Dear Grandpa Sippa,
I hope this letter of mine find you in the best of health. I hope you’re not feeling too lonely. I am sorry that this is the first letter I am writing to you since I reach England. I wanted to write you before, but I thought I should settle myself and get to know the place a bit better, so I could tell you some good news. Well, Grandpa Sippa, although I have decided to write you now, I still don’t have anything good to tell you yet. Maybe apart from that it’s nice to see Patricia, Clifton and Sonny again and it’s nice to meet the baby twins, Doretta and Barbette. I hardly recognise Patricia and the boys, though. They have all grown much taller and they are all a bit bony. Not like the twins who are really fat. Also, Patricia and the boys now speak with English accents. I can hardly understand what they’re talking about sometimes, and they don’t always understand me either.
Grandpa Sippa, I can’t find anything to like about this England place. The place is cold like inside a freezer and it never seem to stop raining. Sometimes the place is so foggy you can’t even see the person walking next to you. The food is not nice either, Grandpa, but I like their tea. I drink lots of tea. It helps to keep me warm. I was right, too, they don’t have even one single mango tree here. Not one. We can buy mango from the market, but one ripe mango cost nearly the same here as a hamper full of mango would cost us on the island. They have lots of trees, but most of them don’t have fruit growing on them and most of them have no leaves, although Clifton tell me that will change in the sping time.
The worst thing, Grandpa, is that people don’t even say hello to you in this place. The white people don’t like the black people at all, and the black people don’t like the white people much, and none of them talk to you. I used to try and say good morning to everyone I met in the street, but some people would look on me like I was mad, so I don’t do that any more, and anyway the people always seems to be in one big hurry.
I can’t say that I like living with Miss Violet and her husband either. Sometimes Miss Violet doesn’t seem so well. She get very upset and don’t talk to anyone for a long time, and she take lots of pills for her nerves. And I don’t like her husband at all and I don’t think Grandma Melba would ever want me to like him.
I am hoping to start attending school in January. I am looking forward to that because I miss learning. For now, I am mostly staying in the house, and I help Miss Violet with the twins sometimes.
Grandpa Sippa, I miss you and everybody. I miss our house and specially all the sunshine, and I still really really miss Grandma Melba. I don’t think that will stop.
I am going to finish this letter now, Grandpa Sippa. I am sure that next time I write, I will have some good news to tell you.
God bless you and take care of yourself,
Your granddaughter, Erna.
My days consisted of chores, going for brisk walks and, on Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings, reluctantly accompanying my mother, her husband, and my siblings to their evangelical church meetings. The church was a large, ugly, single-storey building, sat back from the main road. It had a mixed congregation of both white and black people, but the whole place had a strange feeling about it. We were not the only children to be dragged along to the church, but, in my eyes, we seemed like the most normal. Given how dysfunctional my family was, this was quite a feat. All the other teenage girls were dressed like five-year-olds and behaved accordingly. There was one girl called Babsie, a tall girl of around fifteen, with a lopsided face. She was always dressed in flowery knee-length frocks with voluminous puff sleeves. Every week, she seemed to be on the verge of starting a conversation with Patricia and me, but the words never quite came.
‘Hi, Babsie,’ I said one Sunday morning, just before the dreaded sermon began, ‘you alright?’
Babsie just stared at me from her lopsided face. Her mouth twitched ever so slightly, but no words came out.
‘Maybe she’s dumb,’ Patricia said, as we walked away.
At precisely a quarter to ten on Sunday mornings, the pastor would sound a handbell and everyone would stream into the building. Once inside they would sit chattering away as if they actually liked each other, but as soon as they left the building the white people would revert to talking to their white brethren and the black people to theirs. Our mother’s main reason for taking Patricia and me along was so we could look after the twins, which gave her time to chat to her Bible sisters. Inside, like the village church back on the island, there were no effigies of any kind. It was just a large plain room with benches, a platform and a reading stand. Men would stand up and read out pages and pages from the Bible and then a few tuneless songs would be sung. Then everyone would sit down again for yet more Bible readings. The women didn’t receive the spirit or talk in tongues. There was no dancing or shouting of ‘Praise the Lord!’ The whole scene was as dry as two sticks being rubbed together. Only there was no fire or brimstone here. It was a passionless, joyless experience for Patricia and me, but these church visits were the highlight of my mother’s week, and it was the only time she appeared chatty and happy.
It began to seem like my life would continue in this miserable vein forever, when one chilly Saturday afternoon the mood in our house lightened unexpectedly. My mother had spent the previous two weeks preparing for a party. It was our turn to host our extended family, which turned out to be a tradition started by my mother’s eldest sister, Auntie Madge, as a way of keeping everyone connected. This was the very same Auntie Madge who had written to us about Mother’s predicament two years earlier. She was a formidable character who, along with her husband, Herbie, had provided many of our island relatives with a room in her large house in Clapham, until they were able to rent or purchase a home of their own.
