by Gina Yashere
This was my first taste of the difference between justice for Black people and justice for white people in England. My mum showed no outward emotion at the loss, and she never discussed the case again. This experience did hammer home my mum’s love for me and how far she would go to protect her children. And even better, I no longer had to wait for my brothers after school. Silver linings and all that.
* * *
When Mum was out working, my brothers and I often made up our own games and built makeshift toys from scraps of stuff we found around the house. Our favorite toys to build were guns. From cop shows to Cowboys and Indians, guns were the most popular toys of the ’70s, before it was deemed politically incorrect and dangerous for young kids to point pistols at one another. Remember, this was the time when parents bought their children candy cigarettes complete with red sugar at the end to duplicate the burning embers of the tobacco. That would be the equivalent of making candies for today’s kids in the shape of rolled-up dollar bills and coated on one end with powdered sugar. I loved those candy cigarettes, though, and even though Mum never smoked, she bought them for us, as they were just another type of candy. Nobody saw the danger of normalizing smoking for a bunch of four-year-olds! I was disappointed to find out at fifteen, when I bit into one, that real cigarettes tasted nowhere near as good as the sugary ones.
As kids, we often got cowboy outfits, complete with fake Stetsons, sheriff badges, and cap guns. Cap guns were named for the small caps, or capsules, of flammable material that would explode upon contact with the trigger’s hammer mechanism. The caps came on a thin roll of paper that was fed through the cast-iron gun. My brothers and I loved running through the house, shooting at each other.
Later, we coveted guns with real missiles, stuff that actually came out of them, and we graduated to water pistols. That was as far as Mum let us go. The more expensive guns that shot pellets, she refused to stump up for, so we began experimenting with making our own. There were toys we couldn’t get our hands on because they were beyond Mum’s toy budget, and some belonged to another world.
For our first experiments, we tried making catapults and guns that would match the toys we saw depicted on Bazooka gum wrappers. Eventually we had the perfect prototype. It was a catapult shotgun made from two aluminum pipes we salvaged from the legs of the cheap kitchen stools everybody had in their houses in the ’70s and ’80s. They had vinyl seat pads, and their thin aluminum legs, over time, would splay out and finally collapse under the weight of a particularly fat auntie who came to visit. That happened at least twice in my childhood, and it took every ounce of self-control as kids not to let a laugh escape, or we’d face a harsh beating after that auntie left.
We collected those broken metal legs from the trash and strapped two of them together with rubber bands. At one end, in between the pipes, we made a trigger from a wooden clothes peg, which was held in the cocked position by more rubber bands. A catapult rubber band was attached to the other end of the gun and then pulled back behind the top of the trigger ready for shooting—similar to the action of a crossbow. Glass marbles were our bullets of choice. They were cheap to purchase with the modest pocket money Mum gave us, and through playing marbles with other kids at school, my brothers and I amassed a decent-size collection, as when you won a game of marbles, you got to keep those of the losing child. We pooled our winnings for our ammunition pile. We’d place a marble in front of the elastic band that acted as a catapult. When the trigger was pulled, the rubber bands released and launched the marble out at full speed. The more bands we used, the tighter the catapult and the more powerful the gun. Super dangerous, and much more fun for it. We played with these guns when we were alone in the house, using cans and plastic bottles from the trash as our targets, and we hid them under our beds when Mum was home. None of us lost an eye, but we smashed a lot of stuff. We broke a window once, and we took a vow to accept the beating without ever revealing the guns we’d used to do it.
Mum eventually found out about our shotguns when Sheyi thought it would be a good idea to take his one to school to show off to his friends. One of those dumb friends decided to pull the gun out of Sheyi’s backpack in the middle of a lesson. Mum got a call from the teacher to come to the school immediately. When she arrived, she entered the empty classroom where Sheyi sat waiting in terror. “Mrs. Iyashere, your son brought a homemade gun to school, and I’m sure you understand how serious this is.” The teacher then pulled the gun out from behind her desk. My mum, who up till that point had assumed she was about to come face-to-face with the equivalent of a peashooter, on seeing the two-foot-long weapon of mass destruction, was so shocked that she burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter. The teacher stared at her aghast. Sheyi thought our mother had lost her mind. Her laughing terrified him even more.
