Over the Moon

by David Essex

  My first task was to meet some volunteers and observe their fieldwork at first hand and Dick decided that we should go to Uganda. It was a country that I knew little about save for the atrocities wreaked there by Idi Amin two decades earlier, but on the flight over Dick told me of its years of tribal conflict and civil war and its crippling Aids epidemic.

  We were met in Kampala by a tremendous VSO field officer named John who drove us in a jeep through the bustling early evening streets of the capital. Cars, scooters, bikes and absurdly overloaded buses vied for road space as in India, while in the crowded markets women balanced impossibly precipitous loads on their heads.

  As we drove to the VSO compound in the Kampala suburbs, I realised what a green, lush and verdant country Uganda was. It was severely crime-ridden, though: John told me that the last VSO field officer in the capital had been murdered for petrol in the very compound that we were heading for.

  Over the next two weeks, we travelled across the country and I admired the sterling and inspirational work done by the team of volunteers. We visited a teacher training college in Nkozi, a ninety-minute drive from Kampala. The students were on holiday, but the principal walked me around the campus.

  He showed me to the campus theatre, which was used by the college’s music and drama department. It was little more than a small tin-roofed building with a raised concrete stage. ‘Maybe you can come and teach here?’ he suggested. It seemed a great idea straight away.

  There was a heart-rending trip to an orphanage for kids whose parents had been killed in civil strife or died from Aids. Some of them ran around the room seemingly happily while many others sat in corners, too traumatised to speak. A saintly volunteer named Mary and her two Ugandan helpers moved among these damaged children, teaching them how to play. One of the older boys took a shine to me as soon as I arrived and insisted that I gave him a piggyback for the duration of my visit.

  In Kampala’s hectic central market I met an American girl who had left a high-flying finance job in New York to organise a group of local lepers into a co-operative. This admirable woman had transformed them from street beggars into traders selling small items for a stall and making a modest profit. They even had an office made from cardboard boxes and it was humbling to be invited in, shake their hands and – a very African protocol – sign their visitors’ book.

  Equally impressive was the middle-aged ex-head teacher from Birmingham who tore around rural Uganda on a motorbike working for women’s rights and helping Aids victims. She was a formidable woman, and even her frequent bouts of malaria were unable to poleaxe her.

  The mantra I heard from so many volunteers in Uganda was ‘We came to teach but we learned so much’ and as Dick Rowe and I boarded the flight home at Entebbe Airport he asked if I would like to return again one day. ‘I’d love to. Maybe I’ll take up that offer at Nkozi,’ I told him. He laughed, but I think both of us knew I was not joking.

  A few months later the fantasy became reality. Dick informed me that Nkozi College had made a formal request for me to do some teaching there and I turned my thoughts to what lessons this very un-trained teacher could impart. In the meantime, I launched another VSO-related project.

  I approached the body with the idea of producing a fund-raising album featuring musicians from many of the forty-eight countries in which it operated. Peter Gabriel and his Womad record label and another fine label Ace were also willing to help, and with the VSO’s enthusiastic support, I began to tackle the logistics of the idea.

  We agreed that I would travel to Uganda, Belize and the Caribbean, visit volunteers and their projects and while there enquire about local musicians. If I liked what they were doing, I would try to find cheap local studios and record them out there.

  It sounded an impossible project but came together remarkably adroitly. On the Caribbean island of St Lucia I found a man called Boo Hinkson singing calypso in a hotel and went to his home studio to record a track called ‘Calypso Classic’. I learned where he got his nickname from the day that a cat crossed our path and poor scared Boo literally jumped into my arms.

  Back in Uganda the country’s biggest group, Afrigo Band, kindly came to record for me in a Kampala studio called Sunrise normally used for Christian programmes. Traditional musicians Dr Semke and Abolugana Kagalana were so keen to be involved that they turned up a day early and had to sleep in the studio overnight.

  It is easy to become cynical in the music business but seeing the joy on these musicians’ faces as they heard their songs recorded and played back to them for the first time was wonderful. It made me think, in a strange way, of the first time I had heard myself singing ‘And the Tears Came Tumbling Down’ on a seven-inch single on my parents’ gramophone in Essex, almost thirty years earlier.

  Although I was loath to intrude on the record myself, I figured it was worth it if it marginally increased its commercial appeal, so back in England I added a track called ‘Africa – You Shine’ with my keyboardist Ian Wherry, African guitarist Abdul Tee-Jay and some brilliant South African female singers, Shikisha. I called the finished album Under Different Skies and released it in 1991. Like all world music albums, it was hampered by the lack of radio and media outlets for such music in Britain, but it achieved its aim of raising some much-needed funds both for the impoverished musicians and for the VSO.

  While I had been making the record the wheels had been set in motion for my return to Nkozi College and now I had decided what I would teach there. I resolved to direct the student teachers in a production of Godspell. I knew resources were tight, but even in my West End performances as Jesus the crucifixion props had been no more than a beer crate and two red ribbons.

  Before flying out I got hold of a few little magic tricks for Jesus to perform and some T-shirts, and I also knew I would need a pianist. My keyboardist Ian Wherry couldn’t make it but a very talented musician called Helen Ireland agreed to come and spend two months in rural Uganda.

