Free Radical

by Cable, Vincent

  The Cables, at this point, made their own contribution to the drama. I had written home telling them, in a matter-of-fact way, that Olympia and I were planning to get married. Since I was, by now, twenty-four years old and had lived away from home for several years, I assumed that they could trust my judgement but would appreciate their blessing and support. The reply, in which he stated that he was also speaking on my mother’s and brother’s behalf, was a parody of my father at his bigoted and snobbish worst. How could I be so naive as to imagine that mixed marriages could possibly work? What about the neighbours, especially the higher class of neighbour we now lived among in Dringhouses? An Asian girl? Then there was my brother, who had recently won a scholarship to a public school; how could he possibly be expected to explain to his socially refined classmates and teachers that there was a coloured woman in the family? Unless I had been afflicted by tropical fever my only possible motive was to humiliate him and undermine his two and a half decades of work towards social acceptance and civic respectability. I later discovered that he had been planning his own version of a dynastic marriage by introducing me to the daughter of York’s leading building contractor and Tory grandee, a Shepherd. The bottom line was the same as Mr Rebelo’s: drop this foolish idea or you will be expelled forever from the family home.

  This letter added anger and further estrangement to an already combustible mix. Olympia was outraged and insulted and it confirmed her worst suspicions about British racism and hypocrisy (the latter because she had briefly met my parents in York, over a courteous if somewhat strained tea, and my father had expressed particular appreciation of her taste in classical music and her disciplinarian approach to teaching). The more immediate set of problems, however, related to her own father.

  Mr Rebelo produced what he thought was a masterstroke. Since Olympia was committed, as a condition of her scholarship to the UK, to spending two years teaching for the Kenyan government, he managed to arrange for her posting to a remote school where she might, in the loneliness of internal exile, rethink her folly. The chosen school was run by nuns with a reputation for uncompromising moral rectitude and was located at a hamlet called Runyenjes, between Embu and Meru, on the slopes of Mount Kenya. Though remote, the school was not inaccessible, at least in dry weather, and could be reached after a long drive on a murram (dirt) road. He had seriously underestimated the capacity of star-crossed lovers to surmount obstacles of this kind and my VW made the journey most weekends, despite some hairy moments with mud and wild animals and, on one occasion, a late-night encounter with a gang of car-jackers.

  Runyenjes was an earthly paradise. Every morning, the ice-tipped peak of Mount Kenya rose above the verdant green of the forest and the rich red soil of the terraced farms that stretched out beyond the school, and the air was fresh and clear. Contrary to expectations, and probably their rule-book, the nuns welcomed this fugitive Juliet and Romeo and soon turned me to practical advantage as postman and delivery boy. The girls had a thirst for knowledge despite coming to school with an array of handicaps, ranging from real hunger, poverty and lack of lighting for homework, to predatory adult males. Olympia’s Cambridge O level class operated at a higher academic level than many she subsequently encountered in British comprehensives. The girls also understood the romantic drama in the life of the new teacher and she was touched by their support and that of the nuns.

  In an ideal world, she would have stayed for a year at least and repaid the goodwill of the school. But she was conscious that the coming rainy season would make my visits impossible and she was anxious to be as close to her family as her father would permit. She managed to obtain a transfer to Kenya (Girls’) High School in Nairobi. Kenya High was in the process of transition from an all-white segregated school to a multiracial one, predominantly of Asian girls and the daughters of the new Kenyan elite of ministers and senior officials. The staff was still largely inherited from the colonial days and some of them made little effort to hide their prejudices and their distaste for the ‘collapse of standards’. There was one (Asian) non-white teacher and more with good qualifications were being sought.

  There were two new recruits, Olympia and, as luck would have it, my friend Pamela Ogot. Olympia had no choice but to live in school accommodation since by this time she had been forbidden to return home – though she made many clandestine visits to see her mother, brothers and sisters, who, between them, bore the brunt of her father’s anger. We had now become engaged and were planning to get married before I was due to leave Kenya in mid-1968. News of the clandestine visits and the engagement had, of course, reached the ears of Mr Rebelo and the Goan community, for which the embarrassment of one of its leading families provided endless gossip.

