My Life, Our Times Read online

  My brother was nothing if not bold: in July of that year, John secured an article by Harold Wilson, the new leader of the Labour Party, headlined ‘The Battle Against Poverty’. We also wrote to John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the earth, and persuaded him to write what we called an exclusive for us. Some of our mistakes were comical: ‘UNEMPLOYMENT HOPES’ was one of our less-considered headlines. There was also a story entitled ‘WOMAN KILLED BY M. HENDERSON AND G. BROWN’. We thought we had learned how to write news, but our piece about the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem described the notorious Nazi overseer of the Holocaust as ‘Adolf, 56’. But there were also moments I cherish. For the Christmas edition of another magazine my brother created, called Zeal, I contributed an article denouncing the persecution of the Jewish people. It is a concern to which I would often return.

  In November 1963, as my family and I had a rare weekend hotel break at Crieff Hydro in Perthshire, I had my first taste of politics on the ground. I already knew where I stood. Never did my father try to push his views on us, but my brother remembers my father talking of the wave of optimism after Labour won in 1945, and a member of his congregation repeating a well-used phrase, ‘we are all socialists now’. He also remembers my father’s disappointment at the October 1959 election result, which they watched together on TV but which Labour lost. My older brother and I quickly became committed to the Labour cause. I wrote an obituary for my school magazine on the Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, who died prematurely, and another article praising another Brown, George Brown, who stood unsuccessfully to be his replacement. In debates and arguments at school, I became a firm supporter of Harold Wilson, who talked of the ‘white heat of the scientific revolution’ and promised to clear the ‘dead wood out of the boardroom’.

  And it is not difficult to see the appeal he had at that time. There was no better example of his theme that Britain was changing than the Beatles, who I and millions of other teenagers first followed from 1962 – young, unconventional, from the north, and awash with a new energy. I was to argue with my history lecturers that the 1964 and 1966 elections were won on a wave of enthusiasm for change and that no one illustrated this mood better than the Beatles. Without their fame Harold Wilson might have struggled to popularise his theme: creating a vibrant, dynamic Britain free from the stuffy establishment living in the past. The Beatles helped Labour win in 1964.

  That was a few months off. When we arrived at Crieff Hydro, a critical by-election in the constituency of Kinross and West Perthshire was under way. The new prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was standing for Parliament, because in his new role he had to move from the Lords to the Commons. At the local Labour offices, John and I offered our services to the campaign of a youthful candidate, Andrew Forrester. He was up against it in a crowded field. There was a strong Liberal candidate, while the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid stood as a Communist, and the famous comedian Willie Rushton campaigned as an independent. Rushton – well known for his appearances with David Frost on the television satire That Was the Week That Was, a late-night programme my father actually allowed us to watch – addressed a meeting I attended and made fun of the now ‘commoner’ fourteenth Earl of Home. Asked whether he would be buying a home in the constituency, Douglas-Home replied: ‘No, of course not. I have quite enough homes already.’ I heard him speak in some of the villages. He delivered exactly the same speech wherever he went – something that shocked me then but which now I quite understand.

  That month, Labour lost but a more bitter taste of politics was to come. I was sitting in the living room with my mother on a Friday night when regular TV programming was interrupted with a bulletin that President Kennedy had been shot, and soon the news came that he had died. What happened seemed like a blow against democracy itself. I was only twelve, but John F. Kennedy had captured my imagination and that of a generation. In the years to come, he and his brothers would have a profound influence on the way I saw and spoke about politics – and decades on, Ted Kennedy would become a good personal friend.

  I was part of an experiment called the ‘E stream’ at Kirkcaldy High School. Concerned about the failure rate at Scottish universities and worried that Fife pupils were failing because they were not sufficiently prepared for university courses, our educational authority decided to give some pupils a seventh university-preparation year at secondary school. To make that happen, we were taken out of primary school a year early. The first ‘E stream’ class contained twenty-five girls and eleven boys; more girls had higher IQ scores.

  I was merging with pupils two years older than myself and it was tough adjusting in my first year. I did not help myself by letting my team down when I dropped the baton in the annual school sports day relay race. But I did have one starring role that year which convinced me acting was not my forte. It was, I suspect, because I had the loudest voice that I was chosen to be the young footballer in a French-language play. I had a very small role bouncing my ball onto the stage to answer a query from grown-ups, cheekily telling them that I did not know the way to the station – ‘La gare? Quelle gare? Je ne sais quoi’ – because I always travelled by car – ‘Je moi, je voyage en auto.’ Unbeknownst to me, a few of my fellow actors, sixth-form pupils, were plotting a daring real-life drama. They were some of the brightest pupils in the school, but amazingly they had drawn up plans for two robberies – one of a shop and one of the local golf-course bar. It became a comedy of errors. They would have been successful if their getaway car had not broken down. Police traced the planning of the raids to maps left on tables in the local café frequented by teenagers. The sixth-form boys ended up in court, but in later life mostly became very successful in their careers. None of the dramas on the stage could compete with that drama off stage.

