by Lemn Sissay
Of that particular season in Blackpool he has since said via Wikipedia, ‘the summer season was the first time I felt that my act had received a proper response from an audience’.
Same for me. And I loved it.
CHAPTER 17
We are wildfire
Wild as the wind
Wild as the dawn
Wild within
Cigarettes were important in Woodfields. I learned fast. If someone goes for a smoke the first person to shout ‘save us’ gets the last few drags. I was at the most potent stage of a life-shortening lifelong addiction but the staff didn’t care enough to tell us not to smoke. They provided us with a smoking area outside. I was twelve. If the adults don’t care that a twelve-year-old boy is smoking, why should he care? In the same way, if the adults don’t care to hug a child, why should he feel huggable?. What are the repercussions for a child who isn’t hugged? I was becoming untouchable. We all were. The law of the untouched was unspoken.
No wonder some young people harmed others. Danny had it in for me from the beginning but he was biding his time. I worked out how to insult. Pretend you can’t see them. Freeze them out. It was a powerful weapon for me because everyone liked Chalky. So I used it on Danny. I cut him out. I talked through him or around him as if he wasn’t there. No one could cause me more pain than I felt inside. I was unafraid. Unafraid of bullies. Unafraid of being hurt.
Like all attacks it happened both superhumanly fast and eerily slow. In the bedroom Danny ripped the front of a cabinet from its dovetail joints. I knew it was for me. I put out my arm as he hit me with it, hard and fast in blunt, ugly disorientating whacks. No one tried to stop him. Between each smash I asked, ‘Are you done yet?’ I went silent. Only his grunts preceded each smash. He carried on until he was tired.
The next day Danny told me I reminded him of his brother and his brother wound him up. We shook hands and it was forgotten between us. He was hurt by the reminder of who he loved, and the love he missed. Hurt people hurt people.
In plain English this was his way of saying I am the cock of this place. ‘The Cock’ meant the hardest, the strongest. But we both knew that fists were not what we needed to survive here. We were already beaten.
Days later I saw Danny pinned to the floor with his arm twisted behind his shoulder. One of the supervisors had his knee on Danny’s lower back. Who knows why? I could hear him whimpering, pain shooting through his shoulder as the supervisor pushed his wrist further up saying, ‘You like that, d’ya? You want some more of that, d’ya? You want to take me on, d’ya’? Danny was making strangled panicked breathing sounds. He couldn’t speak. He looked at me and closed his eyes. This place was wrong.
Children were moved haphazardly from home to home as objects of low emotional currency. Damaged goods. It was nothing personal. You had to have your wits about you to hold on to anything. Money, lighters, socks, bracelets, biros, cigarettes, all of it needed secure hiding places: under floorboards, holes in brickwork under a windowsill. The frequent changing of such hidey-holes kept us all busy.
By now I was famous at my school and in my area. I was Chalky White. Up for a laugh. But it was all shielding an onslaught of daily racism. Not a day passed without ‘nigger’ or ‘coon’ or ‘wog’ or ‘black bastard’ firing from someone’s lips into my face. I had to be alert to punches and kicks from strangers or phlegm flying across the classroom or pavement. I was permanently in fight-or-flight mode. My main weapon was my smile, my guile and my ability to run.
But I loved the daily walk from Orchard Lane to Leigh C. of E. High School with our gang from Woodfields, down potholed Mill Lane, passing the nodding horses in the low mist of Marshes Farm. I was Chalky White from the moment I arrived. Libbey was in the year above. I loved school because I could smell family on the other young people. I could sense their mums and dads by their packed lunches, their new football kits and even by the way they talked.
I was in Woodfields for a year but it felt like ten. Shaking hands on my ‘green’ arrival, becoming Chalky White, skating on Lucky Hollow in winter could all have been idyllic. Mr Marsh from Marshes Farm off Old Hall Lane employed us boys. We baled hay throughout the summer holidays and stacked the hay in his barn. I acclimatised to the disappearance of my family and to the fact that any one of us in Woodfields could disappear at any minute. Regardless, I held on to the idea that my foster parents would come for me one day. But in truth I was letting the idea go. The last hug I’d had from an adult was the stuttered one on the doorstep of their house. I had been in the children’s home for 360 days. I was a world away.
CHAPTER 18
When the war of night’s over
Said the wave to the bay
Let’s be each other’s selfie
And save the day
I wrote a poem in the dormitory on my first day at Woodfields. It was about a tree. In writing about the tree I wrote about myself. Now I can see that. I couldn’t then. That is creation. In finishing a poem I felt the same sense of being that I had in church. It was a discovery, a freedom. This is who you are. I knew there and then that I wanted to be a poet. I had written poetry in earlier childhood but this was me and me alone, channelling something bigger than me that proved I wasn’t alone. The proof was there on the paper. The evidence. I was alive.
In the children’s homes the written word was rare. Letters were rare. There were no books and consequently no encouragement to read. The staff were rarely seen with a book. They were too busy adjusting rotas and shifts. There was no question of university. The suggestion of university was for more deserving people. The children’s home may well have been housing us but it wasn’t caring for us. The children’s home needed to work with efficiency, not love. The act of writing would follow me wherever I went. No one could take it away from me.