  The growing alienation between Olympia and her father was, paradoxically, a result of their being so alike: proud and uncompromising, with unshakeable self-belief. This was a classic collision between an irresistible force and an immovable object. The confrontation reached its peak over our wedding, which Olympia decided should be in the Catholic cathedral: not so much as a statement of faith as a very public declaration of love and commitment. There was no question of a low-key, uncontroversial marriage in a distant parish or register office.

  All of these tribulations had the effect of bringing us closer together, and while Olympia never lost her capacity for flying into a temper at regular intervals, it was always followed by a loving reconciliation. Our differences were few and quickly resolved. I insisted that she give up smoking, which she did, and I agreed, as a reciprocal commitment, to improve my rather slovenly habits in relation to bathing and dress.

  We had the solid support of my friends: my best man, Trevor Sweetman, another Overseas Development Institute fellow, for whom I performed the same role when years later he married Reeti Sharma, a Bengali student at Wye College; Alan Doss, a UN official who now manages the peacekeeping force in the Congo and was on standby to give Olympia away if her brothers were prevented from coming; and Jill Wells, a university economist who let Olympia use her rooms to prepare for the wedding.

  One of the many obstacles, however, was the priest, Father Whelan, an Irishman of the old school who made clear from the outset his distaste for unorthodox and cross-denominational marriages. I agreed to accept instruction from him and we had an amicable, if somewhat one-sided, relationship, in which I listened tactfully and with feigned enthusiasm to his uncompromising interpretation of Catholic marriage doctrine and his anecdotes about administering the last rites to large numbers of Kikuyus before they were dispatched by the hangman during the Mau Mau emergency. Our final session was, however, a disaster. Olympia joined us and made no attempt to emulate my diplomacy. She rose to his every provocation and told him that she had insisted on the cathedral ceremony to please her mother rather than out of respect for him or the Church. A full-frontal assault on the most powerful religious institution in the world was perhaps not the best preparation for a church wedding the next day and, although Olympia never apologized or expressed regret for anything she did, we both had a sense of apprehension about Father Whelan’s revenge.

  The Rebelo family was the other uncertainty. Her two brothers and sister, who were in the country at the time, expressed a determination to come to the wedding, although Mrs Rebelo decided to stay away so as to avoid too big a rift. The main worry was about loose cannons among the more distant relations. An uncle, Socorro, had a gun and threatened to come to the church to shoot us and redeem the family honour. Since he had served several years in jail for robbery, we could not entirely discount the risk. A few of my more muscular sporting friends were put on security alert.

  In the event, the ceremony went as well as could have been expected. The church was reasonably full, of both guests and curious Goans. Olympia’s brothers and sister came and the assassin stayed away. Olympia was stunningly beautiful in a white silk sari and, with the help of a tailor, I managed to look creditably smart. Father Whelan’s armoury of retaliatory weapons proved less than
lethal. One was to stand down the choir we had requested and replace it with a group of tiny children who had not yet been taught to sing in tune. The other was to enliven our wedding service with a very long sermon on the evils of communism. After he had made his point, however, he even managed a bleak smile in the sacristy and, like many other people who clashed with Olympia, he could not resist admiring her fearless honesty and unquenchable spirit.

  Despite two very alienated fathers and plenty of warnings that our marriage stood little chance of surviving, we left the church and reception happy and surrounded by supportive family and friends, and embarked on a brief but idyllic honeymoon in a hotel in the Aberdare Mountains and a longer break in Zanzibar. Zanzibar had recently experienced a communist and African, anti-Arab, revolution, and we were, I think, the only tourists on the island. We were followed around by a small army of sinister-looking, gun-toting secret police thugs in dark glasses, but even they could see our limited counter-revolutionary potential and left us to wander the deserted streets and enjoy each other’s company.

