by Gina Yashere
Later, Regina Road was no longer a suitable place to live, as our family now also included my twelve-year-old sister, Taiwo, whom my mum had sent for from Nigeria. My mother moved us all to Bethnal Green, East London, which is part of the borough of Tower Hamlets, the poorest borough in London at the time. In the 1970s, Bethnal Green was an area of street markets, drab postwar buildings, and cheap rent. It is the site of the world’s first-ever council housing estate (the Boundary Estate) and was also Jack the Ripper’s old haunt. But as a single mother, an immigrant, with no family or community and with a determination that her children would grow up in England, this is where our family spent the next few years.
The East End of London in the 1970s was not a nice place to live as a white person, let alone a dark-skinned foreign family, and it was certainly far from the gentrified neighborhood it is now, with its high-end boutiques and cereal café charging the equivalent of eight dollars for a bowl of Cheerios. There was a lot of suspicion among the white working-class residents of the wave of people of color moving into the neighborhood, thus fueling racial tensions. The National Front, a Far-Right “political party,” was very active in the area, preying on the xenophobia of the native white residents. NF graffiti was pretty ubiquitous on East End walls around that time. It was not uncommon to find signs that read KEEP BRITAIN WHITE, WOGS OUT, AND PAKIS OUT.
The population of Bethnal Green was mainly poor working-class white people, immigrants from Bangladesh, and a sprinkling of African and Caribbean immigrant families. The community was a reflection of all the places England had gone and “civilized.” My mother was one of these people. My mum’s friend Mary, who was from Mauritius, was another. She and Mum would chat in the kitchen, where Mum would spread out her wares for Mary to peruse them, while we enjoyed a rare instance of being allowed to play with Mary’s sons, Roger and Ronny, in another room.
We lived in Colville House, a postwar-built block of brown council flats, which in the US would be called low-income housing, or “the projects.” The flat was a three-bedroom with one separate toilet and bathroom. I remember distinctly the dampness of that apartment. The walls were slimy and wet all year round and had green spots all over them from the damp, which my mum often tried to protect us from by stuffing old newspapers between the walls and the beds. But that damp often managed to transfer itself like alien spore, and we’d wake to find mold spots on our blankets and clothes. Thank goodness none of us developed any serious respiratory illnesses. I’ve never seen that kind of damp since, and I don’t know whether it’s because I’ve moved up in life or it’s just gone the way of most phenomena of the ’70s, like the Farrah Fawcett haircut and white dog shit. But that damp is why, to this day, I cannot stand blankets anywhere near me and would rather sleep in the middle of a blizzard with nothing but a scarf covering my genitalia than let a blanket touch my skin.
My mum had one bedroom, and my brothers shared the second. The third I shared with my sister Taiwo, who is eight years older than me. This was not fun for either of us. She had spent several years in Nigeria living with my mum’s sister while Mum was setting up in the UK, so she came into our lives when I was a toddler.
This is a common phenomenon among African, Latin, and Caribbean communities. When parents decide to travel to another country to look for better work opportunities, they usually leave existing kids behind with their grandparents or other family members, with a view to bringing them over at a later date. In the Caribbean, the term for those kids left behind is “barrel children,” a phrase coined by Dr. Claudette Crawford-Brown of the University of the West Indies, after the containers these parents regularly use to send supplies back to their children. Dr. Crawford-Brown has spent over thirty years studying the psychological effects on these kids. Often they never make it to the new country, and the ones that do may arrive years later, only to find themselves transplanted into a situation in which the parents have other children, and if the parents are working hard to make ends meet, these older “barrel” kids are typically expected to pitch in with house duties and help care for the younger children. Their feelings of abandonment, confusion, and resentment may never be acknowledged.
This is exactly the situation twelve-year-old Taiwo found herself in. I was by then four, Dele was around two and a half, and Sheyi was a year old when Taiwo came back from Nigeria. She was thrown straight into babysitting, cleaning, cooking, and all the other household chores while Mum went out to work to provide for four children alone. In a new household with three small children she had no sibling attachment to, she was expected to help look after them after school and on weekends while still a child herself, and this was compounded by the fact that she considered me and Dele spoiled. Apparently at that time she was already aware that Dele and I were the reincarnations of my mother’s parents, and were therefore more loved, and even though we all had been born in England, she was the one who had been sent to Nigeria, where she’d had terrible experiences. Her aunt had treated her as free household help rather than a beloved niece, and from the beginning, Taiwo had felt like a second-class citizen in her own family.
