My Name Is Why

by Lemn Sissay

  Also by Lemn Sissay

  Poetry

  Perceptions of the Pen

  Tender Fingers in a Clenched Fist

  The Fire People (ed.)

  Morning Breaks in the Elevator

  Rebel Without Applause

  The Emperor’s Watchmaker

  Listener

  Gold from the Stone

  Drama

  Skeletons in the Cupboard

  Don’t Look Down

  Chaos by Design

  Storm

  Something Dark

  Why I Don’t Hate White People

  Refugee Boy

  First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019

  by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West

  and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Lemn Sissay, 2019

  The right of Lemn Sissay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Excerpt from ‘Ride Natty Ride’, written by Bob Marley.

  Published by Fifty Six Hope Road Music Ltd/Primary Wave/

  Blue Mountain.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 234 8

  eISBN 978 1 78689 235 5

  For

  Yemarshet, Tsahaiwork, Teguest, Mehatem,

  Giday, Abiyu, Mimi, Wuleta,

  Catherine, David, Christopher, Sarah and Helen

  The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why

  —Anon., attributed to Mark Twain

  I am the bull in the china shop

  With all my strength and will

  As a storm smashed the teacups

  I stood still

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Woodfields

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Gregory Avenue

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Oaklands

  Chapter 27

  Wood End

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  PREFACE

  At fourteen I tattooed the initials of what I thought was my name into my hand. The tattoo is still there but it wasn’t my name. It’s a reminder that I’ve been somewhere I should never have been. I was not who I thought I was. The Authority knew it but I didn’t.

  The Authority had been writing reports about me from the day I was born. My first footsteps were followed by the click clack clack of a typewriter: ‘The boy is walking.’ My first words were recorded, click clack clack: ‘The boy has learned to talk.’ Fingers were poised above a typewriter waiting for whatever happened next: ‘The boy is adapting.’

  Paper zipped from typewriters and into files. The files slipped into folders under the ‘S’ section of a tall metal filing cabinet. For eighteen years this process repeated over and over again. Click clack clack. Secret meetings were held. The folders were taken out and placed on tables surrounded by men and women from The Authority. Decisions were made: Put him here, move him there. Shall we try drugs? Try this, try that. After eighteen years of experimentation The Authority threw me out. It locked the doors securely behind me and hid the files in a data company called The Iron Mountain.

  So I wrote to The Authority and hand-delivered the letter. The reply informed me I had to write to Customer Services. I wrote to Customer Services. Customer Services replied to say they were not permitted to release the files. The Authority placed me with incapable foster parents. It imprisoned me. It moved me from institution to institution. And yet now, at eighteen years old, I had no history, no witnesses, no family.

  In 2015, following a thirty-year campaign to get my records, the Chief Executive of Wigan Council, Donna Hall, wrote me a letter. She had them. Within a few months I received four thick folders of documents marked ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’. Click clack clack. On reading them, I knew.

  I took The Authority to court.

  How does a government steal a child and then imprison him? How does it keep it a secret? This story is how. It is for my brothers and sisters on my mother’s side and my father’s side. This is for my mother and father and my aunts and uncles and for Ethiopians.

  CHAPTER 1

  Awake among the lost and found

  The files left on the open floor

  The frozen leaves on frosted ground

  The frosted keys in a frozen door

  Eighteen years of records written by strangers. All the answers to all my questions were here. Possibly. And yet, I feared what they’d reveal about me or what they’d reveal about the people who were entrusted with my care. What truths or untruths? Maybe I was loved. Maybe my mother didn’t want me. Maybe it was all my fault. Maybe the bath taps in the bathroom were not electrified. Maybe that was false memory syndrome.

  A friend burned her files when she received them from The Authority. Another can’t look at hers to this day. I’ll start by simply recording my reactions to the first early documents and we’ll see how this unfolds.

  St Margaret’s House was an institution for unmarried mothers ‘affiliated to the Liverpool Board of Moral Welfare’. On 30 June 1967, State Registered Nurse L. Winnard wrote that ‘Lemion Sissey’ (misspelt) was ‘free from infectious disease’. In a second note on the same day she recorded that the six-week-old baby – now ‘Lemn Sissey’? – weighed nine pounds.

  In the letter below I’m six months old. At this point my mother is invisible.

  And then there was this:

  On the back of the photo it says:

  So my name has changed to Norman Sissay; I am supposed to be part Greek. An adoption agency asks whether ‘Ethiopian means he is negroid or not’. This is the first time I have seen myself referred to as ‘Norman Sissay’.

