I felt an immediate affinity with him, for I too intended to purge my sins and work my redemptive passage. It was only seven years since Profumo’s fall, but he manifested such humility, and yet such confidence. He was a considerable contrast from the wretched wreck that I had presumed a man who had suffered such public humiliation would have become. Lying to the House of Commons about an affair with a woman who had slept with a Russian spy may have shocked the nation, but it had also resulted in Profumo’s coming to work for New Horizon. And work he did, ceaselessly, to get the funding and profile that the centre needed to survive. But the British Establishment had been so bruised, and was so far up its own class-consciousness, that to this day it has remained incapable of recognising the far more important role that he now occupied. Profumo seemed almost to have walked out of my ‘A’ level English text, Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. Like the fictional arms dealer Andrew Undershaft before him, John Profumo, Minister for War, had determined to move from armaments to working with the poor.
Domestic Britain was still in transition from the unquestioning post-war, post-imperial order to something more multicultural, more egalitarian. Slattery, Profumo, even Longford were all of the old order. The new was still formulating. It was going to be a struggle, and New Horizon wouldn’t be a bad place from which to observe it. What I was to see was the harshest evidence of the consequences of upheaval and neglect.
The steps down to the underground station at Piccadilly Circus were wet, and stank of urine. Bodies slumped on the lower steps. The cubicles in the lavatories were littered with discarded needles. Blood was spattered on the dirty white wall-tiles. This was the epicentre of Britain’s burgeoning heroin crisis, a stone’s throw from St Anne’s church in Soho, where New Horizon occupied the ground floor. We were open to anyone under twenty-one.
Hard drugs played a role in most of the problems we dealt with. The NHS drug clinics had just started dishing out legal heroin in an attempt to see off the Chinese Triad gangs that were taking hold around London’s West End. The black market was rife, and we caught glimpses of it all the time in the day centre. Fifteen-year-olds would come in having injected Ajax scouring powder that had been sold as heroin. Teenagers already dependent upon the drug were cranking up barbiturates intravenously to blunt their withdrawal symptoms. The casualties were on a huge scale, too many for us to deal with. There was also nowhere for us to house them. What hostels there were wouldn’t take anyone with a drug record, and without improving their living circumstances there wasn’t much we could do about their habits.
In the first year Longford, Slattery and Profumo managed to raise enough money to expand and move the centre to Covent Garden. A caretaker’s flat went with the place, and I was unwise enough to move into it. From the three staff I’d inherited, we grew to fifteen. We opened a hostel of our own in north London, together with an emergency night shelter.
In some senses I felt I was reconnecting with something that had lain beneath the surface of my time in Uganda: the consequence of great poverty. Forty per cent of the kids at New Horizon came from local authority care schemes. The word ‘care’ was a pretty gross misnomer. Many had passed through a dozen or more foster homes or institutions; almost none of them had any educational qualifications. The state had nurtured them for the refuse tip, or at least for jail, where I spent increasing amounts of time visiting our clients. Many of the other young people we saw had come from abusive or broken homes.
It was through working at the centre that I met Madeleine Colvin. She came in one afternoon, a stunning curly-haired lawyer in a summer dress who abandoned her white Fiat 500 at the door. She would come once a week to give voluntary legal advice. We started going out almost immediately, but it would be years before we settled into any kind of partnership.
Living ‘above the shop’ in the caretaker’s flat became increasingly problematic. I well remember escaping with Madeleine one night, and driving off to a party in Oxford. At the party there was a particularly seductive-looking strawberry flan, and we all devoured it. Not long after, I began to feel queasy. Driving home along the M40 with five of us in my Mini, I began to hallucinate that the car was too big to fit beneath the bridges. The white lines became aggressive. Someone had spiked the flan with acid. I was tripping out. Only one of the five of us in the car had not eaten of the flan, and she took over and drove us home. Once Madeleine and I were back in the flat, the acid trip crowded in on us and we swigged orange juice to try to assuage it. But every time the Jacques Loussier disc on the record player stopped, we tripped out again. I supposed I had become party to the so-called ‘drugs revolution’. The next morning I staggered down to the day centre and blearily took up my usual position with the register at the door. The room swam before my eyes as familiar figures swayed into view. Had I joined them? Was this the beginning of my end? It took me a few days to recover, and while the experience did not put me off cannabis, it made me very wary of anything stronger.
In a world with no experts, I soon became a ‘drug expert’. I was even invited to appear on a television programme called The Frost Debate which involved David Frost debating the big issues of the day. On this occasion drugs were the issue, and I remember a heated argument with the great man. It was the first time I had ever appeared on television.
Some of the young people at New Horizon were virtually beyond hope. Jimmy King was just sixteen. He’d so mashed his veins that one day I found him unconscious on the loo, having been trying to fix barbiturates into the veins of his penis. Others had suffered gangrene and amputations. It was hell. But from it emerged Chris Finzi, who gave me hope that it was all worthwhile. He was almost as far gone as Jimmy, but he had one glorious talent: he was an artist of considerable ability, a brilliant cartoonist. ‘I have no sense of who my parents were,’ he told me. ‘I was in homes and fostered, and then I hit sixteen and no one would have me any more.’
I agreed to give him a home on the floor of my flat. There were many moments of failure, even a spell on remand in the secure young offenders’ prison in Ashford. But after more than a year, Chris made it. We at the centre housed him and trained him; but perhaps more critically than anything, he fell in love. He never relapsed.
Kevin was another engaging boy, with tousled blond hair. My chequebook was too much temptation. He stole it with my bank cards, and ran up bills of thousands of pounds. He left my flat for jail.
As soon as one went, another would come calling. Graham was a drug-free male prostitute of sixteen, who looked about twelve. He sat on the chair in my office telling me, in floods of tears, of the abuse he suffered on the streets. He named MPs, a minister and a priest as being among his clients. I had no reason to doubt him, he identified them so clearly.
And then there were the young women. Jan was a regular, sixteen years old, addicted to heroin and barbiturates, and pregnant. The state could not cope with her, and she went to Holloway prison for a stretch. Then she came back to us. We got her housed in Hackney, but neither the council nor we could provide the support she desperately needed. She would come by the flat late at night, throwing milk bottles at the wall to get my attention. Eventually she was admitted to University College Hospital for the birth. I went to visit her, and for the first time in my knowledge of her young life she looked radiant, with the baby, who was miraculously unaddicted, in her arms.
But within a day or two my telephone rang at two in the morning. ‘Ishhatt you, Jon?’ The slurred voice was unmistakably Jan’s.
‘Where are you? Where’s the baby?’ I asked urgently. There was no answer. I ran down to my Mini and headed for Hackney. I had never been to the flat where she lived, but we kept her rent book, which had the address. I found the place in twenty minutes. It was in a tall block, the stairway stinking of urine. There was a human form slumped on the second-floor stairs. I could hear the baby crying when I was three floors below Jan’s flat. I peered through the letterbox. No Jan, just the baby crying. I took a run at the door, and the lock gave. Inside, the baby was filthy, so I washed him. There was a tin of powdered milk, and I mixed a bit up with water. I think it was milk, anyway – I was pretty vague about what to do with babies. I fed him chaotically and swaddled him in a blanket, then ran with him to the car, reflecting that I was now, almost certainly, officially a baby snatcher.
Wondering ‘What the hell