  We had one last adventure before we embarked on life together in Britain, where I had secured a post at Glasgow University. Most of our savings had been consumed paying off a bond to the Kenyan government on account of Olympia’s failing to complete her obligation to teach, and so we decided to travel back overland as far as possible, both to save money and to see more of Africa. I had lived rough for several months three years earlier, on an overland trip with Cambridge friends through the Soviet Union, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and felt reasonably comfortable with the prospect of tackling rural Ethiopia and the Sudanese desert, especially as Olympia was a tough and practical woman whom I had already dragged around some of the more god-forsaken corners of East Africa. Nothing, however, quite prepared us for the journey on country buses through the mountains of the Amharic and Tigray heartlands of Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia: the squalor of the ‘hotels’ which were breeding colonies for fleas and cockroaches, the unremitting diet (kinjara and wat), and insane drivers who were in a hurry to embrace whatever afterlife their religion promised them.

  We tried to appreciate the wonders of Abyssinian civilization and the character of a people who, uniquely, had seen off invading Europeans, but were immensely relieved to reach the Italian boulevards and pensiones of Eritrea. Khartoum in mid-summer in a cheap hotel followed by a train journey across the Nubian desert in third class were arguably even more challenging, but the Sudanese, once they had adjusted to the presence of a woman in the male sections of the train, were generous and courteous to a fault and we survived as far as the Nile steamer. Journeying through Egypt, and then Greece and Italy, was a return to romantic honeymoon mode – with the exception of a rough, deck-class crossing of the Mediterranean which coincided with Olympia’s morning sickness, as she was now pregnant with our first son, Paul.

  On the way to Glasgow, we called in at York to see my parents, with whom I had not communicated since the letter of almost a year before. Nothing had changed. After a strained but polite cup of tea, my father continued as if he had been stopped in full flow months before. My mother sought to maintain the strained politeness of the conversation but was banished to the washing-up. My brother, now fifteen, was again invoked as the chief victim of my – now, our – misdeeds, but was dispatched to his homework, where he was a silent witness for the prosecution. My father had decided before we arrived that racial prejudice and rejection could be more palatable if presented in a tone of sweet reason, as if we could surely appreciate the pressure he was under from the unseen faces behind the lace curtains in White House Gardens. The failure of communication was absolute and it did not take long for the cumulative exhaustion of weeks of travelling to cause tempers to fray. We left amid shouting and recrimination, and if the neighbours had until then been unaware of the strange goings-on at No. 38, they were so no longer.

  We had no further contact with my father and mother for six years. Together with Olympia’s estrangement from her father, these events ensured that we started married life emotionally and practically dependent on each other, and this had the effect of helping us to thrive in adversity and to grow closer together. External events compounded this sense of being together against the world. While we had been marrying and travelling, the Kenyan Asian minority had become the centre of a triangular crisis involving Kenya, Britain and India. There was growing pressure on the Asian minority in Kenya from Africans seeking to occupy clerical jobs in government and make a start in small businesses – roles performed in Kenya almost entirely by the 200, 000-strong Asian minority. The Kenyatta administration made it clear that those Asians who had taken Kenyan citizenship – mainly the Ismaili community – were welcome, but those with British passports were a British responsibility. Growing numbers of Asians left for Britain, and as the exodus gathered momentum the British popular press had one of its periodic immigration panics, with wildly exaggerated numbers and rumours of the diseases, welfare dependency and criminality that the Asians were supposedly bringing with them.

  The Wilson government panicked, despite the information available to it that the total number of East African, let alone Kenyan, Asians was small; that many had no interest in coming to the UK; and that those that did had money, business and other skills. Callaghan threatened immigration controls. India refused to take any responsibility for British subjects, so large numbers of Asians who were well settled in Kenya and were not in any danger from Africanization fled for the airports before the UK controls could come into effect. The pictures of thousands of panicking Asians scrambling to get into the mother country before their UK passports became worthless created a hysterical environment in which Parliament pushed through legislation in record time, despite opposition from the Liberals and a handful of independent-minded Labour and Tory backbenchers.