I was a precocious four-year-old and spoke exactly what came to my mind, as toddlers tend to do. Not understanding where this extra adult had come from, I innocently asked my mum if she’d brought a servant over from Nigeria. I knew my mum had come from wealth, and at four, I didn’t understand that we were now poor. I had no concept of class, and I made a natural four-year-old’s deduction. Big stranger. Cleaning house and cooking. Equals servant. I truly believe Taiwo hated me from that day. She was stuck wiping our asses every time we did a poo, and I don’t know what they put in those potato chips in the East End back then, but our assholes were like those never-ending squeezy cake decorators, and she got no respite. Her resentment at her situation needed a release, and unfortunately Dele and I were those perfect punching bags. She slapped us, pinched us, used painfully hot water when bathing us. Whatever she could do to cause us pain without leaving marks, she did. She then threatened us to keep our mouths shut.
Sheyi was not a special reincarnation child, and he was a baby, so he was spared her fury, but Dele and I from a young age lived in fear of our mum leaving the house to go to work or go shopping. We’d cling to her legs, begging her to take us with, or not to go at all, but we couldn’t tell her why so instead begged her with our eyes, as we knew that if we opened our mouths, the retribution would be severe the moment that front door closed. Mum never understood. She was simply leaving her babies with her trusted older daughter.
From a young age we were taught to respect Taiwo as an adult because of the age gap, and anyway, to us, she was an adult. We had never seen her play, have fun, be a child! And so we never saw her as a sister or compatriot in that sense. We knew she was our sister in the literal sense, and she was still a young child forced into a situation above her control, but to us, she was just an extension of our mother’s harsh discipline.
Her having to share a room with me, and trying to protect her belongings and anything vaguely shiny from this noisy destructive dwarf, couldn’t have been fun for her either. She had a record player and a wonderful music collection, and as I grew up, through her—or should I say through sneaking and playing her records when she was out—I discovered the Jacksons, Rick James, and Grace Jones, whose fierceness I still channel to this day. But my sister could always tell when I’d touched her stuff. I swear she must have set booby traps. There must have been single hairs over door openings, ornaments moved two millimeters to the left, black lights, and luminol. Every day was like a scene from Misery. I never lost a foot, but I got hit a lot in that room. I still kept touching her stuff, though. I was nothing if not persistent. My sister was an asshole, but she had good taste.
As we grew older, Taiwo’s behavior took on a more conniving edge. She would tell me stories of places called children’s homes, where there were no adults to boss me around, and I would be able to play all day and do as I pleased. I begged her for informat
ion on how to be allowed into one of these amazing establishments, and she told me I would have to make certain sacrifices. I’d have to do some bad things in order to be sent there, and some of these things would incur the wrath of my mum, but it would be worth it when I finally was allowed to enter the children’s home to live. Eager to experience this child’s utopia, I did everything Taiwo told me to do to facilitate my entry into this heaven, and she was eager to help. She instructed me to do things like drop a plate of my mother’s food on the floor as I brought it to her, break plates and cups, and spill red juices on carpets. Her personal favorite was to have me lose my earrings.
As well as the colorful materials and coral beads that Nigerians wear, gold is a treasured addition to that mix. My mother had a huge collection of gold jewelry. Some she had purchased and some were heirlooms passed down to her from family. Gold was not only a precious form of currency but also an outward sign of success and wealth, and she would often adorn herself with it when going to parties, weddings, and other important Nigerian events. The size of some of the pieces she wore would put some of today’s rappers to shame. When she took us to these events, she would often drape us in gold too, and I developed a love of jewelry and general body adornment from her. I would cry when we got home from these outings and she would remove all the beautiful shiny metal from my body. The only pieces I got to keep wearing were my earrings. In Nigerian culture, a baby girl’s ears are pierced within days of birth, and so I have worn earrings since before I had any discernible memories. Gold is obviously the metal of choice for the ears of Nigerian baby girls, and that was the only gold jewelry I was allowed to wear before my twelfth birthday, when I got my first gold ring, which I had been begging for since the age of five. The girls in our family wore gold studs or hoops all the time, and this is where my sister got me. She would take one of my gold earrings and throw it away, instructing me to tell my mother I had lost it. Mum would be furious and beat me, and Taiwo would stand by and watch. She would later soothe me, ensuring me that I was a step closer to getting the coveted children’s home invite. I lost several gold earrings, broke many plates, and incurred a staggering number of beatings due to my sister’s deception before I finally decided, at the age of nine, that the kid’s home wasn’t worth all that pain. I didn’t work out my sister’s trickery till I was well into my teens, and to this day my mum doesn’t know that a significant percentage of the punishment she doled out to me back then was as a result of Taiwo’s feelings of abandonment and mistreatment.
3
A Snake Can Only Give Birth to Long Things
As kids, we were taught to stay away from “bad boys,” usually groups of young white teenagers who’d hang around the common areas of the flats, randomly shouting racial epithets as we went about our business. “Wogs,” “coons,” and “niggers” for us, and “stinking Pakis” for the other families, whether they were Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, or suntanned Greek Cypriots. Funnily enough, racial discrimination was not that . . . discriminating.