At Leigh C. of E., my high school, I was summoned to the office of the deputy headteacher. Never a good sign. She had heard about my writing from my English teacher, Mr Unsworth. There were two lights outside the deputy head’s office. Red for stay, green for enter. The red flickered out and after a pause the green blinked on. Mrs Jones had the teeth of Ken Dodd and wore jackets and trousers. ‘Sit down,’ she said. I sat, sharpish. In those days, teachers smoked in their rooms and she stubbed her fag out in her ashtray and walked round the desk (the desk top was barely lower than her forehead). ‘I want you to have this,’ she said, and she held out a book.
It was The Mersey Sound, published in 1967, the year I was born. It was battered and well-thumbed, the greatest compliment to a paperback. In the first poem on the first page by the poet Adrian Henri it mentions an orphanage. All I knew about being a poet is that a poet wrote poetry. It’s all I ever wanted to be. I was fourteen. This was a flag in the mountainside, a base camp.
But there were more pressing reasons to write. One boy from Leigh C. of E., who lived in a house further up Orchard Lane, asked, ‘So where do you live then, Chalky?’ I said, ‘Woodfields, on Orchard Lane.’ He looked at me quizzically at first, as if he didn’t have a clue where it was, then said, ‘My dad says it’s a den of thieves, boy.’
It became clear to me that the adults around me had no idea what to do with me. I was surrounded by teenagers who, maybe, felt the same. The home was bedlam. I started glue sniffing with the other boys.
GREGORY AVENUE
CHAPTER 19
Not lost said the sun
At the start of the day
Just following instinct
Just finding my way
Norman Mills reassured me that I could go back to Woodfields to see Libbey and everyone and that Libbey could visit Gregory Avenue. I hated Gregory Avenue and I hated being moved. I’d lost everybody again. The adults around me had no idea what to do with me. And that scared me. I was losing respect for them. And that scared me.
There was no time to get used to the decision, no say in it, just like the last time. No time to say goodbye. January 1981. The door opened into the ‘family group home’ a
nd I felt the files closing behind me. File is an anagram of life. It was claustrophobic. The garden was tiny compared to Woodfields’, and behind it, at the top of a hill, loomed a concrete hulk of a place, with a singular chimney belching out smoke: Wood End Assessment Centre.
Wood End was one of the names we passed around between us at Woodfields. The names of children’s homes were my points of reference, part of my orientation into the system. The institutions: Wood End, Hindley Detention Centre, Redbank. Today I hear about these institutions in the newspapers under headings like ‘Wood End Abuse Probe’.
I was well and truly part of the system. This was not extended leave. My mum and dad were not coming. It dawned on me. The whole damn thing dawned on me. The Authority was just holding me in a series of houses run by disaffected adults. I was shown to my new bedroom. I still called my foster parents Mum and Dad. I had no other terms to describe them and no one to describe them to. ‘David and Catherine’ sounded weird. ‘Foster parents’ too.
Wood End was a remand centre. Libbey told me that ‘remand’ is what happens when you wait for sentencing. I wanted to tell people around me, I have no one. Most young people in care have someone, one person at least.
Brian and Val Street ran Gregory Avenue. Honestly, I despised them and I despised the name of this place – a ‘family group home’. Brian and Val lived there. The other staff lived nearby. It was homely in the way a grotto in a shopping store is Christmassy. It was false. I could see the cracks. The staff were on shifts like elves in the grotto. There was an office, like in Woodfields, from where I was passed pocket money each week, and a staff room where the staff smoked and talked about us. I was fourteen and I was confused.
I didn’t want to go to my case conference because I couldn’t see it being of any use whatsoever. The case conference was where they made decisions about me and where I sat to hear them make judgements about me. At Christmas I got a radio alarm clock. I tried it out but it didn’t work. And that broke me.
When I was tucked into bed the staff wrote their reports. They had the last word on everything. My teenage self could not deal with this at all. The report seemed only to document anything untoward. My wellbeing was defined by how many marks against my name were in that report . . . I was three years away from leaving care. I started to ask questions about my origins. Who was my mother? Why was I in care in the first place? Where was I from? Why was I here? In realising my foster parents didn’t want me I wanted to know about my birth mother. The only person who could help me was my social worker.
A fourteen-year-old boy should never have to ask the questions Who is my mother? and Who are my family? These were not easy questions to formulate in the mind or the mouth because the question comes with others . . . What did I do to deserve this?
CHAPTER 20
Born under mist last night
Dawn is a gift over dew
I read beneath its light
And turn over leaf to you
Gregory Avenue was in a village next to Leigh called Atherton. Athertonians were honest, hard-working salt-of-the-earth people, like the people of Leigh. They were increasingly unemployed mill workers and miners, tradesmen and retailers. In the early 1980s the Tory Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, set out to break the miners and the North. Thatcher waged war against the Argentines abroad, and the welfare state at home.
The mills in Hag Fold were cathedrals without congregations. And just on the edge, on the other side of Hag Fold, was Pretoria – a set of hills, the result of the second biggest mining explosion in England. In December 1910, the Pretoria Pit disaster took out 344 men and boys, a good chunk of Atherton. Women lost husbands, sons, brothers, all at once.