It took Mum a full three minutes to control her giggle fit, then she asked what the teacher wanted to do.
“Well, Sheyi is a good student, so I will take this no further,” she answered smugly. “I will allow him back into school tomorrow. But I am confiscating the gun and then—”
“What?” my mum interrupted.
The poor teacher had no idea what she was stepping into. “Well, Sheyi can come back to school tomorrow, but obviously I’m going to confiscate this weapon.”
“‘Obviously’? Did you not take this gun from my son?”
“Eh, yes.”
“And you said no further action will be taken.”
“Well, yes.”
“Therefore, that gun now belongs to me.”
“Well, er, well, I suppose, technically, yes.”
“Then technically you will not be keeping it and using it as an example to criminalize my son at a later date. Give me the gun.” End of discussion. Nobody messed with her kids.
My mum walked out of the school with the offending weapon in one hand and Sheyi’s hand in the other. She didn’t punish any of us. But we all disappointingly had to give up our weapons stash.
6
If You Are Eating with the Devil, You Must Use a Long Spoon
When I was around five, my mother began a relationship with a man who became our de facto dad—or as I would later dub him, Step-Bastard—for the next twelve years.
Samson Ekhaguere was a Nigerian man who worked as a mail sorter at the Royal Mail and drove a silver Ford Granada. Not many people on the housing estate where we lived owned cars, so the car added to the excitement he brought to the household. We weren’t to call him “Daddy,” as he wasn’t, so we called him “Uncle,” a commonly used moniker for any older male. In African culture, anybody who wasn’t your mum, dad, or sibling was never referred to by their first name but as either “Auntie” or “Uncle,” as a sign of respect. As we were instructed in my mum’s Nigerian accent, “Uncle” became “Oncle.”
Oncle was a stout, dark-skinned, bespectacled man with a formidable deep voice and big, rough hands with thick fingers. His smile was wide and toothy and reminded me of a crocodile’s—I could see the menace behind his grin. He looked like the big bad wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, but no one else seemed to notice.
For the first year or so after Oncle had moved in with us at the cramped Bethnal Green flat, he was good to my brothers, coming into the family as a father figure for them. I remember their joy of having a new dad. He seemed enamored with them too. They would hang around his legs, and he would scoop them up onto his shoulders, bellowing, “My boys!” But he didn’t have much time or interest for me or Taiwo because, you know, girls. Taiwo didn’t seem too bothered, as the more he hung out with my brothers, the less babysitting she had to do, so she often was left to her own devices.
Despite my initial wariness of Oncle, I longed to roll around on the floor with him and the boys and roughhouse, and I often tried to join in. I’d go sit in the front room where they played while my mum was on her sewing machine in the corner. I’d laugh loudly, trying to alert them that I was available for play too. I’d clap, I’d giggle, then eventually I
’d try to slip closer to the action, only to be shooed away by him. Mum would call me over and try to get me interested in other things. Like sewing. She often spent hours at her machine, making the clothes she would sell and re-creating outfits she had seen on the high street, which she would fashion for us out of whatever material she had. She bought me a mini sewing machine in an attempt to teach me some of her sewing skills, and draw my attention from the boys’ rough play. I was not impressed. I fiddled with it for about an hour before becoming bored and disappearing into my brothers’ room alone to play battles with their toy soldiers. As I listened to them squealing in delight as Oncle lifted and threw them around, I knew I was being excluded from these activities because I was a girl, and it infuriated me.
The first year of Oncle’s presence was filled with my dejection and loneliness. I wasn’t part of the boys club, and I was much safer when Taiwo was ignoring me so I stayed out of her way as much as possible. I had no one. Oncle wasn’t nice to me, and I didn’t like him at all. He had come and taken my brothers, my only playmates, leaving me in the wilderness. Up until that point, I’d not missed being without a father, but around this time I began to pray for my real dad to come rescue me. That he’d show up at our door, swoop me up in his arms, ready to take his family back. He’d drive Oncle away and protect me from Taiwo, and we’d all live happily ever after.
