‘Sorry, but there really is only one way babies come in here,’ she smiled, ‘and I’m afraid this isn’t it.’
‘Where do I go, then?’ I asked.
‘Well, where did you find him?’
‘Hackney.’
‘Phone the emergency service for social services.’
So I did.
‘Sorry,’ said the voice. ‘If the baby’s no longer in Hackney, it’s not our responsibility. If you’re at UCH, you’re in Camden. You’ll have to phone them.’
By the time the emergency social worker in Camden finally agreed to meet me, it was six in the morning and the baby was in distress. I wondered what would become of him. Would he too go into care and grow up like his mother? Poor little mite – how badly we were serving him.
Jan was found dead of barbiturate poisoning three days later in a filthy squat in King’s Cross. There were only two of us at her pauper’s burial at the East Finchley cemetery, and I never discovered who the other person was. I cried as the scratched recording of ‘Jerusalem’ echoed in the empty chapel. I wasn’t cut out for this, I reflected. As I sat there, I felt that at least I’d had the privilege of meeting and knowing people at the far edge. I determined that if I did nothing else in life, I would try to keep my lifeline with New Horizon open for as long as I possibly could.
In retrospect, this was a critical moment in the evolving welfare state. The state was clumsily finding out that there were areas in which it was incapable of offering caring resource. The voluntary sector, places like New Horizon, was better at it. In the long run the state would start to provide us with significant funding to do the job ourselves. But that would take several decades. In the meantime our day centre was a very hard place to be.
However bad things got at New Horizon, the presence of Lord Longford guaranteed that there would always be bouts of light relief. From the beginning, he and I would have lunch about once a month. We were to go on doing so until he died at the age of ninety-five three decades later. Ostensibly the purpose of these lunches was to talk about New Horizon, but in reality we gossiped about current politics and about history. Though Longford was ribbed mercilessly in the media for his eccentricities, I learned a vast amount from him – about the rise of fascism in the thirties, about Ireland, about the war, about Catholicism, about the British Establishment and, more than anything, about politics and government. Here was a man who’d served as Minister for Germany under Clement Attlee in the 1940s, and Leader of the House of Lords in Harold Wilson’s Cabinet in the 1960s. There was almost no one in public life he did not know. He was determined that I would go into politics.
Longford was also, perhaps inevitably, the inadvertent author of a cascade of bizarre events. One Sunday in the spring of 1972, Bobby Moore, the captain of England’s winning 1966 World Cup football team, for some reason offered us a fund-raising charity match at West Ham’s ground, Upton Park in East London. His team was going to play a celebrity side that included some Playboy bunny girls.
‘Lord Longford,’ I ventured, ‘I don’t think you should play.’
‘Why ever not?’ he retorted. ‘I was pretty good at Oxford.’
‘It isn’t a question of how good you were, nor even the fact that you are in your mid-sixties. It’s the fact that you are running an anti-pornography crusade, and the Playboy bunny girls are playing.’
‘Oh dear,’ he said, rather crestfallen.
Frank Longford was really pretty broad-minded, despite his reputation, and seemed to me to have been hijacked by some early neo-conservatives. He was insistent that he should attend the game, so on the day I picked him up from Charing Cross station and headed for Upton Park. Halfway there, Longford rolled up his trousers to reveal the hem of some elderly cream football knickerbockers.
‘Oh my God! You are going to play!’ I exclaimed.
‘I may,’ he said, somewhat sheepishly.
‘Well,’ I thought, ‘he’s a grown man, I’ve warned him about both his age and the girls. What more can I do?’
At the ground, my worst fears were rapidly realised. The cotton-tailed bunnies did what they do, and ‘Lord Porn’, as he was by then tagged, was in their midst. The press had a field day. I don’t remember much about who won, or indeed how much money we raised. But I can still see those blue-white legs adorned in half-mast grey socks, protruding from the cream 1920s football shorts flanked by bunny bottoms.
One day I was sitting in the day centre when the phone rang. ‘Mr Snow?’ asked a posh voice on the end of the line.
‘Yes.’
‘This is Squadron Leader David Checketts, Equerry to the Prince of Wales. His Royal Highness would like to invite you to meet him at Buckingham Palace. Would this be possible?’
Although bemused and instinctively suspicious of anything to do with the royal family, I was intrigued, and agreed. It is one of the strange and inexplicable things about evolving Britain that the royal family still has such pull.
At the appointed time, wearing rare jacket and tie, I set off down the Mall on my pushbike, my usual means of transport, then as now. Ushered through the great iron gates on the right-hand side of Buckingham Palace, I did as I was instructed and leant the bike against the end of the palace. The red-carpeted entrance was surprisingly dowdy and run-down. I was escorted upstairs to what I think was called the White Morning Room. It was certainly white, and sun came pouring in through the windows. There were two others waiting to see Prince Charles with me; they too seemed to work in what we called the voluntary sector. A ludicrous butler wafted in with a silver salver of biscuits, tea and coffee. Suddenly the Squadron Leader arrived with his master. We all stood up. ‘Good morning, sir,’ was the order of day, despite the fact that the Prince was virtually the same age as me. He was stiff, and even then fiddled with his index finger and the links on his cuffs. When he talked, he sounded like a forty-five-year-old.
‘I need your advice,’ he said. ‘I want to do something productive with my life, and I gather that you three are engaged in the kind of projects I think might make a difference.’ He’d been well briefed, and seemed to have an understanding of urban poverty. He’d obviously visited a number of projects. I suppose we were with him for a couple of hours. He was interested in setting up a foundation that would fund projects and people working in the poorer echelons of society. Prince Charles now says that that meeting was the moment of inception for the Prince’s Trust, which to this day is one of the biggest and most successful welfare funding movements ever established in Britain. All this was long before Diana, scandal and absurdity.
For more than a year, one of the most regular visitors to New Horizon was nineteen-year-old Christine. Beautiful, with long straight blonde hair, she was partially sighted and very slightly built. She was intelligent, but had serious communication problems, and it required much patience to win her trust. I was one of the few people she did appear to want to talk to. As so often, she had come from a broken family and had experienced abuse in care. She suffered in many ways, but never took drugs. Even so, she was hard to accommodate and impossible to gain employment for.
One night the police called at my flat. Would I come up to St Pancras? The officers were worried about reports from a squat not far from the back of the station. The place could barely have been termed a house. The windows were missing, much of the roof had fallen in, but there were sheltered spaces within. The detritus and filth between what passed for the door and these spaces was unspeakable. In the gloom, there she was, a hunched pile covered in a coat and an old blanket. I burst into tears. Christine had died utterly alone, unloved and in complete animal squalor. I had known her for 10 per cent of her entire life. The policewoman with us led me out. We all felt completely defeated.
I had originally intended to stay at New Horizon for six months and then, having only been rusticated for a year, to return to Liverpool to complete my degree. I eventually stayed three years, and have no