnight flights I would endure during my adult life, each time vowing never to do it again.
The school where I would be teaching, Makerere College School, was attached to the Department of Education at Makerere College (now Makerere University). It was originally established as a place where education students could do some teaching practice but, by the time I got there, it had become a well-regarded secondary school with a flourishing music department. Hence the request for a volunteer music teacher from the UK to help out.
I have always felt somewhat ambivalent about the work I did in Uganda. No one would argue, then or now, that turning out a handful of young pianists or clarinettists could be regarded as a key priority for a developing country. Yet if young Ugandans wanted to learn to play the piano or clarinet, they surely had the same right to do so as their British or American equivalents. I tried to salve my conscience by learning to play a couple of traditional instruments of the Baganda people among whom I was living; as a result of the disbanding of the court of the King of Buganda,* his official musicians were now out of work and trying to scratch a living by making and selling musical instruments. They were only too happy to teach an ignorant mzungu (white man) how to play a simple tune on the endere, a traditional flute made of bamboo, and the endingidi, a one-string fiddle, with a single string attached to a flexible stick and stretched across a tubular resonator made of goat skin. So I was not, I reasoned, indoctrinating young Ugandans with imperial cultural practices but merely exchanging our respective cultural skills.
The truth, recognised by anyone who has done any gap year voluntary work, whether for a few weeks or for a year or two, is that the volunteers invariably benefit from the experience far more than the people of the country in which they are working. This does not mean that I would discourage young people from volunteering, nor would I argue that the work that they do is worthless. Nevertheless, I seriously doubt that any volunteer agency these days would dispatch an unqualified teenage music teacher to spend twelve months in east Africa.
Since I was totally inexperienced and untrained, but was expected somehow to teach students who were often older than I was, the benefit that I brought to their lives or future prosperity was sometimes hard to discern. Yet there was never any shortage of students who wanted to learn a musical instrument or to play in the school orchestra; my workload included taking eight class lessons per week, nine individual clarinet lessons, and six piano lessons, in addition to conducting the school band and helping out with the orchestra and choir.
The head of music at the school, and therefore my boss, was a formidable Englishwoman called Pat Foster. She was originally from Liverpool and had studied at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. She was in her early forties when I met her, a woman of forthright views and a highly developed talent for falling out with people. At times, I felt as if I had travelled halfway across the world to act as her unpaid personal assistant – she was certainly not always an easy person to work with – but at the age of eighteen, it was probably time for me to learn how to work with difficult people.
During my time at Makerere, I lived in one of the college halls of residence on Makerere Hill, just a short walk from the school. The arrangement should have been ideal for meeting Ugandan students of my own age, but for some reason I made no friends among the other residents and spent what little free time I had in the company of fellow expatriates. Many were themselves teachers, and I think they took pity on the naïve teenager who had turned up in their midst. Some invited me to join them and their families on safari in Kenya and Tanzania, and occasionally, in return, I would babysit for their young children.
My parents, understandably, were anxious for regular reassurance that I had neither been eaten by lions nor starved to death without the benefit of my mother’s home cooking. I wrote a weekly letter home, usually typed on flimsy pale blue writing paper, each letter carefully replied to by my parents (and often, separately, by my brother Stephen as well) and then filed away for posterity. My father’s refusal over several decades to throw anything away, which greatly exasperated my mother, has been thoroughly vindicated: this book would have been far more difficult, if not impossible, to write without recourse to the contemporary accounts contained in the letters that I wrote not only from Uganda, but from the various other countries where I later lived and worked as a foreign correspondent.
I rarely wrote about politics while I was in Uganda and I seem to have been only dimly aware of the slowly emerging crisis that would eventually erupt in 1971 when the army chief Idi Amin overthrew President Obote and ushered in a rule of terror that plunged Uganda into the abyss. In one letter I commented presciently: ‘Obote doesn’t seem to have control of his army – they have set up a roadblock on the main Uganda–Kenya road … rumours are everywhere: army coup, assassination attempt, anything or everything. So we’re all keeping our ears to the ground and our mouths firmly shut.’
The overall picture that emerges from the Lustig Uganda Letters is of an eighteen-year-old who was first overwhelmed by a sense of adventure and then slowly became worn down by the pressures of working under stress in an environment where forward planning was a rare luxury. What I learned over the months, however, was that I could cope, even if I soon came to the conclusion that whatever else I might do with my life, teaching was not for me. It was no fault of the students, but I realised early on that although I would be able to muddle through for a year, the idea of spending the rest of my life as a teacher filled me with dread.
My life at Makerere was mainly a succession of daily crises and frustrations. Everything had to be improvised at the last minute, which turned out to be an excellent preparation for a life in journalism. We never had enough functioning musical instruments for our needs, so I taught myself to become a useful musical technician, replacing springs and pads on woodwind instruments and oiling sticky valves on trumpets and horns.
By the end of my VSO year, I was not only older and wiser, but had also become deeply attached to the people with whom I had been working. In my last letter home before heading for Nairobi to catch my return flight (my determination to find an alternative way back to the UK had been defeated by both cost and logistics), I wrote: ‘I feel very miserable at the thought of saying goodbye to all the people at school – I’ve been so happy here, despite all the difficulties … it is so sad that I have to leave.’
So what was my Ugandan legacy? Towards the end of my year there, eight of my music pupils took Associated Board exams on their chosen instruments, assessed by an examiner who had flown out from the UK especially for the purpose. One clarinettist failed his Grade 6 exam, but four other students gained passes, and three, one of them a bassoonist, were awarded merits. One clarinettist even went on to become a music teacher herself. I also entered myself to take Grade 8, the top grade, on the clarinet, and, to my astonishment, was awarded a distinction. It was to be the peak of my somewhat short-lived career as a musician, because by the time I left university three years later, the demands of journalism ha
d consigned my clarinet to near oblivion.
Makerere College School also gathered more than its fair share of awards at the 1967 Uganda Music Festival, where it won a clutch of prizes in several categories and was presented by the First Lady, Miria Obote, with a special shield as ‘the organisation which has contributed most to the Festival’. The closest-fought competition was in the category ‘European Instrumental Ensemble’, in which there were only two entries, both from Makerere: the recorder group, trained and conducted by my boss Pat Foster, and the school band, trained and conducted by me. The experienced professional, with fifteen years’ teaching experience under her belt, was up against the bumptious teenager. The adjudicator, a former music education inspector in Kenya, had no inkling how much was riding on his verdict.
It could not have been closer: Pat’s recorder group scored 84 points; my school band scored 85 points. I tried not to gloat, but it meant that I could return home with my head held high.
There was just one more mission to accomplish. I had arranged to team up with two young British teachers, both a few years older than I was, to attempt to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa’s highest mountain, and, with its peak 19,341 feet above sea level, the highest mountain in the world that can be climbed without the use of additional oxygen. Three-quarters of the climbers who attempt it suffer from altitude sickness, and fewer than two-thirds make it to the summit. I have never been, even at the age of eighteen, much good at physical exertion, so this was a significant gamble. I suppose it was an indication of how my self-confidence had grown during my year away that I felt it was worth trying.
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