A choking fury flared in Susan’s chest.
“But I will have tea,” the girl added. “I like loose-leaf tea.”
Susan mustered a smile. “Try the Darjeeling.” Picking up the jade and white teapot, she said, “Shall I be Mother?”
Esi’s face hardened, her mouth twisting into an ugly line. “Are you trying to impress me with all this?” Her out-flung arm encompassed the universe of Britannia. “You are nobody’s mother!” Esi spoke in an intense whisper. “Too late! Too late to know your own mother. Long dead! And, worst of all . . .” She retrieved the documents. “Too late to know the sister who was at your side every minute of your life until you were taken. Who searched for you for years. Years! Who never stopped loving you! And when she found you, what did you do?” Esi snapped open the paper with the words Without Prejudice boldly printed at the top. “I know it by heart.” She cleared her throat and put on a poncy accent:
Miss Akua Acqueh, while I acknowledge the possible biological connection between us, there can be no relationship. Enclosed is a cheque for £500 to cover the cost of five years’ worth of stamps, courier fees, surveillance and any other means that you have used to stalk me. Your letters to me must now cease or I will place this matter in the hands of my solicitor. Yours faithfully, Susan Matthews.
Something in Susan cracked. It wasn’t the words themselves but the hideous caricature of herself being played out before her.
“I am . . . You may not . . .” She started again. “I am Susan Matthews. The only child of Emily and Roland Matthews of 14 Vicarage Lane, Kendal. Both of my parents are deceased.”
“I guess you think you look like them,” Esi sneered.
Susan’s heart contracted and all she could say was, “I have no memory of anything or anybody before Mother and Father.”
“You were four years old. I remember when I was four!”
“I have no memory.” The teapot was heavy in Susan’s hand. Heavier still was the weight of the life she remembered. The Sunday roast. Walking holidays in the Lake District. The Christmas pantomime in Manchester. The shadow memories came too. Cruel jibes in the playground. Emily struggling with her hair. The times she caught Father looking at her, as though bewildered by her presence at his table. Father . . . and his vicious dogs . . .
“No memory,” Susan murmured, fighting for control. She filled two cups and passed one to Esi, saying in a low voice: “My mother . . . Emily . . . always told me that my life began when I came to them. Your mother’s letters told another story. But it was just that. A story.” She raised her eyes. “Nothing to do with me.”
Something in Susan’s voice made Esi look at her.
“I’d never wanted to know about . . . before.” Susan’s face twitched. Then the words burst from her. “I wanted to know even less when your mother started to write.” She stopped. “How the person who gave birth to me . . . abandoned me in some African village with . . .”
Esi grasped Susan’s hand and squeezed hard. “Wrong! That ‘person’ left her children—you and my mother!—with her family. She came to England . . . for everybody. For a better life.” Esi’s grip was crushing. Its aggression pushed Susan away from afternoon tea into a waking dream, the girl’s words washing over her, dimly heard.
“. . . became a hospital cleaner . . . shared a cold-water flat . . . the walls of her room black with damp . . . three years before she could send for you and Mum . . .”
Susan felt she was drowning but, despite her terror, didn’t want Esi to stop. For the first time ever, she wanted to break down the wall that separated her from her early life. She closed her eyes. Maybe something from the past, some message, some buried ancient thing would come to her. Perhaps she would remember her childhood and the feel of a burning sun.
“. . . when you and Mum came, things got worse. Two more mouths to feed. No-one to look after you . . .”
Susan felt only the cold English air. Perhaps she would see again that African sunlight. But her sealed lids kept all light out.
Esi’s tale continued. “The perfect solution . . . foster care, for a few months . . . until she found a decent place. She handed you over because my mum was fourteen and could work.”
Or perhaps she would hear the ocean’s thunder. But all she heard was:
“So you disappeared, Abena . . . and were rescued, by a couple with money . . . took you up North and decided to keep you.”
Perhaps she would hear rain drumming on those zinc roofs she’d read about. She waited. This time her own voice was saying, “I don’t remember.”
At the same moment, Esi said, “Gran signed the adoption papers.”
Silence.
The server came, topped up the teapots and went away again.
Esi released her grip and Susan noticed Esi’s thin fingers, prominent knuckles and flat nails. So much like her own. The girl gathered her things and put a photo next to Susan’s teacup.
“You and Mum.”
Susan picked it up, trembling a little. A grainy black-and-white picture of two girls—one tall and thin with Esi’s face, the other, small, sitting on the bigger girl’s narrow hip, their heads turned to each other. Both were smiling.
She shook her head and gave it back with a quick “Sorry.”
“Thank you for tea, Aunt Abena.” They both looked around. The famous hotel was still there.
“Surreal,” muttered Esi, putting the photo in her bag. She leaned in to Susan. “You don’t even remember when your mum and mine came to get you? How could you forget that?”
“I told you!” Susan’s blood boiled. “I have no memory of that time!”
Esi wound the brilliant scarf around her neck. “Akwadaa yerafo.”
