‘Cat got your tongue, child?’ she said. ‘You know it’s rude not to answer when an adult is talking to you.’
I smiled weakly, but no words would come out.
‘You must be tired,’ she added in a softer tone. ‘The plane journey is a long something.’ She smiled broadly, as if she was genuinely happy to see me. Then she patted me on the head and disappeared.
I had imagined that when my siblings and I saw each other again we would be overjoyed. The scene that had played out in my head was of the four of us rushing into each other’s arms and laughing loudly, with lots of rapid-fire talk as we tried to catch up with our lives. In reality, they just stood in the hallway and stared at me. After what seemed like a long time, we all moved through the connecting doorway to the back room, which was roughly the same size as the front room, but more square in shape. Faded pale blue paper with odd little green and red flowers decked all four walls. A large table covered in a frilly plastic tablecloth and plastic mats sat in the centre. In one alcove, next to a sealed fireplace, stood a tall wooden cupboard with textured glass panels and a drop-down shelf. The cupboard was painted the same blue colour as the walls. The children plonked themselves on the chairs around the table and continued to stare at me out of their sad-looking eyes. I had to look away from their intense searching and concentrated instead on the three framed portraits of Jesus on the wall. The Jesuses were all white with flowing hair, but all had different facial features.
I soon found myself wondering how it was that Jesus was always white, even on my island where the population was mainly black. Surely, he should at least be a mulatto?
I was quite lost in my thoughts when my mother reappeared and offered up a prayer:
‘I thank you my God Jehovah for delivering this child safe into our hands. Amen.’
‘Amen,’ my siblings muttered.
Her prayer did nothing to initiate conversation, and in the silence that followed my thoughts returned to my island: waking up to the crowing cockerels, the orange glow of the sun as it rose gently above the horizon, the early morning dew on grass, the lushness and vibrancy of colours, the early morning banter of adults and children. In the meantime, my mother left the room again and then returned carrying one of the fat babies, whom she placed on Patricia’s lap.
‘Keep a good eye on Doretta for me,’ she said, before turning to me. ‘Erna, can you look after Barbette? Someone has to cook the supper.’
Barbette was protesting loudly that her sister was no longer with her, and she carried on crying until mother returned and plonked her on my knees. She stared briefly at my face before letting out the most almighty scream. In a desperate attempt to soothe her, I started jerking my knees up and down, but this only made her scream even louder.
Without a word, Patricia placed Doretta on the floor and whisked Barbette off my lap. The crying stopped immediately. A sly glance from Patricia said it all: Barbette didn’t like new people. She put Barbette on the floor next to her sister where they babbled contentedly, reaching out their chubby little hands to touch each other. Grandpa Sippa and I had learnt of their birth from one of the blue airmail letters. Grandpa had mused about how Grandma Melba would have loved to have known that another one of her daughters had given birth to twins; twins were practically a tradition in our family, but Doretta and Barbette were the only pair who had actually survived.
‘Your food is ready,’ Mother said, emerging from the kitchen some two hours later. Little bits of wet flour still stuck to the back of her hands from making dumplings.
My siblings were out of their seats at speed. I followed them into a freezing bathroom, where strips of glossy pink wallpaper hung limply from the pitted walls, and worn lino covered the floor. We took turns washing our hands in the cracked sink, the water so cold it made me wince. Then we trooped back into the dining room. I gingerly sipped some sweet tea that my mother placed in front of me. The food on the table looked familiar, but when I tasted it, it had an odd flavour.
I realised that I was screwing up my face with every mouthful, so I said in my most convincing voice, ‘De people dem give mi plenty food on de plane.’ It was the first time I’d spoken since leaving Heathrow.
Suddenly, there was hysterical laughter around the table.
‘She sounds really funny!’ Patricia said. The boys giggled their agreement. ‘They must speak really funny in your country,’ she added, turning to me.
