My Name Is Why

by Lemn Sissay

  I worked in his warehouse too on a small industrial estate in Leigh. I had to stir the bleach concentrate into a giant vat, then pour it from a tap into the bottles and stack them up. Bleach was the abiding aroma of my youth. The vat was twice my height and equal in width. I sat atop it and stirred the concentrated bleach into water with a wooden stick. To test it I put my finger in and if it turned white it was ready. There was no breathing apparatus and no protective clothing. Mr Waddington was the embodiment of Margaret Thatcher’s dream, selling cheap household products to the people who hadn’t the money (any more) to buy from the shops.

  When social services found out about my work, I was immediately required to pay the children’s home some of my wages.

  ‘Norman bought a guitar for £30 on Saturday? The source of his money.’ The statement could have read: ‘He has showed initiative in saving money through his Saturday job to buy himself a guitar’ and ‘It is good to see that he has saved to buy, of all things, a musical instrument.’

  CHAPTER 23

  I am not defined by darkness

  Confided the night

  Each dawn I am reminded

  I am defined by light

  During one of the trips round Bolton selling the Waddingtons’ household detergents, on an estate called Daubhill the atmosphere changed. The streets were quiet. The doors were daubed with red swastikas. All of them. Swastikas. I tried knocking on a door, then a second. I could hear a baby inside. Footsteps, and then nothing. My guts churned. I told Mr Waddington about the swastikas and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s where Pakis live.’ We were both quiet. ‘No point knocking on those doors.’ But I felt closer to them than I did to him.

  There were riots all over England in the 1980s: Brixton, Toxteth, Bristol. The last one was in Moss Side, Manchester. The papers were full of ‘rampaging youths’. Racial tensions, unemployment and routine police harassment of black people. All my life I had been told about the bad black people of the big city: the muggers and the drug dealers. A sense of barely suppressed panic took root in me because I knew it wasn’t true. I was the people the people around me feared the most.

  Chalky became a haunting, not a name. I needed it to stop. I needed to stop it. If it was only a joke about my colour why did people get angry when I asked them to stop? Behind the veil of the race joke was hatred. There was no one to guide me on these matters. I had my instinct. I am a black man, I said to myself. I am a black man. I am not colour blind. I am a black man. I am not Chalky White. I am not a nigger, a coon, a wog. I am a black man. I changed, seemingly overnight, from the cheeky chappy, the happy-go-lucky joker, into a threat. And it hurt me. How could identifying who I am be a threat to people?

  I couldn’t unsee the shopkeeper flush red from the neck upwards at the sight of me. Or the store detectives following me in the shops. At the bus stop, I couldn’t unsee the woman clutch her handbag as I stood waiting for the bus. I couldn’t unsee that no one would sit next to me on the bus. I couldn’t unsee men glaring at me. I couldn’t unsee older men leaving the pub looking at their women looking at me. I couldn’t unsee people in cars craning their necks to stare at me, I couldn’t unsee the people from the tops of the buses pointing at me and laughing, I couldn’t unsee them hacking up phlegm and spitting at me from the bus. I couldn’t unsee the police watching me or the police cars slowing down deliberately as they passed. I couldn’t unsee the cars accelerating as I crossed the road.

  * * *

  Thatcher was taking away their jobs. She rolled hand grenades into their villages, stood back and let them explode. ‘Now,’ I’d hear, ‘we got niggers coming in.’ But I was born here. I was born amongst the mills and the mines. I was born in the villages. Overnight, I became an enemy in my own town. And I was afraid and angry. The marijuana didn’t help.

  I hated the home I was living in and the staff who were there. I hated the racism but I never lied to my social worker. I knew that smoking marijuana was wrong but I told him all the same.

  CHAPTER 24

  Whenever I look back, said night

  You’re there.

  Looking back is okay, said light

  But don’t stare.

  In August 1983 Gregory Avenue Children’s Home set out for a holiday to Poole in a minibus. Maggie Thatcher was on the radio sounding plucky. It may have been be the holidays for the likes of us, from the children’s homes of the industrial wastelands, but the Iron Lady had work to do after her election victory. She was rolling her sleeves up, sharpening her knives.

  On returning from holiday I decided not to wear shoes. Poole was hot and lots of people went barefoot on the beach and even on the streets as they made their way back to the hotels. Why put them back on? I thought to myself. Why wear shoes anyway, what’s wrong with not wearing shoes?

  Back in Atherton I stayed barefoot. Barefoot was my rebellion. I might have subconsciously got it from the 1979 film Scum, about a group of boys in a detention centre. There was a barefoot guy called Archer who did it solely to inconvenience the ‘screws’. That was good enough for me. It was my rebellion to the whole town and the whole system. If you want to stare at me I will give you something to stare at!

