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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
"The best book I have read all year. Simply brilliant." – Iain Dale "Oates takes you on an extraordinary journey … His is a life lesson that serendipity and courage can change things for good." – Laura Kuenssberg, former BBC political editor "Few in political life are as candid about the underpinning of what drives them. A gripping tale of escape and rescue, this is the story of the making of a liberal soul." – Gary Gibbon, political editor, Channel 4 News *** Aged fifteen, armed with a credit card stolen from his father, Jonny Oates ran away from home and boarded a plane to Addis Ababa. His plan? To save the Ethiopian people from the devastating 1985 famine. Discovering that demand for the assistance of unskilled fifteen-year-old English boys was limited, he swiftly learned that you can't change the world by pure force of will – a lesson that would prove invaluable in politics. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden charts Oates's journey from his darkest moments alone in Ethiopia, struggling with his sexuality and mental health, to the heart of Westminster, where, as Nick Clegg's chief of staff, he grapples with the compromises and concessions of coalition. Shot through with a captivating warmth and humour, this heart-stoppingly candid memoir reflects on the challenges of balancing idealism and pragmatism, illustrating how lasting change comes from working together rather than standing alone.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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“The best book I have read all year. Simply brilliant.”
Iain Dale
“Oates takes you on an extraordinary journey from teenage rebellion, through the fight for African rights, to the top ranks of the British government. It’s all the more extraordinary because the story is true – his is a life lesson that serendipity and courage can change things for good.”
Laura Kuenssberg, former BBC political editor
“Unusually for a political figure, Jonny Oates has written about love: how it tormented him and how it healed him. Few in political life are as candid about the underpinning of what drives them. A gripping tale of escape and rescue, this is the story of the making of a liberal soul.”
Gary Gibbon, political editor, Channel 4 News
“I Never Promised You a Rose Garden charts the unusual emotional and political journey of Jonny Oates. By turns tender, moving and funny, it is an unflinchingly candid story of teenage rebellion, of love and – above all – of heartfelt compassion. If anyone doubts that there is still a place in politics for exceptional, decent people, this is a book for you.”
Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister 2010–15
iii
v
For David who has lit up my life with happiness
And in loving memory of Sylvia Oates and Mildred Hill
vi
CONTENTS
PREFACE
This is the story of a journey which began in Addis Ababa during the famine of 1985 and ended in the Rose Garden of 10 Downing Street, twenty-five years later.
It is not a political autobiography – if you are looking for the history of the coalition government, you will have to look elsewhere. It isn’t my life story either – there are too many important people missing from it and too many of my mistakes untold for that.
It is, rather, a journey through geographies and politics and emotions. A story about some of the things that happened to me on the way and of some of the people who helped ensure that I kept marching on.
The journey starts with a messed up fifteen-year-old boy embarking on the futile exercise of trying to run away from himself. That boy is me, but I found that to write about myself at that particular moment in my life with the degree of honesty that I wanted to, I needed to take a step back and view things through a more distant lens. Accordingly, I have written the opening chapters of the book, until I was found and rescued by Father Charles Sherlock, largely in the third person.
Many of the place names in Africa have changed since I lived there, so wherever possible I have used both the name as it was at the time and the modern name in current use. In the acknowledgements, I have referred to Prince Buthelezi by his royal title; however, during his time as xHome Affairs Minister, which coincided with my time in South Africa, Prince Buthelezi did not use his royal title, so I have generally followed this practice in the main text of the book.
The events retold here are as accurate as I can make them. They are drawn from a combination of my recollections, my diaries and the letters that I wrote home from Africa at different points over three decades, all of which my mother had preserved. Wherever possible, I have checked my recollections against outside sources and with others who were present at the time. The conversations that I record in the book are reconstructions from recollections sometimes dating back thirty years; they should not be regarded as verbatim records.
Finally, although all the facts are to the best of my knowledge accurate, I have changed the names of some individuals in order to avoid causing unnecessary embarrassment.
BBC News, Tuesday 23 October 1984
Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the twentieth century. This place, say workers here, is the closest thing to hell on earth.
Thousands of wasted people are coming here for help. Many find only death. They flood in every day from villages hundreds of miles away, dulled by hunger, driven beyond the point of desperation.
Fifteen thousand children here now; suffering, confused, lost. Death is all around; a child or an adult dies every twenty minutes. Korem, an insignificant town, has become a place of grief.
The relief agencies do what they can. Save the Children Fund are caring for more than seven thousand babies. Every day they weigh them on a sling then compare their weight with their height. By this rule of thumb, one in three is severely malnourished, starved to the point of death.
There’s not enough food for half these people. Rumours of a shipment can set off panic. As on most days, the rumours were false; for many here there would be no food again today.
Two months ago, there were ten thousand people here; now the latest harvest has failed, there are forty thousand. There’s nothing like enough food in the country; not enough transport to move it if there was.