They must speak really funny in your country? I repeated the comment in my head. How could she have forgotten that it was her country too? Didn’t she realise that it was they who sounded funny with their weird way of speaking?
‘Children, stop with your nonsense,’ Mother warned. ‘And, Erna, there’ll be nothing else on offer for the day, so you can eat what you’ve been given or leave it.’
I left it.
‘How was Mass Sippa when you left him?’ Mother asked, when Patricia was clearing the dishes.
‘He was alright, mam. He seh fi tell everybody hello.’
Mother didn’t respond, just murmured to herself and got up from the table.
It was just after eight o’clock when I finally climbed the stairs to the room I was to share with Patricia. My body felt like a block of ice. I sat on the edge of the bed, my knees knocking and my teeth chattering loudly. I wrapped myself in the thin blue coat that the ugly Satan devil man had given me at the airport, and listened to the rattle of the window frame as the wind whistled fiercely outside. Tears silently streamed down my face. My first day in England had remained resolutely cold and grey. Finally, I curled up in the ice-cold bed in the freezing room and fell into a fitful sleep.
Chapter 20
By 7.30am the next morning, the house was buzzing with activity. I hadn’t realised that my first visit to the bathroom earlier in the morning was my only chance to wash with warm water. When I tried later, the hot water was all used up and I was left to squat over a purple plastic bucket half-full of icy water, attempting to clean myself. Everyone else was quickly dressed and ready for their day: Patricia, Clifton and Sonny in their school uniforms, and the twins in their identical pink knitted outfits. My mother looked smart in her sky-blue auxiliary nurse’s uniform, finished off with a little white cap and a white belt. The ugly Satan devil man was still on his night shift at the factory and hadn’t yet arrived home. It concerned me deeply that once Mother and the children left for the day, I would be the only one in the house when the ugly Satan devil man returned. Moments later they were gone – Mother to drop the twins with their childminder before making her way to the hospital, and Patricia and the boys headed for their schools.
Before leaving the house, Mother mentioned that there was some chicken-neck soup I could heat up if I got hungry. Then she took me into the bathroom and pointed to a mountain of clothing. ‘I want you to wash and hang these in the garden,’ she said, ‘and mind you don’t spoil the colours! Wash all the white things separate from the coloured things.’
I tried to hide the shock that must have appeared on my face. On my island, I’d only been responsible for washing my smalls; my grandparents had paid Miss Merle, Miss Blossom’s even more eccentric twin sister, to do the big washes and the ironing.
As soon as everyone had gone, I went to the bathroom and separated the clothing into colours and whites, threw all the white things into the bath and added some soap powder from a box I found in a cupboard by the door. I plunged my arms into the frigid water and started massaging the whites, but within seconds my fingers were numb. I withdrew them fast, dried them on a rough towel and went to the kitchen, where I searched out the biggest cooking pot I could find and filled it with water. Four pots of boiling water later and the water in the bath was just about warm enough for me to complete the washing. Rinsing was easy – I simply swished the clothes about in the bath with the help of a wooden spoon. After that, I made my way to the garden where I hung out the two lines of dripping wet clothes as fast as I could.
My chores completed
, I decided to explore the rest of the house, where I discovered that, apart from the kitchen, bathroom, dining room and the bedrooms where we children slept, all the other rooms were locked. With nothing else to do, I decided to take a walk. I pulled on every item of clothing I had and, bracing myself against the cold, I left the house, took the first left turn I came across, and was amazed to find that it led me to a small park with undulating grassy mounds and stark, leafless trees. The park was empty apart from an old woman walking a dog and two young mothers pushing giant prams. I walked briskly around the edge of the park before returning to the house. I was cold and hungry, but I still wasn’t looking forward to the chicken-neck soup. Grandpa had stopped serving me chicken-neck soup years before, when he’d seen me picking out the grizzly bits of flesh and depositing them in a tin can.
‘Chile, a trow yuh trow good food weh,’ he’d said.