  These events had a direct bearing on people close to us. Mr Rebelo felt entirely vindicated in his conviction that I had dragged off his daughter to a deeply prejudiced country without honour or principles, and was determined henceforth that the family should rediscover its Indian roots. He proposed to return to Goa. My father was reinforced in his conviction that I had been conned into marrying one of these refugees who were so determined to live off the land of milk and honey (he started to reappraise his assessment several years later when a Tory government dealt with a similar crisis affecting Ugandan Asians in a much more rational and honourable way). Some of Olympia’s relatives beat the UK ban; others, like much-loved Aunt Lyra, made it to Canada; but most stayed put, preparing for an eventual move to India. Olympia and I were angry and unsettled and I put some of my energies when I arrived in the UK into writing articles, including a Fabian pamphlet which, together with David Steel’s book No Entry, provides, I think, a good account of this rather sordid episode in British political history. I came close to leaving the Labour Party which I had only recently identified with, but was talked out of it by Maurice Miller, a Glasgow MP, who put himself at the head of opposition to the 1968 Immigration Bill, seeing a close analogy with the way his Jewish forebears had been treated when they had fled to the UK from the Russian pogroms.

  Olympia and I settled down to life in Glasgow with first one baby, Paul, and then another, Aida. We were a contented, loving family and, while we made some good Glaswegian friends, we must have seemed to them and others rather precious and narcissistic in our little self-sufficient cocoon. Olympia faithfully sent a weekly letter to her mother in Nairobi, and later in Goa, and kept in touch with her family through sisters studying in Southampton and Oxford and a brother, Celso, who came to Alloa for training in brewing technology. I re-established contact with my brother Keith, who came to study in Dundee rather than at Oxbridge, which my father regarded as a failure directly attributable to the upheaval and indiscipline that I had generated at home. The cold war separating us from our fathers continued, however, and seemed likely to continue indefinitely.

  Cracks in the ice appeared only gradually. Mr
Rebelo occasionally expressed curiosity about his daughter and grandchildren, and surprise that we had not realized his prediction of marital collapse. He faced rebellions, too, on other fronts. Amata, Olympia’s sister, hoped to marry a Hindu, Manu, whom she had met while studying medicine in Delhi. Aurelio, the eldest son, had an English girlfriend, Jill. And, the ultimate horror, another daughter, Selina, planned to marry her black boyfriend, Harry (now professor of sociology at South Bank University). Selina’s relationship aroused the deepest Indian prejudices about race, colour and caste, which were all the more difficult to handle and to express because they could not be channelled into a politically acceptable rant like the denunciation of British colonialism and imperialism. Although Olympia and I were blamed for starting the rot, we were no longer outcasts-in-chief. When Olympia’s second brother restored family honour by marrying a suitable upper-caste Goan girl, Judy, at the Catholic church in Verna, we were invited as guests. Mr Rebelo took me aside and invited me to share his evening walks down to his paddy fields and coconut grove and my status as son-in-law was established. Although Olympia was never entirely forgiven for laying waste to her father’s marital plans for his children, she regained her status in his affections and acted as a catalyst for the rehabilitation of the rest of the family, which was gradually reunited.

  My own father put out peace feelers at about the same time. We had confounded his predictions, too, by staying together, and he had heard favourable reports of our academic progress and of the grandchildren. And as with Olympia’s family, a greater marital disaster helped him achieve a better sense of proportion. My brother Keith made a young woman student pregnant in Dundee. Susan Papp had fled as a child from the Russian tanks in Hungary and had later been reunited with her parents in Scotland. To reach university was a great achievement and one that now threatened to fall apart. My father urged my brother to walk away. We took the opposite view. Keith took our advice rather than his father’s and married Susan. The marriage was not a great success but, despite an eventual divorce, Susan and Keith remained friends and my nephew Harvey, after a turbulent and rebellious young adulthood, has settled into a serious career and a family of his own.