Some of the very worst are packed into big sheds, seven thousand now, most apparently dying of malnutrition, pneumonia and the diseases that prey on the starving.xii
This three-year-old girl was beyond any help: unable to take food, attached to a drip but too late; the drip was taken away. Only minutes later, while we were filming, she died. Her mother had lost all her four children and her husband.
Those who die in the night are brought at dawn to be laid out on the edge of the plain.
Dozens of them; men, women and children, under blankets or bound in sack cloth for burial in the local custom.
This mother and the baby she bore two months ago wrapped together in death.
As body after body was brought down, the grief became almost tangible. By Korem’s standards it wasn’t a bad night; thirty-seven dead. Tomorrow there would be more; the day after, more still.
A tragedy, bigger than anybody seems to realise, getting worse every day.
Ethiopia is turning into the worst human disaster for a decade. A disaster begun by nature but compounded by man.
This is Michael Buerk for the Six O’Clock News in Korem, northern Ethiopia.
PART ONE
2WHEREVER YOU GO
1
REMEMBERING
I was fourteen years old when I decided to run away to Ethiopia. Fifteen by the summer of 1985, when I actually made it to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Why did I go? To save the world – at least that’s what I told myself – but perhaps more prosaically and less originally, I was just running away from myself.
Twenty-eight years later. I am on an Ethiopian Airlines flight heading from Maputo in Mozambique to Addis Ababa. I am sat by the window in seat 2L. Next to me in seat 2J is the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg. It’s a very different flight from the last one I took to Ethiopia. Thirty thousand feet below me, the sun is setting over Africa and the darkness is gathering.
I try to imagine myself as that fifteen-year-old boy who sat on a different Ethiopian Airlines plane all those years ago, and I don’t know if I should admire him or fear him. I do recall a few things from that original flight: the music channel stuck to country and western and Lynn Anderson percolating through plastic stethoscope-style earphones with the stark message ‘I never promised you a rose garden’.
I remember excitement as well as fear – my first glimpse of Africa as the plane descended through the dawn. I remember seeing the straw-thatched huts dotting the rural expanse, and the beauty of the light on 4the land. I remember the sense of anticipation that I felt as an almost physical thing, a concrete experience that I can take out and examine.
And I think also of Father Charles Sherlock, who rescued me with his wisdom and kindness and who, by the remarkable coincidences of fate, is here in Addis now.
• • •
The official part of my visit to Addis passes in a haze. Transported from meeting to meeting with the Deputy Prime Minister, it is hard to follow where in the city we are rushing to and from. So much of it has changed, so much grown up in the past few years. But the scent of Addis still evokes memories: the smell of woodsmoke and diesel fumes and the ubiquitous eucalyptus.
At dinner at the embassy, before the DPM and the rest of the delegation catch their flight home, I am asked about that earlier trip to Ethiopia. As I describe how it came about, I see that journey, for the first time, through other people’s eyes: as something romantic and brave – and I make the mistake of believing it.
I am staying on for the weekend for a reunion with Father Charles, so at about 10 p.m., Bill, one of Nick’s protection team, comes in to tell me that a car is waiting to take me to the hotel where I stayed all those years ago. I am excited and nostalgic at the prospect of a weekend in the place that played such a significant role in my life.
After I have checked in, I head to my room. It is on the fourth floor and is pleasant and large; it seems little changed from three decades ago. I stroll out on to the small balcony to take in Addis in the cool night air. I look out at the lights of the city, and then down at the car park below me, and as soon as I do that, any delusions about a romantic and brave adventure flee into the night. I am, once again, that desperately troubled 5fifteen-year-old boy who has decided he has nowhere left to run. And so he is standing on a hotel balcony just like this one, perhaps even this one, and he is calculating – is that far enough to fall to ensure it will be a clean and merciful end? 6
2
BOLE AIRPORT, ADDIS ABABA
It’s 7 a.m. at Bole Airport, Addis Ababa. The morning air that greets the passengers of the Ethiopian Airlines flight from London is fresh and cool, pregnant with the promise and threat of an African day. Among the passengers who descend the steps from the aircraft and cross the tarmac to the terminal building is a fifteen-year-old English boy who has run away from home.
It is either August 1985 or 1978, according to your choice of western or Ethiopian calendar. Either way, the brutal folk who make up Ethiopia’s Marxist military dictatorship, the Derg, have been in power for eleven years. This fact is celebrated by lacklustre triumphal arches, which are strewn across the city, acclaiming the years 1967–78. In truth, there is little to celebrate. Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian emperor, who preceded the Derg, was overthrown for his failure to deal with a famine. Awkward, then, that eleven years on, Ethiopia is plunged into another, which the Derg, with its customary mix of brutality and incompetence, is handling even worse.
The boy has no money, except a battered £1 note, thirty birr in Ethiopian currency and the American Express card he has stolen from his father – and he has no idea what he is going to do now.