  For many of the thirty-six secondary-school students channelled into it, the E-stream experiment turned out to be a painful failure. They were put under too much pressure. In the end, less than half of my classmates went straight from school to university. I felt strongly enough about what had happened to my friends to write what now seems an overly earnest article, complaining that ‘I was a guinea pig, the victim of a totally ludicrous experiment in education … I watched as each year one or two of my friends would fall under the strain. I saw one girl who every now and then would disappear for a while with a nervous breakdown.’ I wrote that ‘the strain of work, the ignominy and rejection of failure could have been avoided’.

  Kirkcaldy High School was one of the best in Scotland and I benefited from a dedicated headmaster, Robert Adam, and inspirational teachers whose names I still remember, like Sid Smith in English and Tom Dunn in history. We were encouraged to argue and to challenge one another as well as the teacher. In a school debate, I argued the case for the motion: ‘That the Smith regime in Rhodesia should be crushed.’ At fifteen, I secured the five A grades I needed in my Higher exams to be accepted for Edinburgh University. A year later, I came first in history in the university bursary competition, but had not been told before I entered that no money was available for my subject area. The following year, however, I was lucky to win a prize – £200, a stunning amount in the 1960s – in a nationwide competition run by the Daily Express for an essay describing ‘our country’ in the year 2000. It was one of the few good things the Express ever did for me. I foresaw that, ‘By 2000, Scotland can, for the first time in history, have found her feet as a society which has bridged the gaps between rich and poor, young and old.’

  It was also a difficult time. My mother was unwell; she had had a terrible year after suffering appendicitis and peritonitis. One evening, just before I sat my school exams, I visited her in Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy. My father thought he was taking us to see her for the last time and that she would not make it through that night. But she had an inner strength that defied the odds.

  Months followed when she was either in hospital or recuperating. My father could cook only one thing, omelettes, another trait I inherited from him, and so we
had a very limited diet. Most Sundays, a family who lived across the road invited us for Sunday lunch; the price was having to listen to their Tory denunciations about the ‘evil’ Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson. On returning home, I asked my father why he did not argue back, and he always replied: ‘How can you do so when you are guests of people who are being so kind in making you lunch?’

  At sixteen I moved from Kirkcaldy to Edinburgh. The two communities were just thirty miles apart, but the Firth of Forth which separated them was also a boundary between the old and the new. The Edinburgh of 1967 was about to cast off its Calvinist past and Edinburgh University would become one of the centres of radical student protest. It was the age of personal liberation. Edinburgh reminded me of what Mark Twain said of his youthful journey from his Presbyterian home to a frontier town in Nevada, from which he wrote that it was no place for a puritan and he did not long remain one.

  The students were in a culture war with Edinburgh’s austere city fathers. Within a few days of starting my studies, the campus newspaper, the Student, was castigated by university authorities for featuring a drawing of a nude woman that could be completed by filling in the dots on the page. At the same time, the students’ union passed a motion demanding that the rector, Malcolm Muggeridge, advocate free supply of the contraceptive pill by the University Health Service. He refused. The rector was elected by the students and Muggeridge’s radical past had ensured his elevation to the rectorship. But in January 1968, when he invited us all to a sermon in St Giles’ Cathedral, he stood up and denounced the youthful generation that had elected him. He pronounced that the world was falling apart amid declining moral standards and ended his sermon by dramatically resigning. I was there that night to hear this fiery and dramatic jeremiad of my generation, and it was written up as if there had been nothing like it at St Giles’ since the Protestant Reformation was sparked by a woman, Jenny Geddes, throwing a stool at the dean. Only long afterwards did I learn that in his youth – and even after – Muggeridge had enjoyed a notoriously active private life.

  Within months, Edinburgh was engulfed in protests against the Vietnam War, against apartheid, and against overly rigid university rules that seemed to deprive students of the new freedoms they craved. The city was awash with its own student counterculture. One day in the local pub, frequented by workers as well as students, I listened to one of the Edinburgh University Labour Club leaders urging local workers to read and follow the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

  A sixteen-year-old at university could not fail to notice that alcohol was everywhere. I certainly did not, but drugs passed me by. Students whom I knew would later write the Edinburgh pub guide, noting that while the city had a hundred churches, it had 500 pubs.

  My first days at university brought more drama than I expected. I arrived on a Tuesday and occupied my hostel room in Lee House of Pollock Halls – room 114 if I remember correctly. I did the first two days of Freshers’ Week – the usual round of talks, meetings and parties – on the Wednesday and Thursday. And then I went to see a consultant surgeon on the Friday for a prearranged appointment about a problem I had been having with my eye. It took the eye surgeon no more than a second to diagnose a retinal detachment.

  Because of a misunderstanding, I left with the impression that I was about to lose my left eye – to have it removed altogether – and not just my sight. By Sunday, I found myself in a hospital bed next to elderly cataract patients, in what seemed one of the most ancient wards in Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary. I was ordered to lie flat for a few days before I was operated on. Both my eyes were bandaged shut for what seemed to a sixteen-year-old an eternity – actually around a week or ten days – during which I had to lie flat again – no pillows allowed – to give the retina a chance to set itself back in place. I would be out of action for the whole of my first university term.

