We were encouraged to start travelling abroad in 1972 because of British Council travel grants enabling us to organise youth and cultural exchanges with many European countries, including eight two-way exchanges with the Soviet Union.

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Of all the memories we have, the one that stands out the most is our school–student exchange trip to Russia in 1977, where we arranged to visit 4 schools in Russia, taking 10 students from 4 different schools in England – 10 from Eton, 10 from Rugby, 10 from a comprehensive school in Swindon and 10 from a comprehensive school in Manchester. As you can imagine, it was a wonderful recipe for a life-changing 2-week trip. I’ll never forget the first meeting between the groups – they all looked at each other shyly until one Eton lad broke the tension by saying to one of the of Manchester girls: ‘I say, are you a Trotskyist?’ She hadn’t a clue what he meant but she replied, ‘No, but are you a toff?’ This got everybody laughing and broke the ice. After that amusing start the young people from opposite backgrounds got on like a house on fire.

​However, our aid programmes didn’t really start until 1993 with the war in Yugoslavia. It all began by accident when we had an urgent request from social services to help rehouse four refugee sisters and their small children from war-torn Bosnia. As usual we were able to use the clothes, furniture and household goods you donated to help. They had nothing but the clothes they stood up in and were glad to be offered practical help. Unlike on TV, we could now see refugees as real people, and it shook us to hear that if it wasn’t for the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing, there was no way they would have left their good life back in Bosnia.

 

From this small beginning our volunteers became very interested in helping us develop our overseas aid programme, where every summer (until Covid) they helped fill our van with wheelchairs and disability aids for the land-mine victims at the Princess Diana landmine workshop in Tuzla, Bosnia. This then developed into taking other things like food, clothes, toys and musical instruments to a home for blind children in Istanbul; Chișinău, the capital of Moldova; and Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. Plus other aid trips to many other European countries such as Croatia where there was a home for severely disabled children.

 

That very first trip to Bosnia was so frightening, delivering aid in a war zone, driving without insurance, with no Satnav phones, flak jackets or tin hats like the other well-organised aid workers. Nevertheless, it was exciting. We met many other dedicated amateur aid-delivery people from all over the world. We met a folk singer from Germany who filled her car with food and clothes and just went over and handed them out. There was a group from Sweden who came over in an old army lorry full of goodies. Because we were involved with these wonderful yet ordinary people who were responding to people in great need (a bit like in Kiev now), it greatly encouraged us to keep going, and eventually we got through to Kamensko, a village outside Sarajevo.

 

So, each year, as promised, we were able to take food, clothing and medical supplies on the advice of refugee families here in the UK and take them to each family personally. On later trips we felt confident enough to smuggle the Bosnian girls’ mother and their brother back from behind Serb lines to Zagreb, where the British Embassy (which surely should be the proper route for all asylum seekers) granted them refugee status and they eventually joined up with the rest of the family back here in England. By the time the Serbs were eventually subdued in Bosnia by the UN and NATO, over 50,000 women had been raped and thousands killed, with 90 per cent of homes damaged or destroyed by the Serbian aggression, very similar to that of the Russians in Ukraine today.

 

Perhaps one of the most interesting aid trips after the war in Bosnia was to bring food and clothes to a street children’s project in Serbia, where about fifty children of all ages lived rough in the back streets of Novi Sad. That’s the town where the railway awning collapsed, killing many people.

Two or three times a year our volunteers fill a 40-foot container with furniture and things for Africa, Cuba, Jamaica and Egypt (disabled children in Cairo and Luxor) – that really is heavy work, and it’s great to see the teamwork of our volunteers who are classed as unemployable. They are so keen, quick and efficient, desperately trying to beat the time limit of three and a half hours – which they often do in spite of once stopping to have a snowball fight! We are proving how great these lads are and also how interesting the work is for all of us.

 

Africa is a real mad kaleidoscope of music, dancing, noise, exotic animals and insects, not to mention birds of paradise; there’s both mystery and danger. In crowded cities insane drivers race jalopies down narrow streets, bumping and scraping each other’s cars, having fun, using their nous instead of a non-existent highway code, and by sheer ingenuity the traffic always seems to flow without any serious accidents. In Nigeria each shanty-town street holds on average about 7 to 10 churches rather than pubs, indicating an obsession with religion, which may account for the lack of pubs! When I was able to stop blinking and start looking properly, I was overcome with sadness because of the terrible poverty blighting the lives of what can only be described as incredibly nice, polite and amazingly beautiful people. I tremble at the contradiction of such natural beauty nestling amongst the beastliness of Western exploitation.

 

I saw the oil-blackened sandy beaches (courtesy of Shell) and further terrible pollution from Shell’s petroleum development area, where nothing will grow and farmers receive no compensation. Local people told me about human rights abuses – how Shell has taken over £17 billion-worth of oil at huge environmental cost and is putting nothing back. They told me that when they complained, Shell turned to the government, who raided their shanty-town village of Agoni, killing 750 people, injuring hundreds more (with no medical care) and making 30,000 people homeless. One of their leaders was Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged by the military. And now we hear of Shell (and other companies) misleading shareholders.

Our many trips to Kosovo hold special memories. One of these trips was sponsored by our then local paper, the Wilmslow Express. In Kosovo one million are either dead or missing, which adds up to 50 per cent of the population.

 

We began taking aid to the Kosovan people in 1998, when they fled as refugees into Albania before the onslaught of Serbian militia, under the brutal leadership of Milošević. We were so shocked to see how poor Albania was. I remember once having to travel by train from the docks to Tirana, the capital, to see one of their government ministers to get permission to take food into one of the refugee camps. The train had all its windows broken and no ribbing between each carriage. We had to jump from one carriage to another whilst on the move – quite exciting for the young, no doubt, but a bit frightening for the elderly. We couldn’t help noticing the millions of gun bunkers and air-raid shelters, now used by the young as alternative coffee bars and meeting places. The following year we took aid into Kosovo to the families we had previously met in the Albanian refugee camps. ‘Thanks to NATO, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair’ was written up all over the countryside. Even now, years later, if you’re British or American and go into any shop in Kosovo you can still be invited into the back parlour for a ceremonial cup of tea, for being part of the international peacekeeping force that got their country back for them.

 

Whilst travelling from Bosnia to Kosovo my partner at that time and I were twice arrested by Serb paramilitary. We were harshly treated, knocked about and shouted at, threatened with guns and thrown into prison for a day. The Serbs – who at that time were perhaps themselves the most undesirable people in Europe – then kicked us out of the country, with the words ‘Undesirable’ stamped in our passports. This happened two years running. The second time, in Montenegro, alongside the speed traps they had Serb-traps. On this occasion the Serbs caught us once again in their illegal roadblock, but this time they also arrested and beat up two British policemen who were on a tour of duty with the UN Special Forces. The policemen’s two Kosovan friends were shot by the Serbs without trial or without mercy, just like in Ukraine and Gaza now, which begs the question, ‘why do men want to fight so much all the time?’