Free Radical Page 6

  I realized at the time, and even more later in life, that while I had arrived in Cambridge with something to prove and a sense of social and intellectual inadequacy, I emerged four years later with much greater self-confidence. Undergraduate life was a remarkably privileged existence. And unlike students today, I was free of debt, thanks to the help of a scholarship, free tuition and holiday jobs. As with the bitter-sweet triumph of the eleven-plus, I always felt a twinge of guilt that many of my childhood friends were not merely working for a living but, through their taxes, supporting me. But twinges of guilt are a weak counterpoint to the dominant themes of ambition and self-interest. A generation later I encouraged my three children to follow me to Cambridge, which they all did.

  Chapter 4

  Olympia

  I first saw Olympia three years before I met her. With her glamorous salwar kameez and dazzling white smile beaming out from the front page of the Yorkshire Evening Press, she left a lasting impression. York University had just opened its doors and the first ever student to register happened to be a photogenic overseas student who had turned up a week early from East Africa.

  Even if I had never met her and had not spent most of my life with her, that picture would still have been significant. It symbolized a fundamental change in the city. Until the opening of the university, York had been overwhelmingly monocultural. Leeds had a recognizable Jewish population, some black and mixed race, people including its (South African) football star Albert Johanneson, and a cosmopolitan university. Further west, in Bradford, Asians were appearing. Hull had some seamen from exotic places. In York, the nearest things to ethnic minorities were the Irish barmen and ‘navvies’ and the ‘gypsies’, a vague category referring both to the ‘tinkers’, who spread alarm and disapproval when they came round the doors selling from suitcases, and to dark-skinned people of unknown provenance. York had, I recall, one Chinese restaurant, around which swirled ugly rumours concerning the disappearance of pet dogs and cats.

  The university brought both domestic and overseas students and, at about the same time, significant numbers of tourists to see the Minster and the medieval walls. Perhaps for the first time since the Roman occupation, the city centre had something of a cosmopolitan feel. But the visitors were not immigrants and, to this day, the city remains remarkably homogenous. Decades later, Olympia’s appearance in a shop away from the central and university areas would silence the conversation and lead to nervous glances.

  It was, perhaps, because the new population was transient that my parents felt at ease with it; indeed, it inflated my father’s civic pride, and my mother discovered a new role in which she was valued, showing overseas visitors around the Minster. They often drove down to the new university to see the campus taking shape. Ironically, in view of what was to happen later, my father had saved the press cutting with Olympia’s picture for me – as if to say, York is no longer the provincial backwater you thought it was.

  I met Olympia, for real, in the unromantic rendezvous of a mental hospital, a Quaker home called The Retreat. Mental nursing was the most unwanted job on offer at York’s employment exchange, and since I had two months to fill before leaving for Kenya I took the job. Once there, I drew the short straw of the geriatric ward, helping Alzheimer’s patients to eat, wash and use the toilet, or changing their nappies. I developed a lifelong admiration for the full-time nursing staff who maintained their professionalism and good humour in this least glamorous corner of healthcare. I also developed a reputation for being kindly but careless, the latter a serious handicap for a job that required meticulous attention to drug dosages and sorting clothes from the laundry.

  Our refuge was the staff room. One day a couple of Indian nurses entered: one very pretty and languid, Nurse Naidoo; the other less pretty but more beautiful and fizzing with nervous energy, Nurse Rebelo. Both had acquired a reputation for aloofness, spurning romantic overtures from the male nurses. I found myself talking to Nurse Rebelo, who was puffing vigorously on a cigarette to calm her nerves after spending several hours with mentally disturbed children. She had flashing, restless eyes and within a few minutes I had been treated both to a wide-open smile and to a surge of anger which caused a mark on her cheek to stand out, the product of an unhappy chemistry experiment with sulphuric acid. What seemed to attract more than cursory interest in the scruffy young man in the staff room was a series of improbable coincidences. She was shortly to leave York for a postgraduate – DipEd – year at Cambridge, which I had just left, before going back to Nairobi, her home town, where I was now headed. I had, furthermore, remembered her picture in the local newspaper when she had first arrived. Intrigued, she somewhat nervously accepted the offer of a date.