Inside the terminal building, there is lots of bustle. Ethiopia may be a Marxist-Leninist military dictatorship, but such is the scale of its 8grotesque and brutal failings that it has exacerbated a devastating famine and in doing so has, paradoxically, brought a degree of prosperity to the capital, its economy driven along by the aid workers, aid shipments and journalists who have been flooding in.
The boy goes and stands by the single luggage carousel and watches the suitcases go around. There is no obvious point to this activity. He doesn’t have a suitcase himself; his only luggage is a small, powder-blue holdall with white handles, turning to grey, which he carried with him on the plane and which is now on the floor between his legs. Inside it are a few changes of clothes – three white T-shirts, three pairs of striped cotton boxer shorts, three pairs of socks – and a Book of Common Prayer.
Nevertheless, the boy stands there earnestly surveying his fellow passengers’ baggage, because he has no idea what he is going to do next. Standing by the carousel allows him inconspicuous time to think, and to try to quell the panic that has risen in his stomach and is now clambering up his insides and constricting the muscles in his throat.
He stands very still and focuses all his energy on achieving a sense of calm; by this method he is able to withstand the rising panic and restore himself to a state of controllable fear. He decides that he must get himself into the centre of the city and track down the aid agencies, who he so misguidedly believes will be waiting with open arms, ready to embrace his altruistic offer of help.
He has not yet worked out that the aid agencies’ demand for unskilled fifteen-year-old English boys is likely to be limited, or, let’s be blunt, non-existent. In any case, inspired by the film Gandhi, he has a righteous certainty that if he wants to do something passionately enough, it will be possible to achieve the objective by sheer force of will and, if necessary, a little assistance from God. He is yet to learn the lesson that 9sometimes you can’t make a thing happen by wanting it to – however hard you try and however much you pray.
He is about to learn that lesson – pretty brutally, in fact.
But for now, even if he has considered the possibility of rejection, he has discounted it. If necessary, Gandhi-like, he will walk to the feeding camps and just start to help out. How he will be of help, he has not considered. Surely his passion to save the world will be enough – what more could anyone ask?
Quite a bit, it turns out. 10
3
WILL
It is the first day in a new term. The boys, all freshly returned to school, are still excited to be back together after a summer away; still abundant in holiday stories and adventures. Not yet jaded by lessons and proximity to one another and short days and darkness. Autumn is making increasing forays, but today it is still warm enough to think the summer will last for ever.
A small group of friends are lying around at the edge of the meadows that run down to the river Kennet, screened by long grass, puffing on cigarettes, sharing out stories rich in exaggeration and embellishment. The warmth feels good and so does the scent of the grass and the camaraderie. Gradually, people drift off until there are just two of them.
One is a dark-haired boy, olive skinned, slight. He is propped up on an elbow while his friend lies on his back, his head cushioned by the bank and his rolled-up grey school jacket, staring at the clear blue sky and the waning sun. He seems in no hurry to move.
‘Another smoke?’ The dark-haired boy proffers a cigarette packet. His friend nods and the boy extracts one from the packet and hands it to him.
‘So what happened, Will? You hardly got down to London at all.’
‘You know, my dad. Usual stuff.’
His tone is resigned exasperation. 12
He places the cigarette in his mouth and strikes a match against the worn glasspaper side of the box. It skids along the surface ineffectually. He strikes again, this time on the upper part of the glasspaper, which is less worn. The pink-headed match fizzles desultorily into life. He coaxes the flame, his hand cupped around it, his face a picture of concentration as he brings match and cigarette together. He puffs on the cigarette rapidly to ensure it remains alight and then he lies back again and contemplates the sky.
After thirty seconds or so of silent contemplation, he says quietly, ‘It’s so frustrating. He just doesn’t get me. He thinks everyone is a “bad influence”.’ You’re the only one he thinks is OK and that’s only because your dad’s a vicar and somehow that makes him think you are good.’
The dark-haired boy listens as Will looses his frustrations in his quiet gravelly voice. And although he is hearing him, he is seeing him more intently. He takes in his friend’s brow, wrinkled now with his sense of injustice, his high cheekbones and soft, almost imperceptible freckles, his light brown hair flecked with the gold of the autumn sun. His green eyes intense and focused.
The boy feels a sharp stab of anticipation and excitement which turns rapidly to fear. He leans back into the grassy bank.
Will continues to talk out his frustrated summer, with his friend interjecting occasionally with sympathetic sounds to indicate he is engaged. Finally, he concludes with an exasperated sigh and gets to his feet, offering a hand to pull his friend up. ‘Anyway, sorry to offload this shit on you. It’s good to have you around. I missed you over the summer.’
It’s a moment, a nanosecond of intensity, and then Will grins and breaks it. ‘Come on, we better get back. See you tomorrow.’
He parts with an affectionate squeeze on his friend’s shoulder and they head off in different directions.
