Adrian Levy - The Meadow - Kashmir 1995 – Where the Terror Began

In June 1995, Paul Wells, a twenty-four-year-old photography student from Blackburn, Lancashire, was also packing. He had planned a life-changing trip to the Indian subcontinent, but he didn’t want to be alone. He had spent much of the spring trying to persuade his reluctant girlfriend, Catherine Moseley, to come with him.

Paul had just inherited a Nikon camera and a small cash legacy from his grandfather, and he intended to use them to put together a photographic project that he hoped would launch his career as a photojournalist. For several months he had been searching around for the right location, and after seeing Desert in the Sky , a TV documentary about the Buddhist kingdom of Ladakh, the same place Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had visited in 1991, he knew it was where he would go. He had loved the film so much that his mother, Dianne, had recorded it, and still has the video today. ‘He was fascinated by the eagles turning on the thermals,’ said Dianne, who remembered Paul sitting in the family home in Blackburn, watching the film over and over again. ‘It was another world to me, but the isolated mountain region appealed to Paul, who’d developed a fascination with spirituality and reincarnation.’ Bob, Paul’s father, said: ‘Once he’d seen that bloody film, he was determined. He was off buying maps and guidebooks.’ He also spent £800 on photographic equipment. ‘After he latched on to something, there was no stopping him. That was our Paul.’

Paul wanted Cath, as he called his girlfriend, to go with him, but she was not grabbed by the idea. She was busy, she told him, committed to her demanding social-work job. Then there was the expense. ‘He told her he would cover all the costs out of his legacy,’ said Bob. ‘Paul saw it as one “last big holiday” before they moved apart. He hoped to be able to spend some time together before Cath went off to study in another part of the country, and he just nagged at her until she gave in.’ By the middle of May 1995, the trip was on. ‘In the end, she did a trade,’ remembered Dianne. ‘She’d come, as long as they went to the forts and palaces of Rajasthan, in western India, after he’d got the Kashmiri mountains out of his system.’

Paul had always loved exploring. ‘Walking, climbing up things, hanging off things,’ was how Bob put it. ‘Walking is in our family’s blood. Paul just stuck at it, and always went further than the rest of us.’ When Paul was growing up, the family moved around regularly, following Bob’s work at Debenhams department store, where he managed the gents’ suit department. Dapper Bob, originally from the West Country, had taken the family to Scotland, and then to England’s north-west. For Dianne, originally from Ealing in west London, it was an unsettling existence. ‘To be honest, wherever I was, was too far away from family and friends,’ she says. When they finally set up home in a modern cul-de-sac on the Pinewood estate in Feniscowles, a suburb of Blackburn, she had been delighted. They would not move again, Bob promised.

Paul enrolled at Feniscowles Junior School. Of the three Wells children, he was always the reckless one. ‘He spent more time outside the head teacher’s office than in the class,’ recalled Bob. ‘There was no telling Paul. If he had any idea in his head he just went for it.’ But soon after moving to Blackburn, Paul formed a steadying bond with Dianne’s father, Grandpa Seymour. With the Lake District on their doorstep, Seymour introduced Paul to hill walking, climbing and orienteering. Soon the young boy and his grandfather were off most weekends, walking a section of the Pennine Way, or climbing Low Fell or Helvellyn.

By the time Paul was a teenager, he was struggling academically at Darwen Vale High School. But he could happily guide a party up Scafell Pike, and family photos show him standing tall in an Aertex shirt against the hills, walking socks wrinkled around his bony ankles, his face sun-bronzed, his hair wind-ruffled. He dreamed of following in the footsteps of Chris Bonington, Britain’s most famous mountaineer. A former army instructor, Bonington had led a life that Paul wanted to emulate. While Dianne thought he was studying upstairs in his bedroom, his head was with Bonington, on Everest and K2. ‘The walls of his room were covered in pictures of the Himalayas,’ says Dianne. ‘He had all Chris Bonington’s books, and would read them obsessively.’

Paul’s parents knew he wouldn’t get the grades to go to university. He didn’t care. After leaving school he followed in Bonington’s footsteps, seeking out an outward-bound training course sponsored by the armed forces. But, reckless as ever, he abandoned it in favour of a last-minute climbing holiday in Spain. For two weeks he trekked alone through the El Chorro gorge in Andalusia, coming back with a new idea. ‘That time alone gave him pause for thought,’ says Bob. Grandpa Seymour always carried a camera, and Paul loved tinkering around in his darkroom. In the autumn of 1994 Paul signed on for a Diploma in Photography at South Nottingham College, finally moving out of home at the age of twenty-three. ‘“Paul Wells, the photojournalist” – he liked the sound of that,’ said Bob. ‘He was always backing the underdog, getting into the wild. It was the perfect career for him, and he chanced on the idea all by himself.’

It was in Nottingham that Paul hooked up with Catherine Moseley, an art graduate from Norwich whom he met at a gig in Rock City, a venue whose manager liked to call it ‘an oasis of alternative culture in a desert of Gaz-and-Shazness’. Cath was a willowy blonde social worker at Base 51, a drop-in centre for troubled Nottingham teens, and her romance with Paul was intense. Paul was not afraid to speak his mind. He was only ever going to be himself. Two years older than him, Cath was quieter, having grown up in middle-class Norfolk. Paul was smitten, and as far as his parents could see, Cath too was committed to their having a real life together.

When Grandpa Seymour died unexpectedly just before Christmas 1994, Paul was ‘crushed’, according to his father. But after the funeral Paul picked himself up and went back to college in Nottingham, taking his younger brother Stuart along as a flatmate. With the money his grandfather left him, he could afford his first real taste of foreign adventure. All he talked about that spring was the Ladakh plan. And he had kept going on at Cath: ‘Please come away with me to India. It will change our lives forever.’

Even though she had finally said yes, Cath was still nervous as summer approached. She called tour agencies in Nottingham, and went so far as to contact the Foreign Office for its latest advice on travelling to India. Ladakh was part of the troubled Jammu and Kashmir state, she was told, but this eastern sector had been untouched by the conflict that rumbled on further west.

The cheapest way for Paul and Cath to travel from New Delhi to Ladakh was to take a bus to Srinagar, a grinding thirty-hour trip, before getting a connection along the Kargil road to Leh and finally to Ladakh, another two days’ journey. Like Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings, they were told that the riskiest part of the trip was the time they would have to spend in Srinagar. If they wanted to avoid travelling through the Kashmir Valley there was a more circuitous route via Himachal Pradesh, to Kashmir’s south. Or they could fly. Since the last option was too pricey, and no one in the UK appeared to know much about the first two, they decided to make their decision in New Delhi.

Towards the end of the summer term, Cath booked the flights and a hotel in New Delhi. ‘She got their jabs sorted, too,’ says Bob. ‘Paul even went to the dentist and got his fillings fixed.’ As they waved Paul and Cath off from Manchester Airport on 15 June, Paul’s parents felt a pang of fear. Dianne wondered when she would see him again. ‘Don’t worry,’ Bob reassured her, putting an arm around her shoulder. He was pleased that his son was at last sorting himself out. ‘Paul can look after himself. He’s a strong lad.’ For Dianne, the only saving grace was that Cath was going with him.