  My own romantic imagination was limited and one of my friends recommended an evening at the pictures. He had heard that there was an excellent war film at a cinema in a small town outside York, with a coffee house nearby. What he did not tell me was that the film was about nuclear war and our romantic evening involved reliving mass destruction and families being incinerated or, if they escaped, suffering a long, slow death from radioactive poisoning. I was numb with embarrassment at the time, and this was certainly not Olympia’s idea of entertainment, let alone an aphrodisiac. But she seemed to find my personal and social clumsiness reassuring. I discovered later that she hadn’t been out with a British boy before and her friends had helped her plan for all eventualities, with dire warnings about how to counter fast moves. A film on nuclear war was not a gambit they had anticipated.

  I was given another chance. This time I opted for a summer evening drive and chat in one of the country pubs near the city. Olympia turned up for the date in a beautiful silk sari, her hair piled up to expose her long elegant neck, decorated by a filigree necklace. She was seemingly oblivious to the open-mouthed stares of the regulars in the Bull and Bush, who had just seen a fairy princess emerge through the haze of alcohol and cigarette smoke. In this improbable setting we began to piece together a knowledge and understanding of one another.

  She was the third child, and oldest daughter, in a family of seven. Her father had come to Nairobi in the early 1940s from Portuguese Goa, like many Goans of his generation, finding work in clerical jobs in the British Empire and then bringing his young wife from Goa to start a family. Olympia was rooted in and devoted to her family and it defined her multiple identity, of which she was immensely proud. She was a Kenyan, and African, by birth and upbringing; an Indian by origin and identification; a Portuguese speaker (her first language, followed by English when she was eight); a Catholic; and a Brahmin, her family tracing its roots to the Kelkar, the land-owning sub-caste that had dominated her village, Verna, in Goa six hundred years ago, before the Portuguese occupation and conversion. One aspect of identity that she firmly repudiated was being a British subject, and I discovered that one of the easiest ways to ignite her quick and sharp temper was to suggest that there were political problems in the world for which British colonialism was not responsible.

  Both her pride and prickliness derived in considerable measure from her father. By dint of very hard work, long hours and thrift, he had supported and paid for an education for all his children, who, in due course, comprised two medical doctors, two academic doctors, a top barrister, a university dean, and a microbiologist turned business manager. He was clearly a very able and honest man who served his bank – now HSBC – way beyond the call of duty and for which he was poorly paid. He suffered the additional indignity of being ‘managed’ by some young public school dimwit who possessed superior rank and salary in order to preserve the racial hierarchy that colonial banking demanded. The family income had been crucially supplemented by Olympia’s mother, a kindly, understated and accommodating lady who, when I met her, was managing a hotel with considerable efficiency. Earlier she had run an upmarket coffee bar in the town centre where, I was later told by an African friend, she insisted on serving black customers in contravention of the prevailing colour bar. A job, seven childr
en and a difficult husband were more than enough for any woman, and Olympia spent a slice of her childhood helping to bring up her sisters and youngest brother.

  Olympia herself had been brought up in this racially hierarchical and segmented society – not greatly dissimilar to Rhodesia, if not quite as ruthlessly stratified as South Africa. She was sent, as law and custom required, to ‘Asian’ schools, initially a Catholic school for Goans, and later with Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims until A levels. Her younger siblings were the first to be allowed into previously all-white schools.

