In amongst the politics I got on with my law course, thrilling to cases that defined negligence like Rylands v. Fletcher, over who was to blame when a reservoir flooded a neighbouring mine; or Donoghue v. Stevens, over what duty of care a drinks company owed an innocent drinker who found a snail in his ginger-beer bottle. I learned much of public international law and nothing at all of tort, or personal property. Every one of my fellow law students wanted to join the legal profession. I thought I didn’t, but that I might drift into becoming a barrister anyway.
I passed my first-year exams with flying colours in June 1969, and left the next day for the most extraordinary adventure by road to India. It was to take every day of the long vacation until the end of September. We who were to travel had to raise the money ourselves. One of my fund-raising stunts had been an attempt to break the world record for sitting on a lavatory. My bid was staged on a platform in the front hall of the Students’ Union. Twenty-five hours I sat on the thing, with my trousers round my ankles, only to discover that the prudes at the Guinness Book of Records would not accept it. In truth I was never able to establish that it was a record anyway, but certainly no one else seemed to be fool enough to claim it. I raised £1200 from sponsors including Armitage Shanks, who made the thing, revealing an unexpected sense of humour. In the final hour students were allowed to buy eggs for 20p each, and reduce me to a ripe old mess.
Our passage to India was courtesy of Comex – the Commonwealth Expedition. This was a mad escapade run by an eccentric who we knew simply as Colonel Gregory. Gregory’s dream was for every university in the land to send a busload of students on a cultural exchange to India, and for as many Indian universities as possible to do so in reverse. It was a brilliant and idealistic way of attempting to give new life to an institution – the British Commonwealth – that already had an elderly, even patronising air of imperial legacy and UK dominance.
I was to be one of our two drivers, so I had to train for and pass my bus driver’s licence in between demonstrations and exams. We twenty-five souls aboard had to decide what our cultural offering should amount to. We suspected that many in India, if they had heard of Liverpool at all, would have done so because of the Beatles, so we lit upon the idea of a four-part close-harmony Beatle band with guitar and drums. In addition to driving, I was to supply the bass harmonies. I was spared involvement in Sheridan’s eighteenth-century play The Rivals, which the rest of the crew proposed to stage.
Somehow the Colonel had cajoled the manufacturers Bedford to supply all the shortened single-decker buses on some kind of subsidised lease-lend basis. When we gathered in Ostend for the first leg of the overland dash for India there were more than two dozen cream Bedford Duples lined up, one each for twenty-five universities, sporting the green-and-gold Comex livery. They looked like an advertiser’s dream. But it was the last time they would. If they returned at all from their ten-thousand-mile odyssey they would have more than lost their sheen.
Once we were under way, countries I’d never expected to visit in my life fell before us like ninepins: Belgium and Luxembourg went without a stop. My whole sense of political geography was changing. Our first night, and first concert, was at a castle above Stuttgart. I found a Germany very far from the one I’d heard my parents talk about in childhood. It felt more prosperous than home, and more energised.
‘Hey Jude, don’t be afraid …’ The close harmony worked beautifully, and the castle walls rang to the applause of the locals who’d turned out to hear us. The Rivals went less well, its complicated plot lines hanging heavy on the German night air. We slept en masse in a gymnasium. I had never slept in the company of so many women. But for our hippy appearance, the expedition had all the hallmarks of a travelling British holiday camp.
Crossing into Yugoslavia from Austria, we tasted the only Communist regime of our journey. Tito was everywhere, or rather his bespectacled image was. The country felt surprisingly mellow, and beyond the somewhat monotone look of the traffic, gave little sign of being very different to the rest of Western Europe. On the wide road running south from Zagreb to Belgrade all twenty-five buses stopped on the hard shoulder to remember the members of an earlier Comex expedition whose bus had crashed at this spot. Seven or eight of them had died, and many more had been injured. It introduced a sombre note to our continuous fast driving and youthful overtaking.
That first glimpse of Yugoslavia was to stand me in good stead later in life, when the ethnic tensions beneath the surface burst into frenzied hatred and killing. In Belgrade, Tito himself turned out in the stadium for our concert. Tough, burly, beaming a warm welcome, he was clearly and massively in charge. I didn’t get near him, but I did catch sight of his foot tapping as I belted out the bass line to ‘All You Need is Love’.
It wasn’t until we reached eastern Turkey that the buses began to pay the price for their large expanses of glass and glinting chrome – too much of a temptation for the locals, who extracted stones from the decaying roadway and hurled them with great accuracy at our passing cavalcade. We lost our back two windows, Cambridge lost all their glass down one side, Aberdeen lost their windscreen and East Anglia most of their windows on both sides. Crossing into Iran, the convoy had taken on a billowing aspect, with curtains and possessions blowing out of assorted openings. Somehow, without the benefit of mobile phone or internet, Colonel Gregory had lined up replacement glass to await our arrival in Tehran.
With nine years to go until the Iranian revolution, this was the time of some of the Shah’s most ostentatious consumption. Persepolis was littered with the paraphernalia of his attempt to mark the supposed millennium of his phoney dynasty. Everywhere were the signs of Westernisation and Americana. The Shah’s Tehran was more than ready for the Beatles, even the somewhat inadequate line-up we had on offer, and we played to packed houses in the basketball stadium.
We left Iran along the coast of the Caspian Sea. Gazing up at the hills overlooking the water, I spotted the telltale giant white golf balls of the early-warning station that the US maintained here against Russian missile tests in the Urals. I knew what they were from having seen a similar installation at Fylingdales, in the heart of my father’s Yorkshire diocese. In a magical kind of way I was laying the superficial building blocks that would assist me later to track the evolving new world disharmony. Yet as we voyaged on towards Afghanistan I still had no idea of becoming a journalist, or of ever retracing my steps here.
The western Afghan town of Herat slumbered in the late-afternoon heat. Old men sat on their white-robed haunches, sipping tea at the roadside. Their hennaed beards and brown features stood out against the tea stalls beyond. Camels and mules fought for street space with ancient bicycles and the occasional highly decorated, heavily overladen truck. The main roads were the best we encountered east of the Bosphorus, for Afghanistan was the archetypal buffer state. They were so straight that they were only marred by frequent head-on collisions induced by sleep and mesmerisation. The international power play here was tense indeed. The United States had built the road from the Iranian border to Kandahar, the Russians had built the rest most of the way to the bottom of the Khyber Pass.
By now our caravan of suburban British buses had broken up into much smaller convoys, having become separated by punctures and breakdowns. Although our own bus was the nexus of our travelling lives, some of us had forged relations with people on other buses. By now the Aberdeen bus held a special attraction for me. I had fallen into easy conversation with one of their crew, Liz, but it was almost impossible to keep track of her; her wretched vehicle rarely coincided with ours. But trying to find her, and then unexpectedly encountering her, provided an extra frisson to an already incredible journey.
Kabul was the capital of the hippy kingdom. There were Western dropouts and druggies everywhere, some in an awful state. Others had simply merged into the scenery. The city was a mellow and tolerant place. What it lacked in tension, though, it made up for in mystery. Whatever the warlords were up to, it certainly didn’t seem to be war. Opium appeared to be present more in the consumption than in the trade. This was a buffer state that, while operating at a barely tolerable level of existence, seemed to work nevertheless. It was hard to see why anyone would want to change it. Yet we were less than a decade from the Russian invasion that would herald the beginning of the end