  I will never forget our arrival at the college, on a warm night with a huge moon and students sitting talking, laughing and playing drums outside. Helen and I were given a tin shack to share and a Ugandan teacher named Celestine was to be our assistant.

  Celestine showed Helen and I to our new two-bedroom home and lit a candle: as usual, the electricity was not working. I was just drifting off to sleep when I heard a scream from Helen’s room. Freeing myself from my mosquito net, I jumped from my bed only to feel the floor moving beneath my feet.

  Scrabbling to light a candle, I discovered that the entire floor of my room was a shifting carpet of cockroaches. Tiptoeing to Helen’s room, I found she had the same unwanted guests. She was not keen, but it is surprising what you can get used to, and over the coming weeks we managed to co-exist warily with our intrusive insects.

  The next morning we awoke to a definitively African scene. The families in the mud huts dotted around us were stirring and making breakfast over open fires. There was the crisp smell of burning logs and the sounds of monkeys, goats and exotic birds. Celestine had kindly brought us a can of water from the well so we washed and prepared to meet our new students.

  In the makeshift theatre that I had seen on my first Nkozi trip, thirty-six trainee teachers greeted us by singing an uplifting, sonorous welcome song. They were fifty-fifty male and female, with an average age of about twenty-three. I explained that we were to rehearse and perform a musical and they appeared delighted, even though I am not entirely sure they had even heard of the genre before.

  Celestine had managed to borrow a piano from a local church so with Helen at the keys we set about the casting process. I had decided to choose ten clowns, including Jesus, and use the other twenty-six cast members as a powerful singing Greek chorus.

  Everybody wanted to play Jesus, girls included, but I settled on a boy called David. Both he and Judas seemed to have a lot of potential, and after a long day Helen and I returned to our grub-laden hut far more confident and less apprehensive about the task ahead.


  Our domestic life soon settled down into a routine of me doing the cooking, Helen washing the dishes and my tinny transistor radio crackling out the BBC World Service. On one of the few nights that the electricity worked, I left our outside light on for the convenience of the family in the nearest hut. Woken by laughter at three in the morning, I looked through the window to see our neighbours gathered around this outside light, feasting on the flying ants that had been attracted to it. Apparently they were a good source of protein and quite the local delicacy.

  During the days, Helen worked tirelessly to teach our willing cast the songs from Godspell as I tutored the principal cast members. It was a very emotional process for me, both for the flood of memories of my days in Chalk Farm that it brought back and because the African actors were growing in confidence and into their roles. I certainly tried to be a more proactive director than John-Michael Tebelak.

  It soon became clear to me that these Ugandans were natural storytellers and performers. If anything, my role was to try to prevent them from over-acting wildly and turning every scene into an over-the-top melodrama.

  Some ladies from the village helped with the costumes and a local carpenter constructed the rudimentary set of planks and sawhorses. The nearby shop gave us a plastic bottle crate for the crucifixion. Occasionally I would take a break to organise other workshops or coach football sessions with some footballs I had persuaded West Ham kindly to donate to the trip.

  The cast’s sense of camaraderie reminded me of the us-against-the-world attitude we had nurtured in the Roundhouse all those years ago, and by the time of the first show we were ready. The audience was made up of other students, locals, doctors and nuns from the local hospital, and VSO volunteers from other Kampala projects.

  We were to play three nights at the college theatre and they were a triumph. I was so proud of my cast on the opening night and the audience were moved to tears by the crucifixion scene just as they had been in London. Absolute troupers, the actors even survived the sticky moment when a goat decided to join them on stage and butted and baa-ed its way through the Greek chorus.

  We had got a touring itinerary, of sorts, with a date lined up at another local college and then the big time: the National Theatre in Kampala. I had booked a truck to transport the cast and set to the next venue, but when it had not arrived two hours after it was due, I stopped putting it down to usual lackadaisical African time-keeping and started getting worried.

  Celestine vanished to the local hospital to make a phone call and returned to confirm that the truck had broken down and would not be making an appearance today. ‘Does anybody else have a truck?’ I asked him. ‘Not that I know,’ he replied. I left the cast happily playing football and headed into Kampala to try to find a solution.

  Passing a construction site, I spotted some builders emptying sand from an extremely beaten-up truck. ‘I want to borrow your truck,’ I told them, and while their initial reaction appeared to be that I must be mental, some cold hard cash helped to change their minds and I headed back to Nkozi with my prize.

  The Godspell cast cheered as I chugged on to campus in a cloud of black smoke and we loaded up the piano, set and actors and set off for the outskirts of Kampala. The journey was quite something. With somebody else taking over driving duties, I transferred to the piano stool on the back of the open truck and resolved to teach the students Ben E King’s ‘Stand By Me’ en route. With the rich voices of thirty-six Africans intoning a tribal-sounding version of this Tamla Motown classic as a long-haired white guy bashed at the keys, we were certainly a sight to stop the traffic.

