Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan

In Maggie’s words, life was ‘heavenly’ for the British hired in those days by London tea companies to run the Assam tea estates. The British lived in comfortable bungalows, the adults attended by Indian servants and the children watched by Indian nursemaids. The men began work at six o’clock in the morning, but after two hours they broke for breakfast. At noon it was time for lunch, and after lunch everybody took two ‘golden and silent’ hours of siesta. After siesta, Maggie writes, ‘there was a little more work to do, leaving time for tennis, a round of golf or a chukka or two of polo before the sun sank. Then the sun-downer drinks parties began, followed by dinner and dancing’ at the club. But by the time Emma was born in 1964 and her sister Erica in 1965, it had become plain that the postwar world was going to have a lot less room for people like the McCunes.

For India, as for so many other colonies, the end of the Raj in 1948 was only the beginning of the slow and subtle process of loosening Britain’s control over the country. In the first few years under the new Indian government, the British tea companies operated pretty much as they had under British administration. But by the late 1960s, they were under pressure from the government to replace British employees with Indians. Julian lost his job supervising the maintenance of the equipment used to grade and prepare tea leaves. Maggie’s father was pensioned off and decided to return to England. In her book, Maggie says that she and Julian enjoyed mixing with people of all races in Assam, but the only Indians she mentions socializing with were the petty royals for whom the dissolution of empire was almost as much of a disaster as it was for the British. Julian talked about emigrating to Rhodesia or South Africa, where many of their British friends from India had already gone, but Maggie worried about moving to another refuge that might prove temporary. She wanted to spare her children the uncomfortable colonial sense she had always had of never quite fitting in England. She wanted ‘Home’ to really feel like home for them. In 1966 the McCunes decided to move to Yorkshire, where Julian had gone to school and had family. Emma was two.

There was an old manor house on the windswept edge of the Vale of York that Bunny McCune had never forgotten in all his years of wandering. Julian’s parents were dead, but his mother had come from Leeds, and as a boy he had attended Aysgarth School in North Yorkshire before going on to Winchester College. Cowling Hall, a long, thin brick-and-plaster Queen Anne mansion not far from Aysgarth on top of a hill overlooking a spectacular view of the Yorkshire Dales, had first captivated his imagination when he was a schoolboy. The house was shaped like an L, and the oldest part had been built from the ruins of a despoiled abbey. It was empty when the McCunes arrived. Local people said it was haunted. A child had died in the house, and a man had suffered a nervous breakdown. It was an imposing, if dilapidated, piece of architecture, but in the winter a bone-chilling wind whistled right through it. The house was so cold that Maggie tells in her book of warming butter for toast by the coal fire in the drawing room. But with six bedrooms, it was more than big enough for what would become a family of six - Jennie was born in 1967 and Johnny in 1970 - and Julian had to have it. He had already invested his inheritance in a franchise he planned to set up in North Yorkshire for a firm marketing closed-circuit-television monitoring systems. Charmed by Julian’s manners, the titled owners of Cowling Hall agreed to rent it to the McCunes for the nominal sum of six pounds a week.

A number of Aysgarth old boys still lived in the area, and these former classmates helped the McCunes settle into North Yorkshire’s county set. Wensleydale is the heart of James Herriot country, a misty green landscape of ancient stone villages and black-and-white cows that occupies a large place in the sentimental imagination of England. Bunny hunted and fished in the area’s magnificent forests and streams; Maggie organized cricket teas and was elected to the local cancer research committee. There were ponies for the children: Maggie saw a moral purpose in such outdoor pursuits. ‘Ponies are such good discipline,’ she told me once. ‘When you come back from riding, you can’t just think about yourself. You have to brush down the horse.’ And there were the all-important public schools. After attending the local primary, Emma became a weekly boarder at Polam Hall in Darlington. Emma is positively radiant in photographs from these years, her cheeks freckled and ruddy as she poses in front of Cowling Hall or astride her pony, Misty.