  When the letter from which this extract is taken was written, I was almost eight months old. In England unmarried pregnant women or girls were placed in Mother and Baby homes like St Margaret’s with the sole aim of harvesting their children, then the women were shipped back home to say they had been away on a little break. A little break. They were barely adults themselves. Many of them didn’t understand the full implication of the word ‘adoption’. They were sent home without their newborns after signing the adoption papers. They must have been bewildered and in shock at the loss of their first child. I found testaments online from people who lived near to St Margaret’s.

  It was very eerie in certain parts it really felt haunted.

  I can remember being in the Billinge Maternity unit when one of the young girls from St Margaret’s had her baby. The only visitor was a lady social worker and on the day mum and baby were due to leave, mum was taken away in one car (crying) and baby hurried away in another!

&nb
sp; My mother would not sign the adoption papers for Norman Goldthorpe. So Norman Goldthorpe defied her and assigned me to ‘long-term foster parents’ Catherine and David Greenwood.

  I was 228 days old at the time. I must have been with them from at least 150 days old. My foster parents told me some years later that I was alone in the hospital because no one would adopt a ‘coloured’ baby. They said they chose me after praying to God and that my mother didn’t want me.

  Mr Goldthorpe was adamant that my name would be Norman. Norman means ‘Man of the North’. The foster parents wanted to call me Mark from The Gospel of Mark, and their last name was Greenwood. My name was Norman Mark Greenwood. The Authority wouldn’t officially acknowledge the name my foster parents called me. I am Norman Sissay in the files. The foster parents wouldn’t acknowledge the name The Authority gave me. I was Norman Mark Greenwood and I knew no different. It was a land grab. But without my mother’s signature on the adoption papers The Authority could not adopt me.

  My mother must have been at her most vulnerable. She was pregnant and alone in a foreign country where she had come to study for a short period of time. Her college in the South of England sent her to the North of England to St Margaret’s to deal with her pregnancy.

  These places were baby farms. The mothers were the earth and the children were the crops. The church and state were the farmers and the adopting parents were the consumers. My mother was supposed to give birth and sign the adoption papers. She didn’t. She wouldn’t.

  Testimony has come to light in national campaigns for unmarried mothers in England that in the 1960s coercion and subterfuge were used to get vulnerable women to sign the adoption papers. This is exemplified in the 2013 film Philomena.

  My mother understood what adoption meant and would not sign. Her father – my grandfather – was dying in Ethiopia. She had little choice but to return to Ethiopia without me. With my name changed and the foster parents’ identity hidden there was little chance she could find me if she wanted to.

  I was three and a half years old when The Authority served a Notice on my mother via her church in Ethiopia to say that ‘all the rights and powers of the parent of Lemn Sissay be vested in the local authority it appearing to this Authority that the parent has abandoned this child’. The document further states that: ‘If not later than one month after the service of this notice, you shall serve a notice in writing on the Council objecting to the resolution, the resolution shall lapse on the expiration of fourteen days from the service of the notice of objection . . .’

  She was given one month to object to the notice. Then she would have fourteen days to take The Authority to court, where she would have to prove to the court that she was a fit mother. The notice would have taken approximately a month to arrive in Ethiopia and another month for the letter to return. There were no direct flights from Addis Ababa to London. My mother would have had to fly from Addis Ababa to Athens and then from Athens to London. It was an impossible deadline. It was a set-up.

  The Authority depends on the sleeping prejudice of assumptions because for this notice to have any premise we must assume that the mother didn’t want the child or that she was unfit to keep the child.

  My story begins without her or any knowledge of her.

  CHAPTER 2

  I will build an embassy

  In your heart over time

  There is a plot of land inside me

  Build one in mine

  The Greenwoods and I lived at Number 2, Osborne Road, where the swallows came each summer to nest in the eaves. It was a semi-detached house fronted by sandstone with a sheer, solid, red-brick gable-end wall flush to a cobbled street on the left. The garden at the front just about coped with a giant laburnum tree lunging from the bottom left corner. Google Dictionary tells me the laburnum is ‘a small European tree which has hanging clusters of yellow flowers followed by slender pods containing poisonous seeds. The hard timber is sometimes used as an ebony substitute.’

  We had roses round the perimeter and a pathway on the right side. There was symmetry between our house and next door’s. Both had giant bay windows downstairs and up. Parallel to the cobbled street were the backs of houses facing Wigan Road where the big park was. At the front, beyond the laburnum tree, across Osborne Road, was the Flower Park.

  There was a chemist and two doctors in Market Street, a baker’s and a butcher’s where we went on Saturdays, two junior schools, a grammar school and a comprehensive and the shoe shop where my mum worked her first job before she became a nurse. It was a small town sown with housing developments from different eras. They were separated by parks. There was no river. All the water was in the baptismal pool beneath the floorboards in front of the pulpit in the Baptist Church.