  The show was at a rival college to Nkozi, which meant that the cast were both nervous and determined to put on a great performance. This was easier said than done as two or three of them had got malaria, and one female clown was too ill to perform and was replaced by her understudy.

  Adversity can be a great motivating force and to my delight the cast ratcheted their performance up another notch with both Jesus and Judas on spellbinding form. The audience transformed from too-cool-for-school to transfixed and then tearful, and as the company bedded down in a borrowed dormitory that night, there was much excited talk about hitting the big time with the National Theatre show the following night.

  Yet this show looked to be ill-starred when we arrived at the theatre to be told that the stage manager was away for the day at a funeral. This being Africa, he had no assistant and the theatre managers had not thought to provide anybody else to help us. We would have to work the lights, the sound system and just about everything else ourselves.

  The technical rehearsal was understandably slow-going as Helen, Celestine and I pushed buttons and twiddled knobs on the National Theatre’s fairly rudimentary production console. I found a big ladder and vanished up to the ceiling to set the lights. The students were restless but patiently did what had to be done before show time.

  In the dressing room, I gave them a football-manager-style pep talk, pointing out that it was by far the biggest show to date and they had to rise to the occasion. However, I was only too aware that this also applied to me as I tried to keep the technical aspects of the performance afloat.

  I even had to ring the bar bell to summon the audience into the auditorium, at which point it became clear they were of a very different calibre to the previous shows. Here were Kampala’s glitterati, together with senior representatives of VSO, consulates and various other aid organisations.

  I had kept the lighting low as John the Baptist opened the show by entering through the auditorium to baptise Jesus so that when the clowns burst into ‘Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord’ there would be an explosion of light and colour. It worked, and from there the audience were with us all the way.

  It was hard for me to evaluate individual performances as I hunched over the unfamiliar lights and sound switches but the cacophony of clapping at the curtain call told its own story. The British Consulate invited us to a post-show reception in their honour and as my jubilant cast nibbled canapés in the palatial grounds, I knew it was an experience they would never forget. That went for me as well.

  The National Theatre were so taken with our Godspell that they asked us to play for a week and after the stage manager returned I was able to sit back and enjoy the subsequent performances. It was also nice for Helen and I to get out of Cockroach City and have a week in the VSO compound in Kampala that boasted twentieth-century luxuries such as electricity and running water.

  This last week was great fun but contained yet another lesson that I need to do something about my pesky need for speed. Driving a jeep with a VSO volunteer in the passenger seat, my accelerator foot grew itchy as we crawled along behind a very slow-moving Ugandan Army jeep full of soldiers. I pulled out to overtake them, at which point the soldiers all levelled their guns at me and the volunteer quickly grabbed the steering wheel and diverted us down a dirt road. He then patiently explained the Ugandan Highway Code: if you overtake a military vehicle, they will shoot you.

  Helen and I had the most emotional departure imaginable from Uganda. We travelled back to Nkozi to say goodbye to all of our friends, and to the cockroaches, then were driven to the airport. As we waited to board the plane at Entebbe, Helen pointed out of the window and simply said, ‘Look!’

  Our students were ranging the airport’s perimeter fence, holding signs declaring ‘COME BACK SOON’ and ‘WE LOVE YOU’ and waving furiously. They had walked more than twenty miles to do this and it made me feel both awed and humbled.

  Twenty years on, I still receive occasional letters from the Nkozi class of ’92. Most of them have now become teachers, although a couple of the girls became nuns. I will also never forget the biggest compliment of all, paid to me by the boy who played Judas: ‘You are a white man with an African soul.’

  I made numerous other trips with the VSO including a jaunt to Grenada in the Caribbean, which has a high incidence of mental illness, and also to Malawi, where I managed to contract Tick Typh
us fever and on my return spent a few days in a state of mild delirium in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in King’s Cross. I also played a fund-raising concert at the Barbican that was attended by the Duke of Edinburgh, who took a definite shine to Verity backstage and had a long chat with her.

  Despite my initial reservations, I found my work with the VSO so fulfilling that I even extended my tenure as ambassador to three years, only reluctantly handing over the baton in 1993 to Olympic gold medal javelin-thrower Fatima Whitbread. It had been absolutely one of the most rewarding adventures of my entire life.

  21

  IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT THE FAMILY

  OUTSIDE OF THE VSO, as the nineties dawned I chose my work projects carefully and selectively. With Verity, in particular, and Danny having been born at the height of the hysteria of Essex Mania, there had inevitably been times when I had to be away from home for longer than I wanted as they were growing up. I had missed a handful of crucial formative moments in their childhood developments and I was not going to make the same mistake again.

  So outside of my trips to Africa, I made sure that my work schedule always left me plenty of time to zoom back across the Atlantic and hang out with Carlotta, Kit and Bill in Connecticut, as well as spend quality time with Verity and Dan in London. It was a busy period but a happy one.

  One film offer appealed immediately to my subversive, slightly twisted sense of humour. A Japanese film company contacted us asking me to play an evil duke, Don Pedro, in a ninja movie called Shogun Mayeda. By now a teenage martial arts fan, Dan was hugely impressed as its star, Sho Kosugi, was a legend in that field.