The dark-haired boy crosses the narrow stone bridge over the river, 13but instead of turning right by the tennis courts towards his boarding house, he takes a left and heads along the grassy path by the riverside. He comes to a small gate and passes through it into a meadow. The trees alongside the river dapple sunlight onto the water, which dances in the flow.
At the end of the meadow is his thinking spot, a stile shaded by trees, with a long hedge to its right, running uphill alongside the meadow. Perpendicular to the stile on the left is the tree-lined bank of the river. If you sit on that stile, facing the direction of the town, all is lush greenery and sunlight and shade. It is the beauty of England.
It’s where he sits and smokes and thinks. He never comes here with anyone, not even Will. It’s the place where he tries to make sense of growing. Of the plunging, soaring, sinking ride of adolescence. Where joy and dread and shame and confusion are examined or ignored or driven into hiding.
Today, he comes to the stile to contemplate happiness. Two months of summer holidays passed and he saw Will only twice. Once in London and once at Will’s home in the manicured suburbs of a provincial town. Will’s absence pulled at him every day, dragging and sinking him. But now they are back together, and Will is as kind and thoughtful and troubled as the Will he constructed in his absence.
He has feelings for Will which he knows he must not entertain. So he threatens them and chases them away and lights another cigarette in the gathering dusk. 14
4
A BIBLICAL FAMINE, NOW IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Why did I run away to Ethiopia? Why did I run away at all? Easy enough to answer the first question; harder to answer the second. I’ll start with the easy bit.
On Tuesday 23 October 1984, I was home from school for the half-term holiday, lounging on a sofa in the sitting room of our new home, St Bride’s Rectory in Fleet Street, as the BBC news played out on the telly. I wasn’t paying too much attention, to tell the truth. And then, suddenly, I was.
There was something about the way in which the newscaster introduced the item that put me on alert. Her tone, sombre and subdued, her voice dropping as she introduced Michael Buerk’s soon-to-be-world-famous report of the Ethiopian famine: ‘Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the twentieth century. This place, say workers here, is the closest thing to hell on earth.’
The dispassionate urgency of Buerk’s voice, the simplicity and economy of his language, overlaying harrowing footage of the dead and the dying, alerted the world to a human catastrophe, but it did more than that: it galvanised the world into action.
Michael Buerk knew how to use language, and he knew how to use 16silence too. The pauses in his commentary, as Mohammed Amin’s footage spelled out the full horror of the suffering, were as powerful as his words. The silences demanded reflection; they insisted that we attend to what this meant, not just for the victims, but for ourselves as witnesses. ‘This three-year-old girl was beyond any help: unable to take food, attached to a drip but too late; the drip was taken away. Only minutes later, while we were filming, she died. Her mother had lost all her four children and her husband…’
‘Her mother had lost all her four children and her husband…’ There was something about that simple statement that overwhelmed me. It was so relatable and so devastating. Tears swelled behind my eyes, and I clenched my jaw tightly, trying but failing to fight them back. Sorrow for loss; horror at the world that I saw through angry teenage eyes.
Those words and images from Michael Buerk’s broadcast changed the world for me. I was not alone in feeling their impact. Millions of people saw the same images and had similar reactions. A total of 425 television channels around the world broadcast Buerk’s report, and the sense of outrage that this biblical famine should be occurring amidst such plenty was harnessed and directed by Bob Geldof, lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, through Band Aid and Live Aid. Geldof was a rebel who had found a cause. Aged fourteen, I had found mine too.
These were days of excess, when European Community market intervention to stabilise agricultural prices led to grain and butter mountains piled high in European warehouses as the rains failed and grain stocks dwindled on the scorched plains of Ethiopia.
EC intervention stocks were not an abstract concept to me. Each day, my well-heeled schoolmates and I were fed on them. The school’s refrigerators groaned with the weight of subsidised EC butter. Our breakfast tables were littered with half-pound packs, prominently stamped with 17the words ‘EC Intervention Stocks: Not for resale’, with the relevant EC regulation spelled out underneath.
In a desperate attempt to dispose of the grotesque mountains of excess, these stocks were handed out to charities, and – thanks to their charitable status – the most exclusive schools in the country were among the happy recipients. Subsidised butter fed to the richest people in the land while millions faced starvation.
Don’t tell me there weren’t things to be angry about.
The horror of the famine camp at Korem ignited a fury within me that was already smouldering. Natural teenage rebellion was now super-charged with a sense of righteous anger – the grotesque injustice of this famine was their doing; it was exactly what adults allowed to happen. Obsessed with imposing endless rules and restrictions on the rest of us, they were oblivious to the abjectly corrupt world that they had built.