At around four o’clock on the Saturday, relatives began to arrive. Within a couple of hours, over forty adults and children had piled into our house, filling all the common spaces. No one looked casual: all the men wore suits and the women sported an array of fabulous frocks, bought specially for the occasion.
‘Bwoy mi loving dis!’ I said to Patricia as the house echoed with noise, laughter and the reggae music that our relatives had brought with them.
‘Come, Violet!’ a skinny man with straightened hair shouted, pulling my mother towards him. ‘A long time you have a dance with your old school friend.’
He swung my mother around the middle of the room a couple of times until she managed to escape his grasp. ‘I have to look after everyone, Linford,’ she squealed, ‘I’ve got no time for you and your crazy dances!’
Then someone put Millie Small’s ‘My Boy Lollipop’ on, and all at once everyone got up to dance to the ska beat.
‘The place too hot, though!’ cried a male relative who had found a seat in a corner and was sipping from a bottle of brandy. ‘The dancing will provide all the heat we need right now,’ he added, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. Of all the days for my mother to have actually switched on the fire!
‘You can start making your way through to the dining room,’ Mother said, during a lull in the dancing.
She was like a woman transformed. She bantered with her relatives as they moved around the table collecting their food. ‘I can’t believe so many months have passed since we last saw each other, Vernie,’ she twittered to a woman in a striking red dress, ‘in fact, I think it was at the last get-together at your place.’
‘Time is our enemy, cousin,’ Vernie replied, ‘but at least we are guaranteed to meet up at these gatherings. Well, as far as we can guarantee anything.’
Somehow, Mother had managed to make the whole affair appear as if fun and laughter were just how things moved in the house. But all too soon it was over and life returned to its normal dreariness, and it was hard to believe the party had even happened.
Chapter 22
Soon enough it was December and coming up to my first Christmas in England. All the shops were lit up and filled with bright sparkling things. Every conversation, whether at the bus stop, on the train, or in the
park, seemed to be about Christmas. People were constantly asking each other what they were doing for Christmas, what they wanted for Christmas, what gifts they were giving to whom, whether they were going away for Christmas or staying at home. The local high street was packed with shoppers who appeared to be in an even bigger rush than usual. I sat by the living room window and watched as our next-door neighbour, Mr Kelly, dragged a Christmas tree into his house. Everywhere I looked, people seemed to be dragging Christmas trees along with them.
It was a good time for the rag-and-bone man to tout for business. I heard his horse and cart clanking along the street at least once a week in the weeks leading up to the holidays, accompanied by his sing-song refrain: ‘Make space for the new! If it’s broken, we’ll take it away! Make space for the new!’
One afternoon, as I made my way home from another of my brisk park walks, I found myself arriving back at the same time as Mrs Kelly. As we climbed the steps to our respective front doors, she turned and asked me, ‘Is your ma around, dear?’
‘No, mam, she gone to de hospital for work,’ I replied.
‘Oh, so she has! I don’t suppose you and your brothers and sister want to see the tree, do you now, dear? Me and the boys put it up yesterday.’ Mrs Kelly knew full well that our mother did not celebrate Christmas, and would not have approved of the invitation. ‘It could be our little secret,’ she continued, ‘we wouldn’t want to upset your ma now, would we? But you’re children, after all, and every child loves Christmas. Santa coming and all that!’
Patricia and the boys let out yelps of joy when I told them of Mrs Kelly’s invitation.
‘I wish we could have a Christmas tree,’ Clifton sighed.
‘Me too,’ echoed Sonny. ‘All my friends at school have one.’
The Kelly’s house was the opposite of ours in every way. Everything about it seemed perfect. The first thing I noticed when Mrs Kelly opened her front door was how warm it was. There was a long radiator in the hallway that was almost too hot to touch.
‘In you go, dears,’ Mrs Kelly sang, as she ushered us into her living room.
Inside the room, a granite fireplace glowed with orange flames that danced above a mound of white-hot coals. On the mantelpiece were framed photographs of John F Kennedy and the Pope, surrounded by pictures of family members and children taking their first Holy Communion. Next to the fire, inside an alcove, there was a miniature shrine that housed a tiny water font, alongside a statue of Mother Mary with a bleeding heart. The tree that I’d seen Mr Kelly dragging past a few days before was standing tall in the bay window. A doll in a full-length white dress, a pair of wings protruding from her back, and a white veil partly covering her blonde hair, sat at the very top of the tree.
‘Why yuh put a dolly on top of de tree, Miss Kelly?’ I asked her.