  How had it happened? In April, before leaving for Edinburgh, I had been kicked in my head during my last rugby match at school. I had been playing for the school’s rugby team as a winger and then as a wing forward. Only fifteen when I had joined the first team, I had been knocked around for most of the season, though to my delight I scored the winning try in my debut match. My speed – I had run in the Scottish schoolboy championships – did not compensate for my lack of weight. Often, we played Edinburgh schools, where our opponents were sometimes eighteen years old. In the last match of the season, we were playing former pupils of our school – some of them friends of mine – who wanted to teach us a lesson or two by being overly physical during the opening minutes. I went down on the ball right at the start of play and then was surrounded and buried in a loose scrum. A boot landed on my head and I got up dazed, probably concussed. But, since it was the first few minutes of the match, I did not want to go off. Despite being more than a little hazy, I was so proud to be playing in this prestigious match that I just ploughed on.

  Afterwards, I thought nothing of it. Only gradually, during that summer term of 1967, did I start to sense a problem. I felt as if I was always looking into the sun and the sun was reflecting on my eye. But if you have one good eye, you do not really notice how bad the other one is. I went to see an optician, who could not find anything wrong. Then I went to see a doctor – a family friend who was a kind and generous man. He could not find anything wrong either; perhaps that was not surprising because the batteries in his torch were dead. He suggested I go to a consultant and agreed to fix up the appointment. Unfortunately, this was May, and the appointment was not until October – five months away, during which time, as I later discovered, my eye deteriorated beyond the point at which an operation was likely to succeed.

  Ironically, I could have gone right away to an eye consultant at my local hospital; but not knowing my way around the NHS at the time, I simply took the advice of the GP who directed me to his consultant friend. It would be the last time I would ever go private. I spent what would have been my first month at university a few hundred yards away from it, lying flat and blinded in the hope that the retina, once operated on, would stay flat. As I recuperated I joined fellow patients, mainly there for cataract operations, and I remember how every night at nine o’clock a trolley came around the ward, offering each patient – thanks to a bequest to the ward – a choice of Guinness, beer or wine, which was open even to a sixteen-year-old. I knew the NHS was free – but I had not expected free beer.

  I was told the retina had been reattached but there was no improvement in my sight. A few days after I returned to university – January, to start the second term – I went back to the hospital for a routine check-up and was told the retina was not in the right place. I had to have another operation, but the prospect of it working was, I was informed, remote. The surgeon agreed I could finish my third term, then spend the summer holidays in hospital and recuperating.

  I took his advice. But back again at the university in the autumn, when I went for a precautionary check-up I arrived fearing the worst. And I was right. I was suddenly back in hospital for a third operation. The surgeon said he and his colleagues would try one last time. Just before I went under a general anaesthetic he told me: ‘Okay, Gordon. We’ll have a bash.’ 1968 was one of the most tumultuous years of the twentieth century, but I saw very little of it.

  When the third operation did not work, I finally accepted I was permanently blind in my left eye. At least my right eye was fine. Or so I thought. I did not expect that two and a half years later, I would find myself back in hospital, when that eye suffered its own retinal detachment.

  In university but out of the classroom for much of my first two years, I had to renegotiate my course of study. I was advised to do an arts degree, the MA that I was awarded at nineteen, and then I prepared for an honours degree in social and economic history. I had some great tutors with whom I kept in contact after my studies, including Paul Addison, the prize-winning author of The Road to 1945, and the supervisor who eventually took me through my PhD, another John Brown, who sadly died a
few years ago. I thought I had worked hard but my other activities led me to miss some lectures. When I was awarded my degree, the head of history wrote to me saying: ‘Absurd and reprehensible an admission though it may be, I am not sure I know what you look like. So I very much look forward to meeting you.’

  I also followed my brother John in another marginally more serious journalistic enterprise. John had worked at the university student newspaper and in the summer of 1969 I was elected editor. We concentrated on seasoning the usual campus gossip with investigative journalism which brought us the UK student ‘Newspaper of the Year’ award. We exposed the case of a professor who tried and failed to finagle his son a first-class honours degree. The professor was removed as head of his department but, rather than being sacked, benefited from an all-too-familiar university stitch-up. He was appointed to a personal chair in Romance linguistics.

  Apartheid was now at the top of the agenda. Students, including some of my friends, had been arrested when protesting against the visit of the Springbok rugby team to play Scotland. Following a sit-in at the university careers office calling for the university to sell its shares in South African companies, we had also found papers showing that its director was a recruiting agent for MI6 – we kept it secret that one of the brothers of a school friend was exposed as a spy – and then in December I returned to guest-edit the Student. In a special edition that sparked national headlines, we exposed how the university had lied when it denied shareholdings in companies with interests in South Africa. Out of the blue, we had been handed a document which proved beyond doubt that the university held half a million pounds of investments in a range of corporations operating in South Africa, including De Beers and Anglo-American. Far from divesting, the university had been amassing a bigger portfolio. After our special edition, ‘Sell the Shares’ stickers and posters blanketed the university. A month later, the administration capitulated and sold the shares.