That anger built in me over the following months as Bob Geldof cranked up the pressure in the face of the mind-numbingly slow reaction to the crisis. In December, the Band Aid single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ was released to raise money to tackle the famine and received a massive response from the public, achieving the cherished Christmas No. 1 spot. Margaret Thatcher’s tin-eared government insisted that VAT on sales of the record would not be waived, but they hadn’t reckoned with Geldof and the strength of public opinion. Chastened, they backed down. By then I had clocked that politics had a lot to do with what happened in the world. It was a revelation that shaped the rest of my life.
Of course, I shouldn’t pretend that my actions were fuelled purely by my rage at the injustice of the world. There were other issues too. I was a seriously messed-up teenager, looking for a cause through which to channel the anger and shame that I felt with myself, and if it hadn’t been Ethiopia, doubtless I would have found something else. 18
I am not sure if anyone looks back at their teenage years and says, ‘That was a great time to be alive.’ Certainly, I don’t. My rage was fuelled by the confusion and disorientation of adolescence, by my anger at feeling alone and different, and by an awakening sexuality which I feared, and which the world taught me to despise.
At fifteen, I was slight, dark haired, olive skinned, morose. Above all, morose. I looked older than my fifteen years; most of the time, I could pass for eighteen. I was taciturn, uncommunicative, locked inside myself – profoundly depressed. The depression arrived with my adolescence. It didn’t leave until my late twenties. I am not talking here of feeling a bit down. I am talking about something very different. A sticky, suffocating web that is forever tightening around you, choking your sense of selfworth, feasting on your confidence. And however much you tear at it, you cannot rid yourself of it. So that, now, whenever you go to bed, you pray: ‘Please God let me not wake in the morning.’ And when you awake, it is with desperate sadness that another day has come.
That was me. That was how I lived my life. That was my prayer before I slept.
5
THE AIRPORT ROAD
The boy pulls himself out of his reverie. He has to work out how he is going to get from the airport to the city centre. On the plane, they had handed him an immigration card. Among other details, it demanded to know where he would be staying. This gave rise to his first misgiving. Obviously, he had no idea – he could hardly put ‘feeding camp’ – so he flicked through the in-flight magazine looking for hotel advertisements. There was only one, for the Hilton Hotel on what is now Menelik II Avenue, so he wrote that down. It turns out that the words he writes on this immigration card will prove very important to his life. But that is for later.
Right now, he has to negotiate the grim-faced immigration officials. He approaches the immigration desk warily. In turn, the immigration officials eye him suspiciously. A white boy dressed in faded denim jeans, a striped business shirt and an expensive-looking tuxedo jacket that once belonged to a now-deceased investment banker – but that is a whole other story.
The boy hands his passport to the official, who flicks through it until he finds the visa in Amharic script that fills an entire page of the old-style navy-blue British passport. He scrutinises it minutely but is unable to detect any flaws. Now he flicks to the photo page, where he finds a black-and-white photo of the boy, a year or two younger, staring intently 20into a camera lens, his dark-haired fringe a zig-zag admonition to an inexpert barber.
The immigration official’s severe glance alternates between the photo and the boy standing before him, but again he can detect nothing wrong. The image is clearly of the boy. The boy has a visa issued by the embassy in London entitling him to enter the country. There is no reason not to stamp his passport and admit him, and eventually this is exactly what he does. But he seems uneasy about it. A few months ago, perhaps he would have challenged the incongruous presence of an unaccompanied fifteen-year-old boy at his immigration desk, but these days, with aid staff, journalists and the occasional pop star-turned-humanitarian flooding through the airport, the official contents himself with suspicious looks and grimly stamps the passport.
A cold sweat seeps through the boy’s pores as he endures the immigration official’s scrutiny, and the droplets are trickling down his back as he emerges from the airport into the light of an African morning. In the shade, it remains cool, but the sun is rising in the sky and already starting to heat up the day. The outside of the airport is populated by battered blue-and-white Ladas, which operate as a curious hybrid of bus and taxi. At a discreet and scornful distance from them are a fleet of sleek, beige Mercedes-Benz sedans which serve those with more expensive tastes and a greater desire to arrive in one piece.
The boy eschews these options and decides to walk. Needless to say, he has no idea of the distance from the airport to the city centre, nor has he considered how outlandish a mode of transport this will appear to the local populace – a white boy walking through the early morning streets. But he does know that he has very little cash and he needs to conserve it.
So he sets off down Bole Road towards the city. The first thing that he realises is that it is hot in the sun and a tuxedo jacket isn’t the ideal 21attire for a summer’s day walk in the Ethiopian capital. The next thing he notices is that he is attracting quite a bit of attention. The surprised looks from passers-by he steadfastly avoids, staring straight ahead and trudging determinedly forward. What he finds harder to ignore is the group of ragged and insistent young children who are gathering around him.
‘Where you go, faranj?’ demands one child, using the Ethiopian word for a white person, which the boy will hear very often during his time in the city.
‘Carry bag?!’ The tone manages to sound both friendly and aggressive.
He tells them he is going to the city centre, which elicits blank looks – he later discovers that Addis doesn’t really have a city centre. He tries ‘Hilton Hotel’, which seems to mean more to them.