Most blocks of flats have a trash-disposal chute accessible from each floor. You squeeze your trash into the chute and it falls down what looks like a grime-filled helter-skelter and lands in huge trash cans on the ground floor. Sometimes those chutes become blocked, or you belong to a large household that produces larger than chute-size refuse, so the rubbish needs to be manually taken to the ground-floor cans. This was one of the chores I’d been promoted to at around the age of seven.
I relished this gig, as it proved I was responsible and trustworthy, and I got to go outside the flat on my own, an extremely rare occurrence due to my mother’s overprotectiveness. One day on the way back from one of these trash-emptying occasions, I came across a bunch of white teenagers hanging out and smoking by the stairway that led back to my flat. I did as I was taught and made no eye contact as I nimbly brushed past them and ran up the stairs. One of them shouted, “Run, little wog!” Followed by the sound of hawking as one of them gathered enough saliva in his mouth and spat in my direction.
I was a tomboy at seven but still a girl, therefore still being dressed by my mum, who would scrape my unruly hair into a bun and put me in cute dresses that I loathed. I was wearing one such dress that day and so felt the gob of spit hit me on the back of my thigh as I ran away from those boys. I don’t remember being particularly upset by this attack, just mildly disgusted by the spit and that I hadn’t been fast enough to escape it. Mum calmly cleaned the spit off my thigh while muttering about bad boys under her breath.
I still emptied the trash the following week but this time wearing jeans. Something I welcomed.
Such was the everyday reality of life in 1970s Bethnal Green.
The mouth of an elder might stink, but it comes from wisdom.
Most children of African parents will tell you their parents were strict. A lot will say they had less freedom than their white or Caribbean peers. Many will even say their parents were overprotective. But what they speak of pales in comparison with my mother’s utter obsession with not letting anything happen to us.
My mother did everything humanly possible to keep us at home. Her fear that her children would die if they strayed too far from her was such that she kept a large scrapbook in which she’d paste clippings from the newspaper of bus and train crashes and other fatal incidents, which she used to deter us from going places. Whenever we asked to go anywhere, she’d bring out the scrapbook. “You see these children? They are all dead. You know why they are dead? They left their mothers to go on a school trip and are never coming home. Dead!” No amount of persuasion deterred my mother from these opinions.
My class was once going on a trip to the Tower of London. This historic castle, known as the home of the Crown Jewels, worn by every king and queen of England at their coronation, was also an execution site and prison from 1100 to 1952, holding such prisoners as Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn, and the infamous East End gangsters the Kray twins. As you can tell from the name, the Tower is in London, in an area called Tower Hamlets. We lived in Bethnal Green. In Tower Hamlets. We could almost see the Tower of London from our council flat.
My mum told me I couldn’t go on the trip. One of my teachers, feeling pity for my predicament, wrote my mother an imploring, heartfelt letter, begging her to let me join this local trip to the Tower of London, stressing how educational it would be for me, and personally ensuring that Henry VIII would not come back to life and have me beheaded with an axe. My mother read the letter, crumpled it up, and then, without further thought, gave it to me to throw in the bin. I was devastated. So upset was I that I made the mistake of channeling one of the American kids I saw on TV. “I hate it here! I don’t wanna live with you anymore!” As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I knew I’d made a possibly life-threatening error. My mum stared at me hard. “Is that so? Okay, then. Go.” Huh? Okay, well, that was easy.
At last I was going to head to a local children’s home, the one my older sister had been telling me about. I would turn up, and despite my lack of invite, I’d inform them I was an orphan. I was on my way! I went to my room and stuffed a school bag with some clothes and a couple of my favorite toys, then walked back into the front room to say goodbye. I was excited. I was going to a local children’s home as an orphan. What could be better than a home with just children?
“Did I not buy you that bag and toys? Leave them here.”
Fine. I was sure the children’s home would give me new, nicer toys. I put the bag down and turned to walk out of the house. Mum stopped me again. “Where are you going? Did I not buy you those clothes and shoes you are wearing? Take them off.” I was still adamant I was leaving, so I stripped down to my underwear, and hoped there was a children’s home not too far away; I’d sprint there before anyone saw me. I turned to leave.
“Ah-ah. Did I not buy those knickers?” Surely not! I stared at my mum beseechingly as my lips began to quiver. She didn’t budge. I slowly removed my underwear. I was in tears now, but I still shuffle
d to the front door, using one hand to cover my genitalia. I was seven then, so breasts were not an issue yet. I opened the door and stepped out onto the landing. Mum shut the door behind me.
It was the weekend and a sunny day in London. The council estate was bustling. No one was currently on our floor, but there were five other flats on our level, and anyone could have walked by. I didn’t know where the nearest children’s home was, and I certainly didn’t want to be asking for directions from strangers buck naked. And what if I bumped into someone from school? I turned back and hammered on the door to be let back in. Mum took ages to open it.