Last year I had a memoir published. A copy somehow reached a group of friends I haven’t seen since we left school. They are all granddads now, but in my head, of course, they are forever 17.
Among them is a kid I’d been besotted by. In the book I called him Sammy, and, having read about himself, Sammy got in touch. At the sight of his name in my inbox, I shook. Strong feelings have shallow graves.
I knew Sammy had been to prison but I knew only the barest bones of why. Now he told me how it happened, and partly it was character and partly it was chance.
For had he not chanced to bump into Dil, another school friend, in Western Rd one random Wednesday afternoon, his life would have been different in a hundred ways.
And who among us, on reflection, cannot say something similar about some single, arbitrary, unconsidered event?
Sammy was drifting at the time, in his early 20s, working as a barman despite having a degree in French and Spanish. He didn’t think he wanted a career. But he did want dope. He loved the stuff. And he’d have argued, as many others have, that it did no harm to anyone and a lot of good to some, himself included.
He’d thought of trying his hand at smuggling it, partly for his own consumption, partly for easy money, but also, he insisted, as a moral crusade.
He saw it as both an honour and a duty to defy a law that penalises harmless pleasure.
Sammy always had a certain idealism. By instinct he championed the underdog and distrusted authority.
He nourished a sense of a better world, a tolerant place where people just got on with being stoned and friendly. It speaks to a good heart.
The other half of this encounter, Dil, had gone out into the world to do some travelling and teaching. He sent me a letter once from southern India describing how he lived with monkeys on his roof, and it made me ache to live with monkeys on my roof as well.
He’d also taught in Africa. But now he was briefly back in the town where we’d all been brought up and, on that Wednesday afternoon, fate’s bony finger nudged him on to Western Road and into Sammy’s path.
Having not seen each other for a few years, they caught up on recent doings.
Dil said he’d been travelling and teaching. Sammy said he’d thought of smuggling drugs.
It was then that Dil unwittingly chose to change the path of Sammy’s life. “If you want to smuggle drugs,” he said, “go to Khartoum”.
Hashish was readily available there and cheap. But it was the postal system that clinched the deal.
If you wanted to send a parcel overseas, you took it to the central post office unsealed.
There you queued for a while in the heat until you reached a little window where a clerk went through the contents of your package, checking it was legal, then weighed it, sold you stamps and a sticker that said your package had been checked and cleared and then handed the package back to you, still unsealed, for you to take to another building to do the actual posting.
Sammy was all, as they say, ears.
At the time, the Sudanese Government was recruiting any graduate speaker of English it could find and packing them off to secondary schools around the country to teach English.
The idea of helping poor African people appealed to Sammy almost as much as the idea of smuggling a lot of hashish.
Within months, he was in Sudan. And when, a year or so later, his teaching contract was complete, he posted a series of parcels back home, addressed to himself.
Sammy then flew back, went to his home post office to collect his bounty and was met by a hand on the shoulder. “Would you mind coming this way, please, sir?”
He came this way and it led to prison. Character, in other words, was destiny. But so was chance. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen.