‘We take you there.’
He isn’t keen on this development. His head, right now, is overwhelmed by the trouble he has got himself into, and he wants his walking time to be quiet and to allow him to think. That is now out of the question, surrounded as he is by five or six children insistently vying for the right to carry his bag. The powder-blue holdall contains almost all the boy’s belongings and he is naturally reluctant to give it up to anyone, least of all a bunch of fleet-of-foot children. So he tries to ignore them and to walk on in the hope that they will become bored of him and disappear.
He really understands nothing of the world and certainly nothing of the world of these children. They are not going to be put off; they are not going to get bored and head for home. They most likely have no home to go to except the street, and to them there is nothing the slightest bit boring about a white man in a tuxedo tramping through their city.
The constant cry of ‘Faranj! Faranj!’, accompanied by an insistent tugging at his jacket to ensure his attention, is starting to get to him. Alongside that, the novelty and excitement of his first intercontinental 22flight and the sights and sounds and scents of his first day in Africa are starting to be replaced by the magnitude of what he has done. He is aware of the precariousness of the predicament he has placed himself in, and that awareness threatens to overwhelm him.
In this moment of weakness, he surrenders to the calling of the street kids. What has he to lose, he thinks. So he stops, unslings the bag from his shoulder and hands it to the child who has assumed leadership of this ragged band of demanding children. He is a boy of nine or ten, dressed in tattered red shorts and a washed-out grey T-shirt with small holes in the fabric around the neck and a large hole at the bottom, where the fabric has given way entirely.
The child takes the holdall solemnly and tries to sling it over his shoulder in the manner that the boy has been carrying it, but he is considerably smaller and it unbalances him. He staggers, unshoulders it and grins broadly. One of his fellows comes to his aid, and the two of them take hold of one of the bag’s white handles each. In this manner, with the bag swinging between the two of them, they head towards the city with a processional seriousness of purpose.
Soon the other boys are squabbling for the right to a turn carrying the bag. But the chief street child and his comrade are not for sharing the task, which they have taken to with an impressive display of responsibility. And so this family of lost children continue their journey, the white boy, perhaps most lost of all, adorned in expensive western clothes in the midst of a gaggle of five or six raggedly dressed African children, the two bag carriers immediately before him, the others straggling around him.
The pavements on Bole Road – in as much as they exist – are pitted and potholed, the air is laden with the fumes of ancient Ladas and a tumour of fear is growing heavy in his stomach. Yet the boy cannot help being struck by the vibrancy which is all around, and now that he has 23conceded to the street children, he starts to look about him, to absorb the looks of surprise on the faces of those passing by, sometimes turning to suspicion, other times dissolving into smiles and giggles and muttered comments.
What might surprise people who had been to other parts of Africa – but does not surprise the boy, as he has never been outside Europe before – is that, aside from the children, no one has asked him for anything. Even they have only asked that they should be allowed to carry his bag, although, of course, there is an implied price in that.
Every now and then, other children join the throng, laughing and giggling and crying out – ‘Faranj! Faranj!’ or ‘Americaaan!’ But they are swiftly pushed off by the praetorian guard who have claimed him as their own since he began this trek down Bole Road.
The distance he has to walk to the city is only four miles or so, but the boy does not know this. So he is walking slowly in the growing heat, acclimatising himself to the thinness of the air and the sense of adventure and fear that is heightening his senses. He is still wearing the heavy black tuxedo despite the rising temperature, and the sweat is starting to soak through a shirt which has already suffered through a summer’s day in London, a flight across Europe and north Africa and now the beginnings of an African day. He would love to remove the jacket, but in it are his passport and wallet and he knows that if he takes it off, one of the children will insist on carrying it. Though they have carried his bag with a reverence and sense of responsibility more appropriate for a holy relic, he just can’t risk his jacket disappearing into the back alleys that run off Bole Road. So he sweats some more and carries on.
As the journey continues and the morning gets later, so Bole Road grows increasingly busy. The Ladas are joined by buses, belching blue diesel fumes, and the pavements are now thronged with pedestrians, some striding purposefully towards their destinations, others gathered 24in groups on corners, waiting for lifts or buses. Bole Road is wide and straight and poorly made, the pavements worse. Running off it every few hundred yards are dirt alleys, leading to impromptu settlements of corrugated-iron roofs held up by mud walls. Some are evidently shops; others, homes.
Eventually, the road widens out into a huge open space. It is Meskel Square today; back then, it was Abiyot or Revolution Square. In one corner of the square is a vast red billboard displaying the faces of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Ethiopia – home to one of the oldest churches in Christendom – is having a new holy trinity imposed upon it, this time down the barrel of a gun.
