But then Jules got talking to someone in the gun club and discovered that it was actually only air rifles that were stored in that metal cupboard, and that there was no ammunition there at all. Everything suddenly became rather dreary and complicated, and the whole project simply petered out.
I guess we wouldn’t really have done it anyway. Neither of us were psychopaths. On the contrary, we were both in our own way the kind of people who have a strong need to do good. When I was expelled a year later, I went to work in a school in Africa and, from that starting point, gradually built up a career in international development. Jules, always more radical and daring than me, rebelled against rebellion itself, finding God, and celibacy, and submission to authority. He trained for the Catholic priesthood, fighting heroically all the time against doubts and forbidden longings. He was working in a dismal council estate in Liverpool when his ferocious inner struggle finally became too much for him, and he killed himself at the age of 28.
‘I don’t know what I believe in any more, Matt,’ he said to me in a letter shortly before he died. ‘I know I don’t believe in God or the church. I think I believe in trying to make things better. But if you don’t know what this world is or how it works, how can you make things better? How can you be sure you’re not making things worse? It’s like there’s this huge machine towering over us, sucking people in, mangling them and spitting them out, and I know I’m part of it, I know I’m tainted by what it’s doing, and I badly want to make it stop, but I’ve no idea which are the levers that turn it off and which make it go faster still. And the hardest part is that even my own motives are unclear to me, my own levers. I don’t trust my impulses. I don’t trust my judgement. Whatever I decide to do, I find myself wondering: who am I really doing this for?’
I know what he meant. Flying between international development conferences around the world, or hurrying from one meeting to the next along third-world roads in air-conditioned SUVs, I too often ask myself who it is I’m really helping. I too worry that my work may be perpetuating the very problems that it is supposedly there to solve.
We were seeking purity back then at Shotsford. We saw and loathed the blatant hypocrisy of our own class, its smug self-righteousness, the way it wallowed snout-deep in the trough of privilege even while it flattered itself it was the humble servant of the greater good, and we wanted to root that out from inside ourselves. You couldn’t have it both ways, that was our view, and I think deep down it’s my view still. (Sometimes, I swear, sitting at some middle class dinner table and listening to the conversation move from tongue-clucking at the xenophobia of ordinary English voters, to talk about how to get our kids into the schools where the middle class kids do well, my trigger finger still itches.) You couldn’t call yourself the enemy of capitalism if you remained one of its beneficiaries, that’s what Jules and I felt. You couldn’t be rich and enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
My parents and Jules’ were very comfortably off. They had big cars that purred, and big houses that women from small houses were paid to come in and clean. Self-centred teenagers though we were, we understood our complicity in all of that. We voluntarily attended the school they’d paid for. We bought our drugs and beer with the pocket money they provided. We lay dozing in our beds during the school holidays, while our parents’ cleaners hoovered the rooms around us. We knew the enemy was inside us as much as outside, and it seemed to us that only self-destructive violence was a powerful enough emetic to purge it. What better way was there of finally separating yourself from a thing than making it hate you, having it hunt you down and fling you into its prisons? We hadn’t heard of suicide bombing back then but, if we had, the thoroughness of the method would surely have appealed to us.
Purity was the thing. To destroy and to be pure. Anger is often a selfish emotion, the snarling of a dog that doesn’t want to share its bone, but our anger seemed to us to be selfless, for we would throw away everything to serve it: our futures, our place in society, the pride of our parents, material wealth, the respect of our fellow citizens.
It was mostly narcissism, of course. It was mostly our own oedipal anger, inflated to the size of the world by our adolescent egotism. I’ve seen the same thing in my daughter Jasmine, screaming into the faces of policemen on anti-capitalist marches, and then coming home to upgrade her smartphone and book herself one of those intercontinental holidays that she and her friends dignify as travelling.
A few years after the London bombings, I was driving a hired Range Rover across the Republic of Malawi in southern Africa. I’d been visiting a series of projects across the region and was now returning to Lilongwe, the capital, where I had a number of meetings scheduled with senior figures in various NGOs. After several weeks of lodging in sticky rooms with no air conditioning and only intermittent electric power, I was very much looking forward to a few nights in a hotel with regulated temperatures and proper beds before finishing my business in the country and returning to the UK.
The landscape I’d been driving through was flat, and not particular scenic. It was largely denuded of indigenous vegetation, and dotted untidily with sparse dry plots of maize and vegetables, and little clusters of huts, reminding me of a scalp from which the hair has not so much been cut or trimmed as pulled out in clumps. There were people everywhere. From the horizon behind me to the horizon ahead, a steady stream of pedestrians was trudging stoically along the edges of the road, often with bags of charcoal on their heads, or bundles of branches. Evidence of any kind of indigenous economic development was minimal. In the larger settlements I passed through, the most prominent buildings typically housed projects funded by international NGOs – Oxfam, Christian Aid, Médecins sans Frontières – whose logos succeeded one another on the signs by the roadside.
I was finding all this rather depressing. No doubt these projects were appreciated by the people that used them, and no doubt they provided a pretty good living to many people, including me, but the message they gave out was very clear: the people of this country cannot look after themselves. Back in the donor countries the message was the same: pathos-drenched fundraising ads depicted sweet but helpless Africans, waiting for rescue with big brown beseeching eyes. How many local initiatives had been stifled, I wondered, how much inward investment had been lost, by the steady drip-drip-drip of this message over the decades?
I pulled over at a petrol station by a crossroads, asked for my tank to be filled up and bought myself a Coke.
‘Mazungu! Mazungu!’ children called out excitedly, as I climbed out of my car.
I sighed. This is a generic name for white people that’s used across Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and the whole Great Lakes area. I’m told the word originally meant something like ‘aimless wanderer’ and, at that particular moment, this actually felt about right. I was an aimless wanderer. I knew the road to Lilongwe, and the address of my hotel. I knew the time of my flight back to Heathrow. I knew where to send my expenses form when I got home. But I’d lost all sense of the purpose of my life.
There was a white plastic table outside the petrol station, with white chairs around it of the kind that people sometimes have in their gardens back in England. I took my Coke over there so I could sit down to drink it, and I also took a book I was reading, though I knew this wasn’t the kind of place that a mazungu could expect to be left in peace. The children gathered in a group, about ten yards away from me. There were five of them aged about six or seven, two of whom were carrying baby siblings on their hips, and of course they were all very smiley and sweet. Now they watched me intently, beaming with anticipation, as if they thought I might at any moment grow wings and fly, or take water and turn it into wine. I waved and smiled to them, which made them squeal and laugh, running away for a few yards in pretence of being alarmed, and then creeping back again.