Enticing Blightie, 1972

I FLY INTO HEATHROW in March 1972 feeling blessed by the angels. I am about to start my postgraduate studies at Oxford and marry my own True Love (TL), who has been there for a year. The place is full, he says, of wise men and, to his delight, girls in very short skirts on bikes. He is a zoologist, embarked on a DPhil recording the reproductive habits of voles in nearby Wytham Woods. I don’t know what voles are. They look like rats in the photos he has sent me. Plain voles in safe woods, after the wild, roaming beasts of Africa, must feel like domesticated science. But heck, it is Oxford. His stout father (who died an anorexic in Canada in 1988) never could describe what his son was studying but used to boast to one and all, ‘Do you know? My son, number four, he’s in England, Oxford, first-class university in the world, he is there, sons of kings and prime ministers are there.’ Vainglory comes easily to Ugandan Asians. And until we were disabused, we believed that England was an orderly, eternally genteel haven, the antithesis of African mayhem.