by Lemn Sissay
One of the boys had been hauled off for going over the top, not even allowed to get showered. I asked where he was off to. The boy next to me muttered, ‘Where d’you think? He’s getting worked over.’
‘Where?’
‘In the gym, that’s where they like doing it. After that he’ll be in the quiet room.’ The ‘quiet room’ was a padded cell.
What were you doing when you were seventeen?
CHAPTER 29
Be the river to the sea
Be a lake to light
Be warm be dawn
Be my satellite
I try to keep sane. I try not to get my head smashed in by The Men. Many years later Norman Mills, my social worker, tells me in a BBC TV documentary, ‘You shouldn’t have been in there, Lemn.’ He also tells me that his colleague apologised to him because the decision was out of their hands too. All of this was down to the Director of Social Services.
I grew my dreadlocks in Wood End. I twist my Afro hair each night at Wood End. I write every day in recreation hour. I have written poems ever since I came into care. They become my flags in the mountainside. They chart the journey. If you think all of this is too crazy to be true then so did I. In my writing there are no limits, no boundaries to the imagination. There is a freedom. My hair rises into a knotted mass of twisted spikes and then the locks drop into a crown of dreadlocks.
Penny Cook, the psychologist, had found information on the National Association of Young People In Care (NAYPIC) and the Abasindi Co-operative which was a black women’s theatre group in Moss Side, Manchester. She passed the information to Norman Mills, who passed it to me.
I wrote a pleading letter to a determined, quietly spoken woman called Margaret Parr. She was based in Manchester and worked with NAYPIC. She set up an affiliated organisation called Black and In Care. My first visitor. She came all the way from Manchester to this godforsaken lock-up to visit me, someone she had never met.
Visitor protocol. The sports hall was lined with tables. The staff stood at the front, the sides and the back of the room. We boys were marched in and placed by our seats. ‘Sit.’ We sat facing forward and waited. Meanwhile our visitors were searched at Reception then escorted through the corridors to the sports hall entrance.
Margaret Parr looked at me before sitting. She rummaged in her bag and brought out a punnet of grapes. I’d asked for grapes. She was the first outside person who could see the shit I was in. I was an experiment that hadn’t worked. I had the evidence. But she believed me straightaway.
‘There are many of us,’ she said, ‘all around the country. Black kids fostered or adopted then thrown back into a care system when we reach twelve or so.’ Her skin was lighter than mine. She had been in care too.
‘This isn’t right,’ I said. ‘They say I am here because they are waiting to put me in a flat but it’s been ages and this is a prison.’
Margaret could see what it was. ‘Don’t let them drug you,’ she whispered.
Afterwards we lined up in the sports hall. Many of these boys would have just seen their mums or dads or sisters or brothers. We took off our clothes down to our underwear and prepared for the strip search.
Margaret had brought me a book. It was a biography of Bob Marley, by Timothy White. I had read the biography by Ernest Cashmore but this was much better. I read it in recreation time. This was a deeper Marley, the mixed-race boy from the country conquering the harsh glare of Trenchtown. As I read some more of his internal distress I started to understand him more. And the more I felt I understood him, the less I knew. He is a natural mystic.
Margaret told me about two conferences on the horizon which I wanted to attend. One was for the Black and In Care group and the other was at Ruskin College in Oxford for the National Association of Young People In Care. Offering no reason, The Authority said I had to choose one or the other.
Thank God for pressure groups. Had it not been for NAYPIC and WHO CARES and Black and In Care and the Abasindi Co-op I am not sure I would be here today.
At the NAYPIC conference in Oxford there were young people from children’s homes and foster care from all over the country. It was breathtaking to be around so many people who had similar experiences.
The Black and In Care conference was a different matter altogether.
I was eventually allowed to attend the Black and In Care conference on 20 October 1984. It was a historical occasion – the first conference for black young people in care. From this conference came the Black and In Care video, which was watched by many social services departments around the country. Exhilarated, I returned to Wood End where I was strip-searched.
CHAPTER 30
In the way light talks to a river
In the way a river holds night beneath
In the way spring calms winter
In this way we should speak
I had a plan all along. The system at Wood End run by The Men was based on privileges. I gained ‘privileges’ for ‘good behaviour’. Privileges meant I could work unsupervised digging the gardens of the staff homes which lined the driveway. So I ran away to the housing office of Atherton Town Hall. I straightened up and approached reception.