At the top of Revolution Square, Bole Road is intersected by another expansive thoroughfare of two carriageways, each of three or four lanes, which climbs up a hill away to the right. Crossing this road is a hazardous undertaking, but it is nearly the end of the journey. On the other side, Bole Road gives way to Edget Behibret, now Menelik II Avenue, another wide road climbing the hill towards what was once the imperial palace. A few hundred metres beyond Revolution Square, the avenue crosses a river and then the two carriageways diverge around Addis Ababa Park. To the right is Africa Hall, the headquarters of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, in those days the only high-rise building in Addis Ababa, and beyond it is the Hilton Hotel, replete with uniformed guards standing to attention at its gates. No skyscraper, this, but still one of the highest buildings in Addis.
Fifty metres before the hotel, the children come to a stop. They do not seem keen to progress closer to the guards. The English boy assumes this is because they fear being chased away, but it suits him well. The senior child takes hold of both handles of the bag and presents it to the boy with a serious expression, underlining the significance of the 25undertaking he has discharged. The boy reaches in his wallet and extracts a ten birr note – this is one third of his total store of Ethiopian currency. To his surprise, the child’s face darkens, his brow furrows and he pointedly pulls back his hand in shock. ‘No, faranj! No birr! Doll-aaars, Dee-Marks.’
The boy is nonplussed. He does not have a wealth of experience of street children, or indeed any experience at all. But he can’t help being surprised at the stricture of their currency regime, nor being slightly miffed that the pound sterling is not included in the menu of acceptable options. But as he surveys the faces of the other children, it is clear that they are all equally shocked and disappointed that their companion of the past hour and a half should attempt to pay them off in the debased local currency.
Naive as to the currency rules of the street, he has brought with him neither US dollars nor Deutschmarks, but he does have in his wallet, alongside the thirty Ethiopian birr, a solitary £1 note. He pulls it out and proffers it to the child, who takes it in his hand and scrutinises the small green bill carefully. ‘Inglis?’ he asks.
The boy nods and the child’s face relaxes, mollified that he is at least now dealing in hard European currency, even if it does not meet with his exact specifications. Then the English boy points at the image on the note and says, ‘That is the English queen.’
He doesn’t know why he says that. Perhaps he thinks it will reassure the child as to the solidity of the currency. But the child just scowls up at him, either in incomprehension or in hostility, he is not sure which. Perhaps he has absorbed the Marxist rhetoric of the Derg and is appalled that the note in his hand is making him complicit in the hateful concept of hereditary monarchical succession – though to be honest that seems unlikely. In any event, the child stows the note in the pocket 26of his tattered shorts and turns away to deal with the throng of fellow street children who now surround him, chattering away, presumably demanding their cut.
The faranj, at last free of their attention, a circumstance he had fervently desired for most of the walk from the airport, now feels curiously abandoned, the company of the street children exposed as entirely transactional. He leaves them squabbling behind him and heads the final fifty metres up the road to the hotel. The walk has brought on a strong thirst and he is enticed by the thought of a Coke and some shade and perhaps a chance to wash in the hotel toilets.
As he approaches the hotel entrance, he hears a shout from down the street.
‘Faranj!’
He turns and sees that the head street child, having settled his internal dispute, is grinning broadly and waving him farewell.
6
WILL
The late summer dissolves into the wet gloom of a drawn-out autumn term. Outside of lesson times, the boy wanders in from his boarding house a mile or so outside the main school, hoping to casually bump into Will. It is not the done thing to arrange times to meet; people just come over, and if you’re around, you’re around and if not, you’re not.
And it’s not an easy thing to find a specific person. It’s regarded with suspicion to be looking for a particular person rather than the lads as a whole. So he might wander into a study where people are sat around on bean bags, chatting, teasing, joking. And once he has walked in, he is committed. Now and then, he might casually say, ‘Anyone seen Will?’ but not too often or people will make something of it. It will be a joke, but he won’t feel it like that because somewhere buried inside him is the truth. So best not to be too specific and just hope he chooses the right study. Most times he doesn’t. Then he must endure a half-hour gossiping and joking with the other lads and all the time thinking, I want to see Will. I want to see him so much.
Even if he is lucky and Will’s there, he’ll be with a bunch of other people. No real chance to be together. The best chance is to say, ‘D’you fancy a smoke, Will?’ and most times he’ll say yes but most times someone else will say, ‘Hey, I’ll join you. I fancy a smoke,’ and then he’ll feel 28an anger rising in him that he won’t get to be with Will on his own, but he’ll swallow it and go and have a smoke anyway.
And that’s how he progressed through the autumn term towards the half-term break. Out of lessons, searching for Will. In lessons, cynical, distracted, a burden to his teachers. And in his solitary time, sitting on his stile trying to handle the headful of troubles bubbling and boiling inside his skull.