Pretoria now is a forest of silver birch and eerie ponds. I’d walk up there and sit atop and look across the Lancashire plain to the city of Manchester.
I spent three years in Gregory Avenue but as much time out of it as possible, like any teenager.
Gregory Avenue was on the edge of Hag Fold Housing Estate. I got to know everyone on the estate. I’d wave at a driving instructor for three years. She used our estate as her training ground. She wasn’t from the estate but I was in love. She was beautiful because she always looked out for me and waved back. It became a game.
Tony Concannon lived on Devonshire Road. He ran the boxing club in Atherton and his wife worked in the taxi firm next door to it. I’d spend evenings at their house, smoking and drinking cups of tea with them and their kids. Mrs Concannon brought films back from the video shop. And so I saw all the new films before anyone else. I took whatever affection and acceptance I could from anyone who knew me.
I spent Saturdays popping into different houses on Hag Fold Estate for cups of tea and gossip. Tony had two dogs. He took them lamping up to Pretoria at night. Lamping is how you catch rabbits. The dog sees a rabbit. Tony shines a light in the rabbit’s eyes, it stuns the rabbit, and then the dog pounces. Tony brought the rabbits home, I think, and made stew.
I’m still unhappy at Gregory Avenue and so my social worker suggests youth groups.
The estate had a comforting, familiar rhythm to it; the mills changed shifts at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m.; the mines had their shift times too. Payday was on Thursday for the miners, Fridays for the mills, when the pubs got lively and when stomachs were full. The shops shut for a half-day on Wednesdays. There was a Catholic Club for the Catholics and the working men’s club for the Protestants. Women weren’t allowed, except on Thursday nights for the whist drive. I was the boy from nowhere, from nobody, who was everybody’s somebody. Chalky White.
I had been on earth for fourteen summers. And to ask me not to ‘build my hopes up’ was heartbreaking, given that all I had was hope. I needed an answer to the question, why? Neither the social worker nor the foster parents took responsibility for what had happened to me – certainly not the blame. The most institutionalised people in the care system are the workers.
CHAPTER 21
What was taken I have used
To make myself a home
The stone the builder refused
Will be the head cornerstone
On my fifteenth birthday I visited the Greenwoods.
When my social worker showed me the information about my mother I knew there had to be more to the story. The foster parents were determined to wipe me from their family story. Something was wrong. I figured that I could return to them to find out what really happened. It didn’t go well. October 1982.
I was introduced to Bob Marley by a friend on Hag Fold called Lyndon Marsh. I was nearly fourteen when Marley died and Island Records were pushing out his music. Lyndon was a huge fan. He introduced me to marijuana at the same time.
I was spellbound by the album Survival. It flooded into my bloodstream. Robert Nesta Marley loved Ethiopia. His funeral in Jamaica was on my birthday, 21 May.
Marley shouted down the forces of oppression. In his words I heard my own story and felt a growing pride. I am a survivor, a black survivor.
Bob Marley was my first black mentor, my first black friend. He spoke of suffering, history, the truth of the world and of ‘Babylon’. He would be my guide. I dropped the name Chalky White. It was no longer a joke.
What also captivated me about Bob was his way with metaphor and how he drew from the Bible. In a deceptively complex song, ‘Ride Natty Ride’, he wails:
But the stone that the builder refuse
Shall be the head cornerstone,
And no matter what game they play,
Eh, we’ve got something they could never take away,
. . .
And it’s the fire – FIRE – it’s the fire – FIRE.
For the first time I identified myself as a black man amongst a sea of whiteness. Marley cheered me on. The more people around me denied my race by saying they were colour blind or that we are all human beings or that we are all the same the more I realised that race confused them.
By 1983 I had been in Gregory Avenue for two years and I was becom
ing what Rastafarians called ‘Conscious’. It was the consciousness Marley spoke of in ‘Natural Mystic’.
CHAPTER 22
Secrets are the stones
That sink the boat
Take them out look at them
Throw them out and float
I left school with few qualifications and started a Saturday job on Leigh Market. Mr Waddington was a market trader and salesman and he had a stall that sold household detergents and toiletries. I started in the early morning with a bacon butty and hot tea. I was good in the market. I liked the quick-fire humour and the work ethic of the markets. I was smoking marijuana heavily by now. In two years’ time I would be leaving the care system.
The Waddingtons befriended me. I and the other boys who worked for him were cheap labour, but it was labour we appreciated. I graduated from the market stall to door-to-door deliveries.
Mr Waddington drove the Transit van crammed with tubs of bleach and detergents for floors and windows, and conditioner and shampoo, and from the Transit van I saw a bit more of the world, the reality of the 1980s industrial landscape. I handled money for the first time. Peter Libbey got me the job.
We were trusted with the products, trusted to knock on the doors, trusted with the cash. We’d feast on the estates of Lancashire, Bolton, Wigan, Rochdale. To a fifteen-year-old it was great work experience. Money in my pocket. The big wide world. Mr Waddington waited at the wheel while we ran door to door back and forth with our bottles and cash.