‘Hi. Can I see the housing officer? It’s urgent.’ I said this with my best smile.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Peter . . .’ I saw a leaflet on the board for the Royal Bank of Scotland. ‘Peter Banks.’ I hated that lie.
Eventually I was ushered from the waiting room.
‘My name is Lemn Sissay. It’s not Peter Banks. And I need to tell you I am in Wood End, you know Wood End? And they are saying that they are waiting to find me accommodation. But I shouldn’t be there. And I have no family. And it’s a prison. And they say they are trying to find me somewhere to live. My social worker will tell you everything. Will you talk to him? He’s Norman Mills. He will tell you.’
I knew his number off by heart.
‘And I’m going to go back to Wood End now. And I am going to be punished. I need you to speak to my social worker. That’s the only reason I’ve run away, to see you. I need you to know that, that I haven’t done anything wrong.’
He was taken aback, but friendly. He listened attentively and told me that he’d do his best but he couldn’t make any promises. I never saw him again.
I was trying to kickstart the system in the same way that I had done with the psychiatrist, so I could get away from it. Back then, no one told me that it had worked. But it’s here in my files.
When I returned to Wood End I was strip-searched and had my privileges taken from me. I could no longer turn the soil unsupervised. On 29 October the area officer, my social worker’s line manager, wrote to the housing manager on his behalf.
The area officer, Mr Sumner, wrote to the housing manager and the Assistant Director of Social Services on 26 and 29 October respectively.
The J.G. Poyner below was Director of Wigan Social Services, responding against the advice of a senior social worker, an area manager and a housing manager to block my progress.
I am seeing this for the first time as I write. By mid-December 1984 I was in my flat. My first home. I was seventeen and a half. I lived on the newest housing development in Atherton. It was called Poets’ Corner. My one-bedroom flat was at 21 Cowper Avenue. The streets that surrounded mine were Burns Avenue, Blake Avenue, Chaucer Grove, Keats Close, Byron Grove, Milton Close, Wordsworth Avenue, Browning Avenue. This whole housing area was being built while I was in the children’s homes.
After thirty years, Graham Wilson, the housing officer, wrote to me out of the blue.
You probably won’t remember me but if you cast your mind back to when you got your first flat on Poets’ Corner (!) in Atherton I was the guy at the Atherton town hall who dealt with your application. You came in to see me a few times before you got the flat and I remember getting stick at the time as you were officially too young to have your own tenancy but I was impressed with you then and I have been really pleased to see
how well things have worked out for you ever since. You deserve the recognition you now have. I left working for the council about a year after you got the tenancy (never was a local authority type!) but I remember how strong your character was then and the funny things you did eg Rasta colours on the front door! – Bowling ball games on the floor that your neighbour downstairs wasn’t impressed with! – Walking round with the ladders on doing the gutters! and especially once when you left my office and I saw you through the window of the town hall when the motorcycle cop wasn’t impressed with your ‘holding the nose’ gesture and he reacted badly!
I found this in my files relating to that incident.
I was charged with being ‘likely to cause breach of the peace’. The court hearing was 5 November 1984.
Somebody left a gift for me outside the flat. I don’t know who. It was a thing of beauty to me: a black Olivetti typewriter with a waterfall of ebony finger pads, each ingrained with one mother-of-pearl letter.
Epilogue
Be the window at dawn
Be the light be the ocean
Be the calm post-storm
Be open
Click clack clack. I was alone, at eighteen, in an apartment on Poets’ Corner. I had a letter from my mother dated 1968 and a birth certificate with my name: Lemn Sissay. All the names which came before – Norman, Mark and Greenwood – were created to hide me from my mother and from Ethiopia.
My mother is from the Amhara people of Ethiopia. It is a tradition of the Amhara to leave messages in the first name of the child. In Amharic the name Lemn means Why?
Acknowledgements
Jamie Byng, Francis Bickmore, Leila Cruickshank, Megan Reid and all in the Canongate family, Clare Conville and all in the Conville and Walsh family. Ethiopia Alfred, Jo Prince and Andy King, Sally Bayley, Jenni Fagan, Meseret Fikru, Markos Fikru, Sophie Willan, Dave Haslam and the Haslamites, Jo and Tom Bloxham, Whitney McVeigh, Suzette Newman, Linda Lines, Mark Attwood, Bobbi Byrne, Peter Libbey, Norman Mills, Hannah Azieb Pool, Helen Pankhurst, Alula Pankhurst, Parvinder Sohal, Lebo Mashile, Jude Kelly and Caroline Bird.
‘Full of light and hope . . . A prodigious talent’
Daily Mail