  We attended Bryn Baptist on Wednesdays and Sundays. We wrapped ourselves in hymns and were lost amongst the flock. It’s where our friends and family were. And we prayed. We prayed at breakfast. We prayed at lunch. We prayed at dinner. We prayed before sleep and in the mornings. There was good and bad in the world. There was God and the Devil around us. There was darkness and light, daytime and night, black and white.

  On the surface Ashton-in-Makerfield was a plain-speaking Lancashire town. Even the street names were plain-speaking: Liverpool Road led to Liverpool, Wigan Road to Wigan, Bryn Road to Bryn. Market Street is where the market was. And the road to hell went to hell. And racing through the fields, hidden from view, was the fast, furious East Lancs Road linking Manchester to Liverpool.

  Ashton was adventureland – shop doors rang when they opened, milkmen whistled from milk floats, old men tipped their flat caps, a horse and cart drove through the mist early on Saturday morning. It was the rag and bone man shouting ‘Rag and Bone’ in three notes like church bells.

  Christopher, the Greenwoods’ first-born child, my little brother, came along in July 1968. We were opposites. He was blue-eyed, albinoish timidity and I was a brown-eyed, Afro-haired potty-on-my-head kind of child. Sarah was born two years after Christopher and eight years later came Helen.

  Only fourteen months apart in age, Christopher and I fought like brothers – cats and dogs had nothing on us. I adored him.

  When it came to the colour of my skin my parents referred to me as chocolate. It would have been impossible to ignore the dark-skinned heroes in 1970. Muhammad Ali was at his most famous that year. No one told me I was the same colour as him. No one told me I was the same colour as Martin Luther King. In my parents’ eyes, though, there were no black heroes. In their world, Africa was full of poor people waiting to be saved.

  Racist comments from the outer world became more frequent. Mum and Dad’s response was to tell me to ignore it or to say back, ‘We are colour blind,’ or ‘We are all human beings. We are all God’s Children,’ or else: ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me.’ But names weren’t the problem. The underlying unkindness was the problem. We don’t fear the snakebite. We fear the venom. It has been formulated inside the snake from the moment it was born. It was the underlying unkindness of other children that bothered me because it came from their parents.

  My mum fostered a child as her mother did before her; only my mum fostered a ‘coloured’ baby in 1967, in a time of racial intolerance in England. Some smiled and stopped to look at me in my pram and others spat on the back of her coat as she walked by. Years later they would do the same to me. So whatever this racism was, it would be the shadow to the light of my parents’ love.

  CHAPTER 3

  Meet me by the morning

  On the corner of night

  Where the mist rises

  Where love might

  Every street has its weird family. Often they are not weird at all, just bohemian, childless, pious, snobby, too well educated, super-stylish. They’re just different. You never think it’s your family, though. No one does. Our family loved God and God loved us. We feared God. We lived in love and in fear of God. It was a lot for me to take on board, especially as I a
lso loved Jubblys, Curly Wurlys, R. White’s Lemonade, a quarter of Bon Bons, Sherbet Dip Dabs, Milky Bars. And I didn’t fear any of them.

  I was a happy child, always listening to adults, to what was being said, trying to pick up the root of the conversation. I was inquisitive and unafraid. Another way of looking at it might be that I was so afraid of missing something that I had to know everything that was going on around me.

  Granddad Munro made wooden chests for each of us. One for Norman. One for Christopher. One for Sarah. Outside we ran free. The Flower Park, the Big Park and the copse near the school – these were my adventure playgrounds. I was a regular candidate for the early-bed brigade and spent much of my time mooning at my friends from the bedroom window.

  Mum called me in one day, but for once I wasn’t in trouble. Mum and Dad were in the kitchen. ‘Get upstairs!’ she shouted at me. But I didn’t go upstairs – not all the way. I stopped to listen as she continued with the same tone to my dad.

  ‘Just go out and do it. Now! Before the whole town sees it,’ she said, banging cutlery, rearranging chairs, slamming cupboards.

  Mum was a nurse. I wondered whether she was like this in the hospital when she delivered the babies. ‘Just go, now! Here, take this, and you’ll need a bucket too, won’t you?’ The sarcastic tone hung in the air.

  As Dad walked out the front with a mop and a bucket, I followed. On the red-brick gable-end wall of our semi-detached, someone had scrawled in giant letters: ‘BASTILLE’.

  ‘Dad, what’s Bastille?’

  Unusually for him, he didn’t explain, but carried on sponging the wall and said, ‘Look it up.’ So I headed back in for the encyclopaedia.

  ‘Bastille was a fortress in Paris. For most of its history it was used as a State Prison . . .’ The rest of the day we spent on tenterhooks. It had got to Mum. And Dad too. He just shut himself up in the front room for hours. I didn’t think it had anything to do with me.