The biggest impact the YCL made on my life was when news got round that a local youth club was losing its premises in a church, and was eyeing a disused four-storey Victorian pub, the Winchester Arms in Swiss Cottage, as a replacement. The pub had been purchased by Camden Council years before, and left empty. I volunteered to join the members of the youth club in occupying this wonderful building and setting to work on converting it, while I negotiated with the council for a short-term lease. The project consumed the attention of my whole family. The youth leader, Graham Good, and his partner Brenda, took up residence in my parents’ home, and my father became the project’s legal trustee. The refitted building survives as a popular youth club, under voluntary rather than Communist management, to this day.
As A-levels approached, I turned my mind to life after Hendon County. With Mr Potts barely acquiescent, I had been encouraged by my economics master, Mr Brown, to apply for a place to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. Much to my surprise, I succeeded. But the closer the prospect of starting there became, the more nervous I was. There was little university, much less Oxbridge, background in my family – although Miles had broken the mould by excelling at Nottingham, and going on to Liverpool. I felt too young, too Hampstead Garden Suburban, to go up to Oxford straight away, and persuaded the college to allow me to delay a year, convincing them that I would benefit from living and working in Tanzania, where Julius Nyerere was championing a distinctly African system of village-based socialism which he called Ujamaa.
Finding a placement was not easy. Over a period of many months, I wrote dozens of letters to the government, charities, churches and voluntary organisations, all to no avail. Eventually, luck struck. One evening I heard a radio interview with the Bishop of Stepney, Trevor Huddleston, previously a bishop in southern Tanzania, and a Nyerere enthusiast who as a young pastor had been booted out of South Africa for his stand against apartheid. I wrote to him, and he invited me to see him at his home in Commercial Road. We talked for nearly an hour, during which I imagine I impressed him more by my enthusiasm than by any special knowledge or qualifications I might bring to rural Tanzania. But he generously arranged for me to work with Anglican missions in the north of the country – and even more generously, I would later discover, to pay for my room and board.
In September 1972 I boarded a flight to Nairobi, from where I would make the short turbo-prop hop to Musoma in north-western Tanzania, with a feeling of adventure and excitement. When I arrived at the Buhemba rural aid station, amid rolling hills and sweeping valleys hundreds of miles from Tanzania’s coastal capital of Dar es Salaam, I was struck by the simple beauty of my new, very un-Suburb, breeze-block home. I shared it with a VSO and a Canadian volunteer. It was lit by kerosene lamps, and we had a small gas cooker and an outdoor latrine.
Soon, however, a sense of loneliness and isolation set in. I wondered how on earth I was going to survive a year of this. Even if I were one of life’s great natural linguists, which I am not, mastery of Swahili would have been a stretch. Over time, I did acquire a rudimentary competence, but thankfully most of the Tanzanians in the mission spoke English. They helped me, and teased me, over my initial difficulties. I had no obvious common ground with the assortment of New Zealand missionaries who ran the station, kind as they were. Nothing in my upbringing had prepared me to embrace the bedrock of religious belief and purpose that defined their lives. With each passing week, however, I began to feel more a part of things. When I was not working, I wrote scores of letters home to Bigwood Road, to Steve and Keren and other friends, and of course to Bishop Huddleston. They replied with letters of their own and an endless supply of books.
We started work early each morning, and finished in midafternoon, amid the heat of the approaching southern hemisphere summer. I planted endless gum trees, determined to stay one step ahead of the rabbits as they devoured the saplings. I built chicken coops. I painted houses. I helped in the mission office, sorting the huge pile of unfiled invoices. I also spent hours talking, and listening, to the Tanzanians with whom I was working. I travelled to Nairobi to buy agricultural spare parts and, nearer home, to Musoma to stay with a charming if slightly eccentric missionary couple, the aptly named Merry and Beatrice Hart.
After four months, I left to work at the missionary-run Murgwanza Hospital in Ngara, on the far side of Lake Victoria near the border with Rwanda and Burundi. A typical day would begin at the concrete slab that served as an operating table for the ebullient English missionary doctor, Arthur Adeney. I would pump anaesthetic ether from a cylinder into a patient with a torn limb, a broken bone, or a burst appendix. If things got complicated, Arthur would have me read him the relevant passages from his university anatomy textbook while I tried to maintain my attention on the pump. The rest of my day was devoted to the dozens of young children in the hospital’s orphanage. I can still almost feel the two young sisters who waited for my arrival every afternoon clinging to me, and vividly remember their wailing when it was time for me to leave.
I thought, read and wrote a great deal during my time in Tanzania. Much of what preoccupied me was politics. This was long before the era of the internet or the mobile phone. What news we got came from the BBC World Service, the beginning of my love affair with the BBC. I read books and pamphlets by Nyerere and his TANU party thinkers, as well as other African authors. I read political novels, like Emile Zola’s Germinal and William Morris’s utopian socialist fantasy News from Nowhere. I read about Christianity, and remember being especially moved by the theologian Michael Green’s passionate statement of belief in Christ’s resurrection, Man Alive. It helped me to understand, and even at times to feel a part of, the fervency, commitment and simple goodness of the missionaries whom I was working and living with, and coming to admire. In my letters home, I tried to come to terms with what this new wash of knowledge and experience meant about the easier life I had lived, and the easier choices I had made, before living in Africa. There were times when I felt caught up in the promise of Nyerere’s Tanzanian socialism. At others, I felt swept away by the shared purpose of the missionaries – almost, but never quite, fetching up in the arms of the organised Church.
My final work in Tanzania was at the Isamilo primary school in Mwanza. It was the hardest and most demanding of all. I taught every subject to a class of forty youngsters. Teaching had seemed so easy when I was on the receiving end, but now, no matter how hard I tried, I felt there was always a child I could not reach, or a bit of knowledge I could not convey. It left me with an undying admiration for those who have a natural talent for teaching.
In the end, I also learned something else about myself. Africa would for ever be a part of my life, including but beyond the campaigning against apartheid that involved my whole family. But I knew my real home was in Britain – the country, the culture, the politics in which I had grown up. I ended my eleven months away more rounded, wiser, more grown-up – and with far more questions than answers. One of my many long letters to Steve, written shortly before my return, probably captured this best: ‘Sometimes, I reason that Tanzanian socialism is tremendous, and the only hope for development, but that socialism in England would be wholly impractical. And that we are living in an ideological cloud-cuckoo land in which England no more has a socialist future than it will fly in the air … And then I think there is a lot wrong; much injustice and unnecessary poverty and human suffering, and that something must be done about it. But how? Through the Labour Party in Parliament … or yet more words and demonstrations?’ All I knew for sure was that, anxious though I was to get home, I would feel very different when I got there from when I had left.
I was certainly no less confused when I arrived at St Catherine’s in the autumn. But the tug of politics was stronger than ever, now with a pulsating African and international dimension. Whatever I had seen and written home about to Steve and the others, it never seriously occurred to