  My feet were like a child’s hands gripping all the different textures of the world. They were grounding me. They were tethering me to earth. My young skin cracked and split; an upturned knuckle of glass twisted into my foot and plucked the skin out like a tin opener. But I grew a harder skin: skin that could eventually walk on glass. In my files there’s no reference to my bare feet. Looking back, I can see this was a desperate plea for help. Again the marijuana didn’t help.

  In November 1983 social services started looking into my employment with Mr Waddington and investigating his financial records – he claimed to have kept no records of what he paid me. The social services made me into a liability and Mr Waddington sacked me unceremoniously. I felt deeply betrayed. I returned to the warehouse with a Stanley knife and slashed some of the bottles of bleach.

  This introduction to the police would come back to haunt me. They were aware of all the young men at the children’s homes. When a child runs away from the home the police are called, so I was aware of them and they were aware of me. I had no respect for the police at this time. They represented The Authority. They were overtly racist. Fuck the police was my general attitude and theirs was fuck you. They were out to punish me as much as possible for less than £10 of damage. A caution would mean I wouldn’t have to go to court. But they had triggered The Authority. Someone in The Authority was opening my file.

  I found another job within a week at a clothing factory in Atherton. At the tail end of the era of apprentices I became an apprentice cutter. I worked an Eastman cutter.

  The factory manager thought himself a character and spent his days nipping the bottoms of the women. The women mainly worked on the ground floor in rows of giant sewing machines like on Coronation Street. They received packages of material from a chute on the floor above. That’s where the cutters were. Three old men with tape measures round their necks and me.

  There were three long tables, each the size of a billiard table. Raised slightly above the table on a cylinder was a roll of cloth. I drew the material from the cylinder across the giant table like a bedsheet then clipped it to the end. I repeated this until the sheets of material were about an inch in depth. With chalk the shape of a shark’s tooth I drew patterns onto the material using cardboard stencils. The stencils were in the shapes of the front and back of a dress, or the front and back of a pair of trousers.

  The Eastman cutter was a vertical automatic saw, with a finely serrated blade. It slid beneath the fabric on the table.

  ‘Put it on the side of the cloth, that’s right, lad, and push this lever down so it grips the cloth. Now press the red button, hold tight, and push and cut around the shapes. That’s the way. When you’ve fully cut the cloth, pull up the block of material, tie it up with a strip in bunches. Arright? Throw them down chute.’

 
The trousers and dresses would find themselves on market stalls throughout the North West of England and eventually they would dress the families of the North West too. Out of the blue, I received a call to the police station.

  I’m not a thief and I’m not a liar. Smoking cannabis at such an early time in the development of my brain was not good. But anything that would take me away from the madness seemed reasonable. I dabbled in LSD and magic mushrooms too. Other worlds opened up inside me and I couldn’t control them. Once I hallucinated without taking the LSD; it scared me enough to make me stop.

  Many parents have children who have dabbled. Fortunately most young people find their way through it and, like me, they stop. But if a child in care does the same he is treated in a very different way.

  Christmas was close, too close. My mental health deteriorated rapidly. I started to walk via back streets. I found main roads too intense. I didn’t want to be looked at. The sewing machines at the factory were like tanks drilling into my head. The patterns on the long table became a turtle’s back. A table transformed into a giant turtle and looked at me while slowly munching the old man.

  The noise tormented me and I couldn’t do it any more. I couldn’t smile. I opened my mouth but nothing. No words. I couldn’t go back to work. I could barely walk to the shops. The world started to stutter like a faulty VHS tape. The sun started to hurt my eyes. My head was falling apart and the people in the home didn’t seem to know. They worked in four-hour shifts. They couldn’t see what any parent would have seen in their own child – a mental breakdown.

  There were five days till Christmas. Christmas was the one day in the year that I was most aware of loss. It was the one day in the year where it became obvious that I had no one. There was nowhere to hide on Christmas Day. My contempt for the adults around me was difficult to hide. One of the staff wrote a report and called my social worker, describing abusive language and aggressive behaviour, and said she wouldn’t be answerable for her actions if it happened again. It was a threat but it was also a signal that I would have to be moved. Four days till Christmas. Three days until Christmas. Two days till Christmas.

  Who were these ‘Senior Members of The Authority’? Couldn’t they see that Gregory Avenue was virtually empty? The other children had gone home to their families for Christmas. When a child in care of The Authority comes into contact with the police ‘Senior Members of The Authority’ are alerted. I was on their radar. Meanwhile, my social worker had been trying to find my mother.