7
THE HILTON HOTEL, ADDIS ABABA
The boy nods a morning greeting at the guards who stand by a metal boom securing the entrance to the hotel grounds. He walks down the covered walkway and enters the cool darkness of the large hotel foyer. Generous leather armchairs populate the space. To the left is a large dark wooden reception desk and opposite it, the foyer lifts. Beyond the reception desk is a horseshoe bar and beyond that, doors on to the terrace and gardens.
One of the porters approaches him and offers to take his bag. He declines and strides purposely to the bar, where he orders a Coke from the elderly bartender. The man moves with a very exact slowness. Stooping to take a glass from under the bar. Crossing the bar to the ice bucket and picking out each cube one by one and placing it delicately in the glass. Finally, he extracts a Coke bottle and with great precision and deliberateness takes a bottle opener from his pocket and applies it to the metal cap. The process is mesmerising but agonising for the boy, whose thirst grows exponentially with every step of the tantalising procedure. Finally, the glass of Coke is set carefully before him. The elderly man smiles with his eyes, but his lips are impassive.
The boy takes his Coke out to the wide terrace and sits himself down to contemplate his position. Below the terrace, the hotel gardens spread 30out before him, and in the distance he can see the mountains that rise up to surround the city. From the trees below, exotic birdsong reaches the terrace, which at this time is still delightfully shaded and cool.
But the boy is not cool. He is hot and bothered. It has occurred to him that at this exact time the letter he posted to his parents from Heathrow Airport will be plopping onto the doormat of St Bride’s Rectory in Fleet Street. He wonders who will open it. He tries to imagine their reaction when they discover he has not stayed the night at his friend Dan’s flat in Kensington Church Street but has instead travelled to another continent, to a country in the grip of famine and civil war. Will their reaction be one of shock or anger or fear? And how will they respond to the story he has concocted to explain his departure? A story, he realises now, far from reassuring them that they are not at fault for his departure, is either so outlandish as to be entirely unbelievable or, if believed, so disturbing that it can only terrify them further.
He realises at that moment, drinking Coca-Cola in a shaded hotel garden, the entire magnitude of what he has done. He has lied and stolen from his parents. He is about to cause them untold heartache and anxiety, and he has absolutely no way back. Every bridge is burnt.
8
RUNNING
I suppose I might never have gone. Although I had worked up the idea in my head, even drafted a letter to my parents, I didn’t have the money for a plane ticket to Ethiopia and I didn’t see any practical way of getting it. Then, one morning, I went down to my dad’s study and lying on his desk was his new American Express card – unsigned.
I didn’t hesitate. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.
I walked up the steps from the study into the courtyard outside the house, my heart pounding inside me, then through the gate and out into Salisbury Square. I found a discreet spot by Fleetbank House and lit a cigarette. Fear and excitement (and nicotine) mixed together and made me light-headed. Now my plan was possible. More to the point, now I had no excuse not to put it into effect.
But time was of the essence. At some point my dad would notice his missing card. Not immediately, most likely – he was absent minded and would probably imagine he had mislaid it at first – but eventually he would realise. I couldn’t risk any delay.
I went back into the house, picked up a pen and locked myself in the bathroom. I stared at the American Express card. On the front, it read MR J OATES – fortuitously, my dad shared the same initial as me and, like me, had no middle name. I turned the card over and signed it. 32
I now felt my actions were compelled. That, somehow, the card was a kind of sign from God that I must go; everything now flowed from that thought and dispelled all doubt from my mind. In that disturbed mindset, I picked up my passport and got on a bus to Piccadilly Circus. The Ethiopian Airlines office was based in Jermyn Street, and this is where I now headed to buy a ticket to Addis Ababa on my father’s stolen credit card.
I don’t remember too much about the next few days, except that it was only while buying the airline ticket that I discovered the need for a visa and vaccinations. The latter were swiftly arranged through a visit to the British Airways Immunisation Centre on Regent Street. The former was more problematic. Although my application was surprisingly never questioned – was it normal for fifteen-year-old English kids to apply on their own (or indeed at all) for an Ethiopian visa? – bureaucratic inertia took hold, lazing over my application as the time ticked ever closer to my departure. Finally, on the day before my departure, the visa was issued.
I was all set. Now all I needed was to buy the time to ensure I was safely on Ethiopian soil before my family realised I was gone.
On the day of departure, I slipped down the stairs from my room undetected and stashed my holdall in the downstairs bathroom, which was immediately inside the front door. Then I popped my head around the door of the sitting room, where my mother was reading. ‘Mum, I’m going over to Dan’s. I’ll probably stay there tonight, OK.’
My mum looked up at her difficult teenage son and said, ‘OK, have a nice time, and don’t you two stay out too late.’
I closed the sitting room door, rescued my bag and jacket, walked down to Blackfriars Station and caught a Tube to the airport. As the train rattled its way through west London, I felt excited and scared. 33At Heathrow, I posted a letter to my parents, checked in and, once I was through security, I called Will to say goodbye. Then I boarded the Ethiopian Airlines flight to Addis Ababa and left everything safe and known behind. 34