Julian and Maggie were a popular couple. If Julian had one talent - and by all accounts, it was an unusual talent in a place as rigid and class-bound as North Yorkshire in the 1960s - it was for striking up friendships with people of wildly different backgrounds. ‘Julian was a thorough gentleman,’ Peter Gilbertson, an old schoolmate from Aysgarth, reminisced many years later. ‘He could go into any worker’s cottage or any stately home with his boots on and his spaniels at his heels, and he’d be fine. He’d put two bottles on the table and say, “Right! We’re having a party.”’ Among their close friends, the McCunes counted Bedale’s local squire and his wife, the doctor and the vicar. Maggie, who had been raised Catholic, converted to the Church of England. Julian, whose political views Gilbertson describes as ‘conservative - very conservative’, became the treasurer of the local Conservative Association. The genteel McCune façade was impeccable, and Emma’s father seems to have felt that this really ought to have been enough. Like so many upper-middle-class public schoolboys of the period, he had been educated to serve the empire. He really had no other skills. After nearly twenty years abroad, he was at first baffled, then angry, to learn that in the Britain to which he had returned his social graces and his old school tie would not by themselves translate into a sizeable income. As Maggie later wrote, his indifference to work, easy to overlook in India, was harder to ignore in Britain. When his security franchise failed to prosper, he went to work for a cousin selling farm equipment to large landowners. After a year or so, the cousin fired him. Julian never discussed business matters with Maggie, and he did not tell her when he lost his job. Nor did he look for a position he considered beneath him. Instead, he pretended he was going off to work each day. After saying good-bye to her and the children, he would drive to a nearby river, park his car, and sit in it reading newspapers. Maggie never guessed that he was unemployed until his cousin finally phoned her to say he had fired Julian more than a year earlier for being ‘bone-idle, a scrounger, and a liar’.

When Maggie confronted him, Julian acted as if he were above worrying about money, the opinions of others or even the law. He was arrested for drunken driving. He took up with a woman who lived in the local village. He was taken to court in Leeds for debt. He continued to come home with expensive presents that Maggie had no idea how he bought. Then he was charged with using his position as a treasurer of the local Conservative Association to steal Tory funds. When a judge asked Maggie why her husband had not appeared with her in court the day the two of them were summoned for failing to pay the rent at Cowling Hall, she had to tell him that Julian was too busy fishing for salmon on the river Tweed. In 1975 local bailiffs evicted the McCune family from Cowling Hall. Maggie and the children went to live in a cottage on the grounds of Aysgarth School; Julian retreated to a crofter’s hut high in the Dales, where he found occasional work as a farm labourer. Emma was ten when the family broke up. ‘Her childhood ended there,’ her mother writes.

The very night Maggie discovered that her husband was having an affair with another woman, she happened to be reading one of Emma’s favourite childhood stories, Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Thumbelina’. The tale of a tiny girl rescued by a swallow from having to marry a mole, then flown to the warm lands of the south, where she became a princess, must have recalled to the McCunes the magical days in Assam, before they were exiled back ‘Home’. As their troubles mounted in England, perhaps it was only natural that the family should recall their years in India as a time and place in which they had been free to be the aristocrats that Julian, at least, felt himself to be. After a few drinks, Julian was wont to regale the local pubs about how, in India, he had been able to take the law into his own hands and do as he pleased. He loved to tell the story of how he had got himself out of jail after accidentally hitting a sacred cow with his car in Calcutta. He never could get used to how the roguish behaviour that his fellow expatriates had found so entertaining in India met with disapproval in England. When he invited the Yorkshire policemen who had caught him driving drunk to join him for a brandy before their court appearance, an English judge was not amused.

It was not Julian’s assumption of superiority that bothered his Yorkshire friends. Imperialism had not gone out of fashion in that part of the world. People did not mind if Julian complained about missing his Indian servants at the same time as he boasted about having ‘given service to the colonies’. They didn’t care if he saw it as his right to live like a lord. After all, some of his old school friends were lords. No, it was not Julian’s pretensions that set him apart from the society in which he found himself. It was his inability to maintain them. ‘I just think he was born too late,’ Gilbertson said sadly. ‘He should have been born forty years earlier and with a hell of a lot of money’ In the end, much of it did come down to money. To Maggie’s intense anger and humiliation, Julian pleaded for leniency at his embezzlement trial on the grounds that he stole to finance his wife’s extravagance. The two were divorced in January 1976. A few weeks later Julian killed himself.