  CHAPTER 25

  Above the water

  darkness greets light

  Here upon the bridge

  There upon the night

  At Christmas my social worker gave me letters copied from my files.

  The Children’s Officer says, ‘I write to inform you that Lemn is still in my care.’ And yet at that time I am recorded in the files as ‘Norman Sissay’. They lied to my mother. And then I read this:

  4 July 1968

  They lied to me. Someone did love me. My mother.

  How can I get Lemn back? He needs to be in his country, with his own colour, his own people. I don’t want him to face discrimination.

  Why would she say, ‘I don’t want him to face discrimination,’ unless she had experienced it? Why would she say, ‘How can I get Lemn back?’ if she didn’t want me? She explains that she got a telegram telling her that she had to come back to Ethiopia because of her father’s illness.

  It didn’t take long for my joy at receiving the letters to turn to anger. A shadow crawled into me. Nobody spoke of depression then. I found myself walking to the front door of Gregory Avenue and then turning back to my bedroom. The Authority in charge was the same Authority who wouldn’t give me back to her. They had everything to hide. All I knew at the time was that I felt unsafe because the staff who were looking after me had no idea about my story. Once I received my files from The Authority their subterfuge became apparent. Everyone had been lying. The Greenwoods had lied from the start.

  My birth mother did nothing wrong. She was not poor. She was not destitute. She did not abandon me. She did nothing other than find herself pregnant while in England and ask for help.

  Norman Mills gave me my birth certificate. I looked at my name, my Ethiopian name, the name my mother gave me. Lemn Sissay. I am Lemn Sissay, I said to myself.

  I didn’t know how to pronounce Lemn. I thought the ‘n’ in Lemn must have been a spelling mistake by a lazy registrar so I pronounce it ‘lem’. On my left hand are the initials NG and the nickname Chalky from when I tattooed myself in Woodfields aged fourteen. I did it with a blunt pin and Indian ink. I stabbed my hand hundreds of times and forced the ink into my skin. Bulbous, crusty scabs grew over the raw flesh. That’s how you tattoo yourself. Then the scabs fall and, hey presto, there’s the tattoo. After a few days though, I tried to tear them off but it was too late, the ink wouldn’t flow out. Now these ‘handmade’ tattoos are barely visible just beneath my skin, like ghosts. At around the same time I slit my left wrist with a razor blade.

  But now I knew my name. My real name was Lemn Sissay. And I knew my country. Ethiopia. I decided there and then. I would call myself by my name and I would ask anyone who knew me to call me by my name. And when they asked, ‘Why have you changed your name?’ I would tell them, ‘I didn’t change my name. This is the name on my birth certificate. This is the name I was born with. This has always been my name.’

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  My name is Lemn Sissay.

  CHAPTER 26

  I stand in light perfectly still

  A shadow moved then hid

  I’ve no more than what I saw

  I’ve nothing to prove; It did

  With my change of name, strange nocturnal behaviour and going barefoot, people in the town did think I was losing it. And the truth is I was losing it. The Authority seemed not to understand what was happening. Christmas passed. And I folded into myself. Norman Mills took me to the police station for a conference about the ‘malicious damage’ to the Waddingtons’ property, which amounted to a grand total of £9.2
6.

  Couldn’t anyone see what was happening? It felt like a betrayal. Norman Mills admonished me for ‘smirking’ at the policeman. I had no fear of the police officer and no respect for the police. They were guarding The Authority. But the £9.26 was to have ramifications. The Director of The Authority sent this on 18 January 1984:

  I didn’t give up my job at the clothing factory. Not in the way they were implying. I couldn’t venture outside, therefore I was unable to do the job. I was in no more ‘financial debt’ than any other sixteen-year-old. The more I look at this, the angrier it makes me. The people in charge of caring for me were building a case against me because the court case had triggered the Director of Children’s Services. It had little to do with me.

  The reason the director was involved was because of the police charge and £9.26. But the police were called because of the accusation by Mrs Waddington. Mr Waddington sacked me, as we now know, because Social Services were making enquiries into his books.

  I am unsure about the kitchen cabinet but let me confess to it. Let me say that it was me who broke a kitchen cabinet. I was a teenager. It was 1984, George Orwell’s 1984, and I was in the depths of a breakdown.

  It was felt that Norman had not fulfilled the conditions of the conference held in December 1983 and that we had no option other than to consider moving him.

  Mr Mills and the residential section were given two weeks to investigate the provision of a working boys’ hostel. Failing this, it was recommended that I be transferred to Oaklands and if there was considerable deterioration in my behaviour and attitude, immediate transfer to Wood End should be considered.