ANOTHER VOICE

Whatever they say, revenge is not a valiant emotion

AUBERON WAUGH

Ever since reading her father's hook (The Animals are Innocent: The search for Julie's killers by John Ward, Headline 1991) last year, I have had a slightly unhealthy interest in the case of Julie Ward, called Muff, who was murdered in Kenya's Masai Mara game reserve in September 1988. The latest development is that two rangers, arrested apparently on Scotland Yard's suggestion, have been found not guilty; the father has vowed to pursue his inquiries; and the Kenyan judge more or less accused three other men of the crime.

It is a strange story, which casts as much light on our own society as it does on the slowly disintegrating standards of post- colonial Africa. Julie Ward, a thin, pretty, affectionate young woman of exceptionally unrebellious nature, still living with her parents at the age of 28, left the job she had held for eight years as personal assistant to the managing director of a photo-typeset- ting firm in Bury St Edmunds to travel overland for a year — France, Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Mali, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Central African Republic, Zaire, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya — in a party of 26 young people under a group leader who was reasonably enough called Dave Tree. Once arrived in Kenya, she decided to stay on, hoping to make some sort of living by selling African curios — wire bracelets and more or less hopeless animal carvings — to the tourists.

Her great love was for animals, especially elephants, which she hoped to photograph from various angles. She was the daughter of a self-made, reasonably prosperous hote- lier, and in all these respects, including her slightly distressing thinness, a recognisable and entirely amiable representative of the new British middle class. Or so she appears from the book, whose author goes to con- siderable lengths to establish the idea of normality in describing her home environ- ment:

Leaving Julie and her collection of teddy bears to ponder ... I headed for the kitchen for coffee and the Sunday Times . . .

Finally, hugging her dressing-gown around her, a sleepy, yawning Julie would appear. Muff, as she was fondly known in our family, was definitely not a 'morning' person. Two cups of sweet tea was [sic] a minimum requirement before she was ready to face the day ... Apart from her love of animals and dogs in particular, Muffs hobby was photog- raphy ... With her love of wildlife coupled with the creative joy of photography, the magnet of Africa must have been irresistible.

One gets the message. All the neighbours love the kids, most of them are great char- acters. This is modern Britain in its Sunday Times Colour Supplement suiting. Normal- ly, I have observed, readers are alienated — even made suspicious and resentful — by attempts to establish any idea of social normality. We are all different, all families think of themselves as richly eccentric. But John Ward's idea of normality was bizarre enough to excite no animosity at all, and I read his book with some concern because at the time I was reading it, in 1991, I had a young daughter who had chosen to spend seven months teaching in a small town in the north of Kenya where there were only three other white people.

What is known about Julie Ward's fate is soon told. On 3 September 1988 she met Steve Watson, an amiable young man from the West of England, in the game reserve and enjoyed a brief fling with him before his departure on 5 September. On 6 September she set off for Nairobi, alone, in a car which broke down. It is thought that she was abducted on that day and mur- dered on 12 September.

Time and again Ward reconstructs the crime in his mind.

In the end, however, her attempts to distract them failed. I am sure that, one terrible night, Muff was raped. I pray it was only once, but reluctantly my mind cannot avoid thc worst scenario. Once the act was commit- ted, she was doomed.

'Who could have done this awful thing to such a lovely, gentle person?' he asks him- self at one point. 'God, if I could just get at him ... it was the start of a cold, deter- mined hatred that remains with me, even now.'

Ward's motives in his quest, which has cost him over £350,000, would appear to be the socially approved purpose of retributive justice, but I prefer to think they are more complicated.

On top of incompetence and deliberate obstruction by the Kenyan authorities, identification was delayed by the fact that her English dentist had falsified the records

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to make it seem that he had given her more treatments than he had. Then, of course, Scotland Yard turned up, and unfailingly pointed the finger at the wrong culprits ...

The reason for my fascination with this sad case is not primarily to be found in a suspicion that Britain may be going the way of Kenya as new, uneducated, indifferent, incurious generations take command. It is more particularly the principle of retribu- tion, in which so many of my fellow coun- trymen seem to take such delight. I know perfectly well that if my daughter had been raped and murdered I should, equally, have been overwhelmed by grief, but I would not have had the faintest curiosity about the details of the crime, or who committed it, nor, unless the murderers chose to identify themselves, the faintest interest in punish- ing them. I know that I would shut up about it and sit like Patience on a monu- ment.

I am not claiming that my position is morally superior, or more dignified or more upper-class than John Ward's, but our responses are so different that I cannot help wondering whether his motives are really as he describes them. I find it hard to believe that a strong desire for revenge can really exist in an abstract sense, against per- son or persons unknown, although every leading article in the tabloid press and half of what passes for political debate in this country may assure us to the contrary. At times, in his narrative, John Ward struck me as a person of genuine dignity, entirelY inspired by love for his lost daughter. At other times, he explains his motives in terms of a burning desire to find out exactly what happened to her, but I am even less convinced by that explanation than by the retributive one. Can it be, I wonder, that he has allowed himself to be brainwashed into supposing that his motive over these last four years has been revenge, when in fact It has been no more than a desperate desire to keep the memory of his daughter alive?

Can this same explanation be extended to the endless snarls for heavier punish- ment after every road accident, the claims for compensation lodged by uncles and aunties of the Hillsborough victims? I would love to think so, that we are not real- ly such a nation of punishment freaks or mercenary opportunists as the tabloid press would have us believe. Perhaps now, after four years, Mr Ward can retire and lick his wounds.