I also had a backup fantasy savior. That was Taiwo’s twin brother, Kehinde. I always knew my oldest sister had been born a twin, but he’d never lived with us, and I’d never seen him in pictures or in person. Whenever I asked Mum where he was, she alluded to him being in Nigeria somewhere. I imagined this big brother one day arriving out of the blue from Nigeria, taller and stronger than Oncle, who’d fight his little sister’s battles and play with me and me only. It wasn’t till years later, when we were teenagers and I was wondering out loud when we’d get to meet this long-lost brother, that my younger brother, Sheyi, who’s always been the most intuitive and smart of us kids, retorted, “You do realize Kehinde died at birth, right?” I hadn’t. Nigerians don’t like to talk about death, and rather than tell us that she had lost a child, Mum had just avoided the subject altogether until one of us worked it out.
In a Nigerian household, kids weren’t allowed to just vocalize their feelings. TV made it seem like American kids could tell their parents anything, from dictating what they wanted to eat to how they felt about something. And their parents listened! On American TV, families sat and discussed their feelings, tears were shed, hugs given, and compromises made. That shit didn’t happen in my family! Respect for your elders—which meant that children were to be seen and not heard—was a rule heavily enforced in our household, so kids didn’t have “feelings.” We just did what the hell we were told and shut the fuck up about it. I did not like Oncle, but I never came out and said, “Hey, Mum, I don’t like this fella. I think he’s a wolf,” because even at five, I knew that somehow this man was important to my mum. To her social standing, as she now had a man, and to our finances. I just had to adapt to the new status quo.
It became obvious that the dislike I had for him was mutual when Oncle began to make comments about how boisterous and how much in need of discipline I was. My knees and elbows were always scraped and ashy from playing rough games with the boys at school. I also knew my own mind pretty early on in life and was prone to asking a lot of questions, something that would always get me into trouble. Oncle saw these things as defiance, and so he sought to stifle me. I often found myself being bellowed at and lectured by him, but being told by my mum that I had to behave myself, as we were lucky to have him, and he was now the man of the house. I learned from an early age to stay out of Oncle’s way as much as possible.
I hated when my mum was working and he would collect me from school, as this gave him more opportunity to bully and humiliate me. He would turn up at the school gate in a suit, looking every bit the respectable father figure, and make a point of berating me loudly in front of my friends. He would bellow my name. “Dapo! Pull your socks up! Dapo! Why is your hair messy?” or “Why is there mud on your dress? Dapo! You wait till you get home!” From an early age, my family had called me by my middle name, Dapo, prompting kids at my school to rename me Bus Depot. He made me so ashamed. I continued to pray every night for my real dad or my unbeknownst-to-me-at-the-time deceased older brother to hurry up and come rescue me.
Oncle/Step-Bastard also brought over from Nigeria some of the more imaginative punishments for kids, like Hold the Bottle, in which the child had to stand and hold a glass bottle over their head, straight armed, for as long as was deemed enough for them to have learned their lesson. If those arms moved down an inch, beating.
Fun guy.
To be fair, that might be why I’m quite good at yoga.
* * *
When I was six, we welcomed my new, youngest sister, Asiriuwa—Asi for short—to the family. Oncle was overjoyed to have a baby who was his own flesh and blood (though we later found out he had strewn others about the country before he settled with us). He dropped my brothers like hot potatoes and concentrated all his attention on his new daughter.
Poor Dele and Sheyi had no idea what had gone wrong. Overnight they went from being “his boys” and the apples of his eye to being discarded like rice prepared by my left hand. He no longer played with them, and in fact, the disdain he had previously reserved for me was now shared between my brothers and myself.