Emma, who was eleven, was visiting the city of York the day it happened. Her father had never stopped seeing her. Indeed, he was the more playful of the McCune parents, forever taking the children out for a ride or a shooting expedition while Maggie fretted over how to buy groceries. That weekend he had invited Emma to go to the horse races with him, but she decided to go to York with her sister instead. She later told friends how much she regretted not going with him that day. She said she always wondered if she might have saved his life. With Julian’s death, the days of pony school and ballet lessons were truly over. Maggie and the children entered a period of their lives as grim and cheerless as the bleakest Yorkshire winter. Maggie, who had not worked outside the house during her marriage, embarked on a heroic struggle to support all four children. For a while, she had to pump petrol at the local service station to make ends meet. At last she found a job as a secretary to a headmaster at a state primary school in nearby Catterick Garrison. In her book, she chronicles the family’s series of moves from borrowed cottages to a grey cement council house before she and the children finally landed their own small semi-detached house in the village of Little Crakehall.

As the eldest child, Emma went from being the petted darling of Cowling Hall to becoming her mother’s second-in-charge. Maggie leaned on her to help with the housework and look after the other children. Emma had to learn to shop and cook and sew. She also had to console her mother, who was so depressed and angry and fearful that she came home from work each evening longing to crawl into bed. ‘After my father died, Emma was like my mother’s husband,’ her brother Johnny remembers. One of Emma’s friends from Kenya said that Emma told her she dreaded coming down to the kitchen in the mornings as a teenager to see the list of chores her mother would leave for her. The family worried constantly about money. None of the houses they lived in had central heating, not even the Little Crakehall cottage that Maggie bought and lovingly restored. The electricity was on a coin meter, and occasionally it went off because they did not have enough coins. It was so much like one of those fairy tales in which a princess is brought low that Emma might have lain in the freezing room she now shared with her sisters, dreaming of Thumbelina and a swallow who might spirit her away to somewhere warm where her rightful identity would be restored.

Despite their reduced circumstances, the McCunes remained part of the Yorkshire gentry. Maggie’s closest friends continued to invite her and the children to fancy dress balls at their Georgian estates. They and Maggie’s sister even helped with fees so that Emma could stay in public school, first at a Richmond convent, then at Godalming College in Kent. Maggie writes in her book that she hoped everything would come out all right if her children could just stay in the same schools and keep the same friends. ‘I think education is the most important gift you can give your children, don’t you?’ she told me. Emma was a hard worker, and she was good at organizing people and getting them to do what she wanted, but her strengths were not academic. Several of Emma’s friends from Yorkshire have grown up to be well-known writers, editors and artists; among this rich and clever group, Emma was considered a slow student. ‘Dippy’, ‘not very well read’, ‘not very articulate’ are some of the less charitable phrases they privately used to describe her intellect. Emma knew what they thought and resented it. Intensely competitive, she was frustrated and disappointed when her test scores were not as high as those of some of her friends.

She came off better outside school. Her set liked to show off, riding to hounds, holding extravagant parties and challenging each other as to who was the most adventurous. They all intended to live dangerously; reckless behaviour was part of what they regarded as their aristocratic sensibility. (Typical of the epic tone was a young man who rented the entire town cinema so that he and his friends could watch the 1948 movie Scott of the Antarctic over and over again. He went on to become a UN ambassador and to write several books about Arctic exploration.) This was an arena in which Emma shined. Even as a teenager, she loved hearing people gasp at her latest exploit. At an age when most people want only to fit in, she strove for glamour. Unlike her strait-laced mother, who favoured straight skirts and wore her hair neatly pulled back, Emma loved dramatic costumes with big hats and lots of jewellery. Once when she couldn’t afford to buy a gown for a grand party, she made one for herself out of black plastic bin liners. After passing through a gawky stage, she blossomed into a long-legged beauty, with pale freckled skin and a slow, seductive manner of speech. A classmate at the Convent of the Assumption school in Richmond remembers the entrance Emma made at a party when she was about sixteen. ‘Emma arrived wearing a striking black-and-white dress she’d made, and long evening gloves. The dress was long and straight. Everyone else was wearing conventional ball dresses, and no one could take their eyes off Emma. Our duckling had become a swan.’