‘Mi nuh like de chicken foot and chicken neck, Grandpa,’ I’d replied, ‘dem look lakka foot bottom and dem taste grizzle, grizzle!’
I hesitated, but chicken-neck soup was all there was. I turned the knob on the cooker, but, unlike earlier, nothing happened. The hall light didn’t come on either when I flicked the switch. It was the same story when I tried the switch in the bathroom and the bedroom. I was worried that I might have broken something with all that water boiling. I put the soup back in the fridge and found an over-ripe banana, which I ate slowly, relishing its sweetness.
Back in the bedroom, I sat in front of the paraffin heater, which Patricia had removed earlier from the boy’s room. Compared to the rest of the house, the temperature was bearable, but the room reeked of the paraffin. I warmed my hands in front of its grille before climbing back into the bed, where I wrapped myself in the sheet, the blanket and the heavy blue candlewick bedspread.
My body was just beginning to warm up nicely when the slam of the front door made me jump. I listened as someone walked heavily downstairs into the lower living area. Moments later, the hall light came on and I heard whoever it was walk back up to the ground floor. I assumed it was the ugly Satan devil man and, sure enough, moments later he called out, ‘Erna, you in the house?’
I ignored him by pretending to be asleep. I heard him climb up the stairs, then he stopped outside the bedroom door and turned the handle. I held my breath, but fortunately he made no attempt to enter; he simply reached inside and switched off the light.
It was Clifton who explained later that evening why the cooker and lights had stopped working.
‘Everything in this house works on a meter,’ he said.
‘What’s a meter?’ I asked. ‘How yuh mean everyting work from it?’
‘Come,’ he said.
I followed him downstairs to the room he called the ‘basement’. The low-ceilinged space was lit by a single dull light bulb. Strange black patches covered the walls and the stench of damp stuck in my throat.
‘Those are the meters,’ Clifton said, pointing at two black metal boxes fixed to the wall. ‘One’s for gas, the other is for electric. When you put a shilling in, everything works.’
So the mystery of the lights not working was solved. I soon found out that every few days the house would be plunged into darkness until either my mother or the ugly Satan devil man came home and replenished the meters. That was, until I remembered the bag of coins that I had brought with me from my island. It dawned on me that the England shilling was exactly the same shape and size as the island dollar. I showed Clifton the coins when he came home from school. The electricity had been off all day.
‘Maybe we can use dem in de meter,’ I said.
‘Yes, I think we could,’ Clifton agreed, ‘but my father will kill me if he finds out!’
‘Im nuh go know it’s you,’ I replied, not really believing it, but thinking it was worth the risk.
I held the torch while Clifton took one of my coins and pushed it into the electric meter slot. After a moment, the lights came on.
‘Yesss!’ he cried triumphantly, clapping his hands.
Then he led me back upstairs and showed me that he’d worked out a way of jamming a sixpence halfway into the slot on the television, which made it run continuously.
For the next few days, Clifton and I kept everything in the house running non-stop. It was all going fine until the ugly Satan devil man sensed something was up and went to check the meter, where he found one of the island coins that we must have left there by mistake. He came back upstairs with a face like thunder and went over to the television and discovered the sixpence that Clifton had jammed in the slot. We watched in terror, but he didn’t utter a single word. Instead, he sat heavily in the armchair, sweating profusely.
The ugly Satan devil man was a diabetic and had to inject himself daily with insulin. Mother told me that we had to look out for him, in case he forgot to inject, and that if we saw him sweating and shaking, then we had to shout ‘sugar!’ to remind him to take some. But now that it was happening we just sat there frozen with fear. Half an hour later, Mother came home and found him slumped in the armchair, with the four of us still sitting on the sofa, staring at him. She rushed to the bathroom and came back with an insulin-filled syringe, which she jabbed into his abdomen. After a minute or so, he began to recover, then, for a reason I was unable to understand, he grabbed hold of Patricia and began lashing her with his belt. The more she screamed, the more he hit her. It was only when she began screaming, ‘I’m going to tell! I’m going to tell!’ that Mother intervened, shouting, ‘Philbert! That’s enough!’
