Swimming with Cobras Read Online Free Page A

ambience, with the smell of his tobacco and the sting of my shortcoming. We sat down at a dark oak table laden with his files and reports, the same one on which my father had had his appendix taken out as a small boy, and confronted the question.
    I had shown some early interest in social work, after an almoner had come to speak to us at school, but I’d not been encouraged in this. “Can’t you think of something nicer , my dear?” my grandmother had asked, speaking for the whole family. When my father and I emerged from his study this time, it was to tell my mother that I would pursue training in medical social work. In compliance with social work theory at the time, I would have to work for a year in a menial job. My father would arrange for lodgings and a position at Dingles department store in Plymouth, just across the border in Devon.
    My mother crumpled. “A shop. Oh dear,” she said.
    It was a year of hard, physical work that opened my eyes to the drudgery of many people’s lives and offered a taste of the antagonism that can exist between boss and employee. I began to take more seriously what went on in the world around me and during the next few years at Bristol University I continued to develop this interest. As well as enjoying all the usual student fun I was also secretary of the United Nations Society, voted for the Liberal Party and expressed vehement opposition to apartheid.
    During the university holidays I worked with the archaically titled Association for Distressed Gentlefolk, administering grants to people who had fallen on hard times. My brief experience in a state high school had given me glimpses of a socio-ecionomic reality very different from my own, and from the house-calls I now made, it was clear to me that Harold Macmillan’s cheerful description of the times did not apply to everyone. I saw people living in the most meagre of circumstances. I visited a professor of English from the University of Cairo who had lost his job after the Suez crisis and now lived in a one-roomed apartment with his wife; a musician whose illness had demoted him from the position of first violin in a major English orchestra to an alcove under the arches near one of London’s stations; a colonel’s widow living in a single room in a London house where she played bridge with her neighbours on top of an orange box, her gracious manner disguising an alcohol addiction. Despite their reduced circumstances, many of these people demonstrated a resilience that I admired.
    At last, after a year at the Almoners’ Institute in London, I found myself in my first job at the Radcliffe in Oxford, a job and place that I loved. There followed the happiest of times, during which I worked and played in equal measure. Life was sometimes giddy with fun, but we were all becoming much more engaged with serious issues and I would soon come face to face with a challenging one of my own.
    â€œI’ve met the man you’re going to marry!” declared my flatmate Patsy Tranfield one late afternoon outside the squash courts where we had gone for a game. A student at the London School of Economics, her chutzpah never failed to impress me. “He’s a Rhodes Scholar…,” she said.
    I flourished my squash racquet. "Well, where is he then?" I asked cheekily.
    â€œâ€¦and a South African.”
    â€œForget it,” I shot back. “Never a South African.” I ended the conversation and concentrated on the game ahead.
    Patsy bided her time. She was engaged to be married that summer to a student at St Edmund Hall where she sang in the choir, and it was there that she had spied the South African. Attracted by his looks she had fallen into conversation with him, and finding that his interests coincided with mine, she decided to match-make. She disapproved of the boyfriend I was seeing at the time and was determined that all her friends should be as happily engaged as she