Still, Emma knew that in clubby North Yorkshire she would always be her father’s daughter. Behind the admiring glances lay pity. The condescension stung. North Yorkshire is a place with long memories. The sound one most often hears in its pubs and mansions and brick Georgian hotels is the deep ticking of grandfather clocks. Emma’s school friends all remember hearing the gossip about Maggie and Julian. More than twenty years later I had no trouble finding neighbours who recalled every detail of Julian’s disgrace. ‘Their father’s downfall was quite a scandal,’ said one of Emma’s friends. ‘It must have been very painful for them to have stayed there.’ None of the McCunes stayed in Yorkshire any longer than they had to. Maggie herself moved to London as soon as her youngest child went off to boarding school.

When I first met Maggie in 1997, I asked how she thought her husband’s suicide had affected Emma. She paused. We were having lunch at a restaurant near St Paul’s Cathedral, where Maggie then worked as a secretary to the registrar. I was interviewing her for a magazine article about Emma. Maggie comes across in person as rather shy and reticent; several times in her book, she mentions moving through her life as if it were ‘a strange dream’. That day she was particularly reserved. She had already warned me that she did not want to talk about Julian. ‘I think it made her less materialistic,’ she said finally of his death, and she made it clear that the subject was closed. Some of Emma’s friends think Julian’s suicide might have helped create a split in Emma’s psyche between the sensuality and freedom she linked with her father and abroad, and the discipline and frugality she associated with her mother and England. Though as an adult Emma seldom talked about her father, she knew that in Yorkshire she would always be the girl whose father started out as an empire-builder and died living like a tramp in a crofter’s cottage. ‘She had a lot to hide, and she hid it well,’ said one childhood friend. ‘She knew everyone would always know, but no one would ever say anything.’ Whatever the reason, by the time Emma was offered a place to study art and art history at Oxford Polytechnic in 1982, Africa already beckoned to her.

Chapter Three

FOR THOSE who care to look, Africa is all over Oxford. It’s in the glass boxes at the Pitt-Rivers Museum, the iron-ribbed museum of a museum that the Victorians built to display the shrunken heads and feathered curiosities of the peoples they were about to introduce to Progress. It’s in the odour of borax at Queen Elizabeth House, an institution where some of Britain’s last colonial training courses were held before it was reinvented as a centre for development studies. It’s in the quiet stucco Quaker meeting-house in St Giles where some of the earliest anti-slavery meetings were held. It’s at the ugly cinder-block headquarters of Oxfam, the anti-famine group founded by Oxford pacifists during the Allied blockade of occupied Greece that has become Britain’s wealthiest international charity. Oxford has updated the ethic of service to the colonies that it preached a century ago when Rudyard Kipling wrote of ‘the white man’s burden’. Nonetheless, dozens of its university graduates still set off for Africa each year with what might be described as a modern version of that urge, an ambition to ‘develop’ Africa that arouses much the same pleasurable hopes and feelings as did earlier pledges to serve Kipling’s ‘lesser breeds without the law’.

Emma first found Africa at Oxford among her fellow students at the polytechnic. A red-brick institution in the suburb of Headington, Oxford Polytechnic then had a reputation as a haven for well-bred students who couldn’t get into more prestigious universities, let alone Oxford University itself. She was seventeen and in her first year when she met Sally Dudmesh, a sweet-faced blonde anthropology student standing beside a university notice board. Sally holds a British passport, but she was raised in Africa and considers herself a white African. She now designs jewellery in Kenya, though when I first spoke to her in 1997 she was spending the summer in England, as she does every year. She said she and Emma felt an instant attraction, particularly when Emma learned of Sally’s connection to Africa. ‘I felt like I was meeting my own sister,’ Sally remembered. ‘At that time she was very arty. She always dressed exotically. She had this sort of very wonderful calmness. She just glided into a room.’ Emma wore a long purple velvet coat. She was pale, with a husky whisper of a voice and a smile full of sparkle and mischief. ‘She made fun of disasters with people. She had a wicked sense of humour, a really fun, bad-girl side.’ The two girls struck up a fast friendship.