  There were also deep and divisive undercurrents in the Goan community, which numbered around twenty thousand at the time of independence in 1962. Attitudes towards the Portuguese varied from those who saw themselves culturally and racially as Portuguese, to those, like Mr Rebelo, who were Indian and had opposed Portuguese rule. These divisions cut across families and were reinforced by the Portuguese embassy and a network of informers reporting back to agents of the Salazar dictatorship. The community was further divided by caste, and despite the best efforts of the Jesuits and centuries of Catholic teaching, the Church as well as the social clubs respected the lines drawn between ‘good families’ – Brahmins – at one end of the scale and Sudras – low-caste untouchables – at the other. One important difference, however, between Goans and other Indians was in their appreciation of Western musical culture, both classical and popular. Olympia was an accomplished pianist who had played Schubert duets with her sister Amata on Kenyan radio and had an eclectic taste ranging from Bach to Elvis.

  Apart from her parents, Olympia had been shaped by several other strong characters. One of the more important was an Irish priest, Father Comerford. He had been headteacher at the Goan school, from which post he had been ousted following some feuding among the governors. Olympia, then aged fourteen, had led a protest march to the education department, which, on its return, had spun out of control, with some of the more hot-headed insurrectionists ransacking the school. In due course the rebels and the head were reinstated. Father Comerford was a charismatic figure, whom I met once before he was posted, as a Monsignor, to an important-sounding job in Rome. He was one of those priests who treated intelligent doubt with patience and respect, encouraged the brighter among his flock to develop their minds, and saw the potential of talented girls beyond child-rearing and the nunnery. Unfortunately, Olympia had also met the other kind, and it was the intellectual intolerance and the straying eyes and hands of less disciplined priests that drove her away from the Church. But she always considered herself a Catholic, and always lit a candle whenever we visited a place of worship. I suspect that the big-hearted Father Comerford would have approved of the fact that when she was dying she sought spiritual comfort from a happily married Anglican priest.

  In her large extended family there was a range of saints and sinners, but one man stood out: a cousin, Pio Gama Pinto, whom she idolized as a man of high principle. Pinto was a communist who had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the African independence struggle and, according to Olympia, was responsible for caches of arms being delivered to the Mau Mau via a hut in the Rebelos’ garden (no other member of the family, I should add, would vouch for this story). For someone to be above the petty feuding of Goan politics and contributing to the fight against the British colonial authorities was enough to win Olympia’s enthusiastic support. Unfortunately he seriously annoyed someone in Kenyatta’s circle and he was killed in mysterious circumstances.

  When she excelled at A level and won a scholarship to study in the UK, an official in the education department thoughtfully recommended one of Britain’s new universities, which would combine innovation and enthusiasm with the intimacy of a small, new student body. At York a few dozen students, initially, had the benefit of an exceptional array of British academic talent, including the vice chancellor, Eric James, a former head of Manchester Grammar School; Harry Ree, another noted educationalist and wartime French resistance hero; Alan Peacock, the liberal and Liberal economist, whose immense intellectual contribution was sadly neglected until later tapped into by Mrs Thatcher; and two history professors, Gwyn Williams, the Welsh Marxist who inspired in Olympia an enthusiasm for Robespierre and Lenin, and Gerald Aylmer, who later moved to a chair at Oxford. Olympia revelled in this company and that of her friends, and I believe they valued her equally.

  I was surprised to discover, however, that, apart from the lecturers, she knew few British people. Her closest friends were overseas students: Suan, the daughter of a Singaporean shipping magnate; Hun, a Malay Chinese, who died of cancer shortly before Olympia; and Maysoon, an Iraqi, who was last heard of in Baghdad in the early years of Saddam Hussein. Her one close English friend, Jenny, had suffered a nervous breakdown in her finals – frightened of failing to meet the expectations of her family – and Olympia had held her hand through the crisis, failing in the process to achieve the first-class degree her professors had expected of her. Outside the university, Olympia spent a year in digs with a homely and kindly working-class York family, whose unremitting diet of chips and endlessly boiled vegetables drove her to hunger and near-despair. One of Yorkshire’s upper-class families offered hospitality at their country home in the vacations, the generosity of which was dimmed only by their insistence that she required lessons in the proper use of a knife and fork.