The ugly Satan devil man stared at her, wild-eyed and panting, and dropped the belt. Patricia ran crying to our bedroom. I gazed at my mother and her husband, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Then Clifton and Sonny started fighting and Mother screamed at us to go to our beds, and the moment was forgotten.
There were only four sources of heating in the house: the gas fires in the living and dinning rooms and two paraffin heaters, one of which never left my mother’s bedroom. The other one was shared between the other bedrooms and the bathroom, depending on who got to it first. The smell of damp that I had noticed in the basement gradually permeated the entire house and it seemed like every day a new black mould patch appeared on the walls. Despite the daily cold washes, the awful taste of everything, the freezing cold walks, the demanding chores, the lack of conversation and any fun, almost against my will, slowly but surely, I found myself becoming acclimatised to what felt like a nightmare place.
Chapter 21
England was turning out to be stranger than I could ever have imagined. I’d had no idea what I would find when I got here, and now that I was here, I was discovering that everything was at odds to the world that I’d grown up in. For a start, the people were different – not just the white people, but the black people as well. It was the dead of winter, and the sight of everyone wearing thick overcoats, knitted hats, scarves and boots just to go about their daily lives was weird enough, but seeing black people dressed in the same fashion was a whole other level of weirdness. What on earth could have persuaded them to leave a place like my island, where only grown men occasionally wore shirts with long sleeves, to live in a country where everyone had to swaddle themselves in layers of clothing? Another thing I hadn’t expected was that the black people came from all sorts of different places, not just from Jamaica. I was often perplexed by the multitude of accents and languages that I encountered. On my island, everyone spoke patois – with a few regional differences – and everyone talked to everyone else. Here in London, it seemed that people didn’t even know the names of their next-door neighbours. I soon discovered that some of our neighbours had come directly from Africa, but my mother warned me not to talk to them, as she didn’t like them, nor they her, it turned out. ‘They think they are better than us,’ she said, followed by her trademark suck of disgust on her teeth. But I was fascinated by them, especially the women, whom I often passed in the street. They were always dressed in elegant, wonderfully colourful clo
thing with dramatic headdresses. I would stop and stare at them while they walked regally by, barely registering my presence. It was the first time in my life that I heard the term ‘coloured’ used to describe people who looked like me. Back on my island, I had just been ‘me’. I wasn’t coloured, I wasn’t black, I was just Erna Mullings. Sometimes people on my island would cuss each other for being too black, or too red, or too ‘chinee’, but there were no ‘coloured people’, and it took me a long time to get used to the term. No one walking down the road greeted anyone. On my island, it was the height of bad manners not to greet your neighbour, but here it was normal. It was an unfriendly, upside down world that made little sense to me, and somehow I had not fully understood that leaving my island was meant to be permanent. The worst thing about this England place was the slow realisation that I was going to remain here forever. I started to experience disturbed sleep and would wake often during the night, each time convinced I was simply having a bad dream and that at any moment I would wake up in my little house on my island. But then morning would come, and with it the terrible realisation that it was no dream, but a nightmarish reality that had already lasted far too long. More than anything, I wanted to get back on that plane and return to my home. For the first time in my life, I found myself feeling really angry with Grandpa Sippa. Why did he ever agree to put me on that plane? ‘A de law of de land,’ he had stressed, when I questioned him about it before I left. ‘A de best ting mi kyan do fiyuh, chile. It wi get yuh a chance in life, an yuh wi be wit yuh mada, where yuh belong.’ But I did not belong and I was never going to belong. The only place I belonged was back on my island with him, so I decided to write a letter to tell him so.
November 1969
The Day I Fell Off My Island Page 16