“What?”
“That’s what Mum called you. ‘Akwadaa yerafo’.” She slung her bag over her shoulder. “The lost child.”
With that, Esi was gone.
Susan felt unable to move yet unable to stay. She managed to pay the bill and headed to the ladies’ room. In the foyer, an expensively dressed guest was in heated confrontation with a uniformed employee, demanding full rights of entry for her large, restless Alsatian. “Tell me why he can’t! Tell me!”
Upset and disoriented, Susan climbed the staircase and wandered around the first floor. She finally found a ladies’ room. Who was that woman in the mirror? And those eyes so full of rage and fear . . . whose were they?
She straightened her back and walked towards the stairs. Suddenly, a loud barking! Her heart began to race. Over the landing, she saw the dog, straining, tugging at the leash. She heard his angry barking at someone she couldn’t see.
Susan began to sweat. Beads of perspiration gathered at her temples. She was shaking. Suddenly she realised that Esi was in the foyer, caught up in the fracas between the dog’s owner and the hotel staff. And the dog kept on barking.
Esi looked up and saw Susan.
It was then that the buried ancient thing came back to her. She is a child again, playing in the upstairs bedroom. Father’s in the garden. Both Alsatians start to bark. She pulls back the window curtain. The dogs are straining on their leads. On the other side of the high chain-link fence, two black strangers, women, one wearing a head-tie, are standing. Calling out. Father shouts back at them in the hard voice she knows. The big woman with the head-tie starts shouting and gripping the fence. Father unleashes the dogs. They attack the fence, lunge at the intruders. The head-tie woman jumps back, knocking down the tall young one. Father turns away; the dogs quieten. But the head-tie woman is back. She is wailing, shaking the fence, getting a foothold, trying to climb over it. The dogs rush forward, barking, snarling, throwing themselves against the fence, their bared teeth threatening the woman’s fingers, tearing her coat. Crying out, the young one points up. To her window. Suddenly, the window curtain is closed and her mother carries her away. On her cheek, tears mingle with the smoothness of her mother’s pearls.
The child screams.
“AKUA! ONUA! AKUA! AKUA!”
Before Susan collapsed on the hotel floor, her screams could be heard throughout the building. When she finally opened her eyes, Esi was there with several members of the hotel management, anxious to bring this disruption to an end. Susan watched as Esi took charge.
“Thank you so much. If you could please get us a taxi, I’ll take my aunt home.”
Tears were still rolling down Susan’s cheeks as the taxi wove through the early evening traffic. Despite an immense weariness, she forced herself to speak. “Why did you come back?”
“I forgot to give you the picture.” Esi took it out of her bag. “It’s the only thing Mum really wanted you to have.”
But Susan wasn’t looking at the photograph. She was looking at the hand that was so much like her own.
Linda Bellos
Born in London, England, to a Jewish mother and Nigerian Catholic father, she has been engaged in politics since her early teens, becoming involved with Black liberation and lesbian/feminism when attending Sussex University as a mature student. She accomplished many firsts in the 10 years after graduating, including being the first Black woman to join the Spare Rib Collective, be leader of Lambeth Council, and treasurer of the Africa Reparations Movement, UK. She is currently re-engaging in community politics following the death of her partner of 15 years, and is working on the first volume of her memoirs. She remains proud of her heritage and considers oppression not a competition but a spur to making the world a better place for all humans, if we can hear each other. She is the proud mother of two children.
Age
Late in 1987, I stood before a gathering of people who had invited me to address them. It was not the first time that I had been invited to speak to a community group, and I have in years since spoken to many more. But what was memorable about this meeting was that I was faced with a group of elderly African and Caribbean people, and it was the first time I had noticed what had previously been missing from my life.
I was born in London in 1950; at that time, though I was not to realise it for some years, I was one of a small number of Black people to have been born in Britain. The significance of being in such a small minority does not, of course occur to a small child. It was only later, with the perspective of distance, that I have been able to look at the true significance of events in my own life. With a shock I realised that my own parents, plus those of my friends and peers, were by necessity young(ish). At the time they seemed old, but most of them would have been in their twenties or thirties when we were born.
When my dad came to England from Nigeria in 1942, his own parents were dead; even had they been alive, it is doubtful they would have been allowed to follow him to Liverpool at the height of the war, or afterwards. When he moved to London in the late 1940s and married my mother, he socialised with other Nigerian men. Many, like him, had married European women and, naturally, they were of a similar age. As a consequence, I did not come across Black people with grey hair, neither did I have the opportunity to learn from the experience and maturity of African elders.