  So the dates with the young Englishman were, I think, as much of a voyage of discovery for her as they were for me. We were both nervous and tentative and stuck to safe subjects like our families, the arts, religion and politics. Her politics, in particular, were unique and were not reflected in any party I have ever encountered: a mixture of revolutionary, anti-colonial fervour, socialistic disapproval of wealth and greed, strong support for academic competition and selection, and social conservatism with a particular disdain for the permissive lifestyle of the ‘swinging sixties’, of which we were then in the middle. She later supported me loyally in the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats and tried, with some difficulty, to hold her combative, outgoing temperament in check for fear of perpetrating some terrible ideological faux pas.

  We were becoming very close, but there was shyness, fear of rejection and, perhaps, fear of commitment too. Olympia warned me, in a roundabout way, that her destiny was already set. Her father had lined up a young man from a ‘good family’, the Ribieros, and would never accept dissent from his eldest daughter on matters as important as this. I also knew my parents well enough to realize that, for all Olympia’s qualities, she would never be seen as a ‘suitable girl’: wrong colour, wrong religion. Much was left unsaid and much misunderstanding consequently arose. One last opportunity to say a proper goodbye was missed when we agreed to rendezvous in London before I departed for Kenya. We lost each other in the crowds around Piccadilly. Fate did not seem to be on our side.

  There followed a year of eagerly awaited and affectionate, but restrained, weekly letters, which took us neither forwards nor back. I discovered that she had been pursued around Cambridge by a music student who fell madly in love with her and wrote quartets and sonatas in her honour. For my part, once established in Kenya, I struck up a relationship with an extraordinarily beautiful Kenyan African woman, Pamela Ogot, who was completing her degree at Nairobi University, though already an experienced teacher and several years older than her contemporaries. She had a figure to die for and a fine coppery black skin of the kind specific to the Nilotic tribes of western Kenya. She was a Luo, and from one of the tribe’s leading families, a niece of the novelist Grace Ogot and, more distantly, a cousin of Tom Mboya, the planning minister, who, after Kenyatta, was the dominant personality in the post-independence government, until he was assassinated. Pamela was, however, a great deal more than a pretty face with a famous name. She was a woman of ambition and determination, becoming the first black teacher and then head of the leading girls’ school in Kenya (Kenya High), head of the women’s movement, and one of the leading lay figures in the Anglican church. She took her Christianit
y seriously, and it included a fierce attachment to premarital virginity. Despite my attempts to argue a contrary theological position, her knowledge of the scriptures defeated me. She was fiercely independent and brave, as she showed by taking her white boyfriend to her college functions at a time when racial sensitivities were still very sharp. We got on very well, but also parted amicably when Olympia returned to Nairobi.

  I suspect it was the over-frequent references to Pamela in my letters, and to the musical Mr Talbot in hers, which made up our minds. When Olympia returned, we agreed to meet in parkland behind the Treasury, promptly set upon each other, and agreed to spend our lives together.

  Hope, elation and love soon collided with the realities of family life. Olympia, I think, still harboured hopes that her father’s heart would melt once he was confronted with the reality of his daughter’s prospective love marriage, rather than the ‘good’ marriage he had planned. She was wrong. Her attempts to discuss the matter led to a shouting match and the warning that, if her nonsense continued, she would be expelled forever from the family home.

  She suggested that I seek a meeting to put a formal request to him because it was the right thing to do: it might satisfy his sense of honour, and might persuade him to respond to me, rather than to an abstraction. The meeting took place at his bank, but while polite, it did not shift his position one iota. I received a long lecture on the promiscuity and general immorality of British people and the inevitability of our divorce. He made more specific inquiries about my family background and it was clear that the Cables and Pinkneys fell considerably short of the aristocratic status that might have redeemed the match. Mrs Rebelo took Olympia’s side but was given short shrift.