Sally lived with Willy Knocker, a white Kenyan from a well-known colonial family who was studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Through Sally and Willy, Emma was drawn into a circle of friends who shared a fascination with Africa. They liked to dress in African clothes and talk about African politics while smoking pot and listening to African music. They wanted lives with an edge. Although many of them came from colonial or diplomatic backgrounds, they all abhorred the British Empire and blamed colonialism for most of Africa’s problems. They felt their romance with Africa somehow set them apart from the restraint and tedium of middle-class English life. ‘It was just sort of a wildness - a spirit of adventure,’ said Sally, trying to explain the allure Africa had for her and Emma. ‘There’s an incredible freedom and scope to Africa that you don’t find in England. In England everything is so controlled. In Africa there’s an intrigue and a fascination and a sense that you can really expand. In England you have the feeling that you’re always having to play a certain role. You could always see that we would not end up living in England. We were not ordinary English girls.’

Sally and Willy’s house was a meeting point for other young people on their way to Africa. Emma met Alastair and Patta Scott-Villiers at a party there in the early 1980s. Patta - her given name was Henrietta, but she’d been called Patta since childhood - was studying international development with Willy in London. She and Alastair planned to move to Sudan as soon as she finished her master’s degree. Alastair and Patta were a couple of years older than Sally and Emma. Alastair was compact, sandy-haired and snub-nosed. His father had been with the Foreign Office, and he had spent part of his youth in Canada. Alastair seemed to have picked up some freewheeling North America ways in Canada. He was brash and friendly, an endlessly inquisitive chain-smoker. Patta was more reserved and watchful. She came from an aristocratic family but never mentioned her connections. She had soft brown hair and a magnolia complexion. She seldom wore make-up and liked to dress in blue jeans and T-shirts. Like many of Emma’s friends, she seemed to feel more relaxed outside England. In 1983 she and Alastair moved to Sudan. Patta went to work for the international charity CARE. Alastair, who had been dealing antiques in London, went along hoping to find some kind of work once they got there.

It was exactly the sort of adventure that appealed to Emma and Sally. Already Emma was restless living in Britain. She had visited Europe several times on holiday. In 1985 she took off the better part of a year to fly in a Robin Aiglon single-engine plane to Australia with a young man named Bill Hall. Hall was the son of a distinguished Oxford professor. He had already finished university and gone to work for his family’s engineering business when Emma and a friend rented a house from his parents in the nearby village of Littlemore. A solidly built, meticulously careful man in his twenties, he was an accomplished pilot. He had always wanted to fly his single-engine plane to Australia, where he had family. He invited Emma to come along with him. In those days without satellite navigation, it was much more risky than it is now to fly all the way across Europe, Asia and the South Pacific in such a small plane. Emma knew nothing about flying, but she threw herself into the organizational details of the trip. She made the arrangements for their stops along the way, travelling to London to apply for visas at the embassies of half a dozen countries. For instance, Emma convinced the Saudi embassy to grant them a visa, even though as an unrelated, unmarried couple she and Hall should not have been allowed to enter Saudi Arabia.

Emma talked her lecturers into letting her use the aerial photographs she planned to take as coursework for her art degree. The Oxford Times covered the pair’s departure. ‘We will fly through extremely varied landscape, including jungle, desert and ocean,’ Emma proudly told the reporter from the paper. She persuaded newspapers in Australia and India to write articles about their 30,000-mile flight. One of them took a marvellous picture of her and Hall in the cockpit. Hall is looking up from a map, while Emma simply looks ravishing in pearls and a colourful print dress.