Not long after my mother and new baby Asi returned home from the hospital, Oncle pulled me aside for a quick conversation, which went along the lines of “You don’t like me, and I don’t like you. Stay away from my child.” As a mere six-year-old, I was slightly disappointed, as I viewed the new baby as a living doll to play with, and I was being denied this pleasure. But I was unsurprised by Oncle’s feelings and was secretly glad to have my brothers back to play with, and to share in my misery. Besides, whenever Oncle was at work, I sneaked into Asi’s room to play with her tiny fingers and toes, and Mum sometimes let me carry her.
With this expanding family, the Bethnal Green flat became too cramped, but we stuck it and its perpetual dampness out for a couple more years while Mum and Oncle saved to buy a house. Two weeks before my eighth birthday, we moved into a large five-story house on Lancaster Road, in Finsbury Park. It was a palace! And dry! Downstairs had a cellar and a large front room and kitchen separated by a wall with a window built in so you could still see the TV from the kitchen! At a time when houses typically had just one TV, that window was state of the art. We couldn’t believe it. A window inside the house.
Looking back, it seems like the previous family must have been on the run from gangsters or the police and left in a hurry, because we discovered a cupboard full of toys and, as the months went by, even more toys strewn about the house. It was like the house had been blessed by a fairy godmother.
Our next-door neighbor had a pond in his garden with ducks and swans. I felt like I’d moved into Narnia—but the novelty soon wore off when I realized those ducks were very early risers.
There was also a two-room extension towards the back of the house that became Oncle’s man cave, where he had a bed he slept in when he did night shifts plus another TV and his own small kitchenette and bathroom. The next floor had a large family bathroom and three connecting rooms, which became my mum’s suite. One room had huge closets, the second was where she kept her sewing machine and materials, and the third had a large brass four-poster bed, complete with heavy curtains.
The ultimate status symbol for my mum was that bed. She’d always wanted one and had insisted on it when they’d bought the house. Though no one but us ever saw the inside of that bedroom, all our extended family and friends knew about that bed, and that Mum was doing well for herself.
Oncle had built that bed. He was extremely handy at DIY projects and took on the laying of carpet, wallpapering, and all the physical work the house needed. He built shelves and cupboards, and put up the curtains
Mum sewed. He even installed several doorbells in the house. One for the front door, obviously, but more ingeniously he installed a button in the kitchen and another by my mum’s bed, both wired up to doorbells in the upstairs bedrooms, so whenever my mum wanted to call us in the large house, all she had to do was ring that bell, and we all had to come running. On the wall above the staircase, Oncle had hung a massive five-foot poster of Elvis, because both my mum and Oncle loved him. It wasn’t unusual for me as a kid to walk past this larger-than-life-size Elvis keeping his eye on our Nigerian British family.
The third level housed the bedroom for the boys, Dele and Sheyi. The fourth had two bedrooms. One was meant to be Asi’s room. That’s right, the two-year-old baby was assigned the biggest single bedroom in the house, but as she was a damn toddler, the room housed all my mum’s stuff that she was selling. Mum now had a shop in the house, and Asi slept in a cot next to my mum’s four-poster. The last bedroom was the girls’ room—as in, I still had to share a room with Taiwo. Fuck.
To escape the oppressiveness of sharing with Taiwo, I spent a lot of time in my brothers’ room, which became my haven. Being close in age, Dele, Sheyi, and I were like a little gang, the three Musketeers, having the same family experiences. We played, fought, and plotted in that room. It was where I could vent, where I learned to play table tennis, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and where I first listened to New Edition and the Jackson 5. That room is where I learned to shit talk, as my brothers and I were always calling each other names and roasting each other before we knew what roasting was. That room gave me a lot of the skills I still use today and was the center of my childhood till I grew breasts.
I was not close to my sisters. Taiwo was like an adult to me. She had not experienced a proper childhood, having spent so many years in Nigeria and then being forced into the role of a surrogate parent to us when my mum had been out trying to make ends meet. As a result, she was not in the least bit fun. During my entire childhood, her feelings for me swung between hatred, disdain for the annoying little turd she was forced to share a room with, and envy, as I had a special place in my mum’s heart because of my birthmark and therefore got away with a lot more than she did as the eldest.