When I finally became aware of what I had missed, it occurred to me how much this absence symbolised the problematics of racism. In the mid-1980s, when the campaign for racial equality was most prominent and (in my view most successful) there were many in both the Conservative and Labour parties who argued that racism would disappear if we (Black activists) would stop drawing attention to it; indeed, they positively urged us to adopt a colour-blind approach. But my revelation had demonstrated to me the weakness of colour-blindness. White people had and needed older people. It would be impossible to imagine the British without any grandparents, picture the House of Commons or House of Lords without those over sixty. It is, of course, not merely a matter of how old people look, it is the continuity and experience that they represent which is significant. And yet, for the communities from the Caribbean and Africa we had to establish homes and families and, ultimately, communities without elders. The immigration rules meant that only the economically active were accepted, our older “dependants” were often not. This was the period when we came here in significant numbers, in the 1950s and 1960s. We did so, or at least our parents did, without many of the social support systems which we now rightly consider essential to survival.
And yet, survive they did. In the face of subtle and unsubtle racial discrimination, in a country in which it was near impossible to find decent accommodation, or fair wages; our parents, my father included, set up shops, churches, and sometimes schools, which began to address our cultural needs. In other words, in addition to moving to a new, cold and sometimes hostile environment, our parents met their own cultural needs and those of their children (to some extent) without the support or help of their parents. Indeed, it did not occur to me until recently that they were of course sending money “back home” because the legacy of British rule did not run to pensions.
I am myself now in middle age, so I am naturally sensitive to issues of old age in a way I was not when younger. Maybe it is that I have recently attended several funerals or memorials of elderly Black African people. Lord Pitt’s memorial service in Westminster Cathedral saw us celebrating the long life of a man who achieved respect and admiration in his lifetime. This contrasted with the funerals of young people who had died at the hands of the police or street racists, or more recently at the hands of their brothers. There is, to my mind, something rather good about attending the funerals of old people who lived long, fruitful and varied lives. It offers an opportunity not only to celebrate that life but also gain a tangible sense of our having a history. Grey hair in some ways represents the notion of history as well age and experience.
One of the things which for me has underpinned racism, and which was most evident during the Windrush Celebration in 1998, is that we are a people without a history, just as Africa was a Continent without a history. Windrush was presented as the point at which we arrived in Britain, having apparently had no history prior to 1948. Grey hair speaks to me of generations, and generations speak to me of ancestors or wisdom—in other words, of history.
My own father, like others of his generation, did not expect to die here. He came to better himself, and he came to serve the motherland at a time of war. Things did not turn out as he would have hoped and expected. He did not, for example end up a rich man able to support his family and friends back home. So, in disappointment and shame, he stayed in England. He died in the UK, on the 17 January 2000.
While I celebrate those of our elders who are returning, buying or building that long-dreamed of home, there is also the recognition that most of our elders are staying here. This means that there will be Grey Heads for our young people to see and learn from, a real sense of continuity and history. The other important side of this reality for me is that the services that our parents paid for and worked in now need to be changed to incorporate their needs. What I mean here is that our elderly may need “multicultural” social services provision, which is sensitive to their needs. In the mid-1980s, when Councils such as Lambeth began to provide multicultural meals on wheels, they were attacked as “Loony Left”. These days not even the Daily Mail would think that it is acceptable for social services departments to leave elderly Caribbean, African and Asian people hungry, offering only traditional British food. (I have no idea whether, since privatisation, culturally sensitive food is provided by the private sector who now provide the services which councils used to provide.)
My own father was the only African man in the nursing home that was his last home. The reason I chose that home for him when I could no longer care for him was that others had a few Black residents but not as many African staff. As his Alzheimer’s had progressed, he had lost control over whether he spoke English or Yoruba, so there being staff who could talk to him in his own tongue was important. The same was true for many other Black people. We hear a lot about new research and campaigning which is being carried out in response to changing demographic patterns, with older people representing a larg
er percentage of the population; some of these people are Black and from other ethnic minorities; they may have needs which are specific to their cultural background, whether it be food, religion or bathing. In looking at our elders’ needs, an awareness of cultures and ethnicity is essential. It is not merely political correctness that makes me insist that care or nursing homes take on board that not all their residents want meat and two veg, with suet pudding and custard to follow.
I never thought I would allow my parents to be put in a home, and no doubt they would have had some of the same concerns. For both my parents, the idea of a home that was not one’s own was too close to the idea of a workhouse. Even though my father had spent the first twenty-five years of his life in Africa, he knew and feared the poor provision for older people in Britain. It was not just the legacy of Poor Laws which made me reticent about old people’s homes, it was more that I had grown up with stories from Africa, where older people were venerated, where the idea of putting them out of their homes was utterly alien. My mother too, had similar views about the responsibilities of children towards their aged parents. Nursing homes were no more a part of my view of family relationships than sending my small children away to boarding school would have been. And yet when my father’s Alzheimer’s had developed to the extent that he had become a danger to himself, I had no hesitation in finding a nursing home for him. In other words, the reality of the situation made me jettison the rhetoric and deal with the needs of my own father, which I could not, despite my best endeavours, satisfy on my own. I do not feel guilty about my father, and I have long since come to the realisation that to try to care for him myself would have been more about me than about him. None the less, there were real difficulties with him being in a nursing home that I had not anticipated.
New Daughters of Africa Page 18