‘Because it represents Jesus Christ, dear,’ she explained.
‘But Jesus was a man, Miss Kelly, and dat is a girl dolly.’
‘You have a point, Erna!’ she smiled thinly. ‘I should have said she represents the Bride of Christ.’
I decided not to ask the next question that popped into my head, about why Jesus’s bride was white.
Beneath the tree lay a pile of beautifully wrapped presents, each with an individual name tag. Patricia, Clifton and Sonny had moved over to the tree and stood staring open-mouthed in admiration at them.
‘Those are mostly for our boys, Frankie and Aaron,’ Mrs Kelly said. ‘We’ve lots of family back in Ireland. They all send the boys little gifts for birthdays and Christmases.’
A tall bookshelf weighed down with books lined the wall opposite the fireplace. I was entranced by the sight of so many books in one house, but as I edged closer, trying to read the names on their spines, Mrs Kelly’s voice stopped me in my tracks.
‘I see that you like books, dear,’ she said, ‘you can come and look another time.’
I had a vague idea that Mr Kelly’s job was something to do with the government and that Mrs Kelly worked as a schoolteacher. I guessed that was why they had so many books.
‘Excuse me for one minute, children,’ Mrs Kelly announced suddenly, ‘and mind you don’t touch anything.’
We stood as still as statues, almost too scared to breathe, until she returned with a china plate covered with thick, round, cream-coloured biscuits.
‘These are proper Irish biscuits,’ she said, as she handed me the plate. ‘I baked them myself yesterday.’
‘Thank you, mam,’ I said.
‘Mind you share them fairly,’ she said.
No sooner had we taken one each and bitten into them, she started shooing us out of the house. ‘Off with you now, then,’ she said, ‘and don’t forget to give my regards to your mother.’
And with that she herded us out of the front room and through the front door.
My mother made it clear that she disliked everything about Christmas. She even refused to say the word unless she had to, replacing it with ‘Christendom’ whenever she had to refer to it – a word that she was not shy about using in public. A few days before the day itself, she took us to Woolworth’s on the Old Kent Road. The boys were convinced that they were going to be bought presents, so they skipped happily alongside her. But Mother’s shopping expedition had nothing to do with buying us children anything. She had taken up sewing again and wanted to purchase herself a much-needed sewing box for all her needlework paraphernalia. The wooden box turned out to be quite a large item and, along with various other purchases, we knew that it was going to be our job to carry them all home.
‘This Christmas thing,’ she announced loudly, as we followed her around the store, ‘is a pagan celebration for heathens and the ungodly. And you can take your eyes off all that rubbish,’ she snapped when she caught Sonny and Clifton looking wistfully at the pretend parcels under a huge Christmas tree. ‘None of that devil worshipping stuff will be coming into my house!’
As I watched other people’s children racing around the store, begging their parents to buy them one of the multitude of toys on display, thoughts of Christmas celebrations on my island came flooding back to me. Christmas wasn’t something that was spoken about, it was just something that islanders did. Preparations would start with house painting, followed by an insane amount of house cleaning and yard sweeping. Everything inside and outside the house had to shine. A few days before the big day, village children would gather together and sing every Christmas song they knew, or just any old folk song with a good rhythm.
‘Christmas a come an mi waan mi lama.’
‘Christmas a come an mi waan mi deggeday.’
‘While shepherds wash their socks by night and hang them out to dry’ and so on, with all the versions children liked to sing.
The village men would build a makeshift dance hall in the middle of Mass Byron’s yard, and would organise two big dances over the weekend leading up to Christmas. Villagers would flock from all around, dressed in their finest clothes. It was a time when copious amounts of white rum and Red Stripe beer were drunk by the adults and a ton of curried goat and chicken and rice and peas consumed. Once everyone was fed and watered, the dancing would start – to ska and bluebeat, all night through. The atmosphere was electric. We children would be given small amounts of money, which we spent on firecrackers that detonated with delightful noisy explosions, frightening old women and chickens alike. Christmas was a time for villagers to come together, for fun and merriment. But our mother’s church did not observe Christmas and she in turn must have shut out her memories of island Christmases.
On our return from Woolworths, Mother unlocked the living room door, walked over to the gas fire and ignited it. This was something she did only when she couldn’t avoid the fact that it was actually colder inside the house than it was outside.
‘This is another level of cold,’ she gasped, ‘pneumonia weather!’
We all rushed forward and, with a bit of pushing and shoving, I managed to get closest to the fire. With my feet out
stretched and my hands resting behind my head, I lay back on the carpet and felt my body slowly begin to warm up.
It wasn’t long before Patricia had something to say. ‘Some people’s fingers and toes fall off in the cold,’ she stated.
‘And your eyes and your mouth can freeze shut,’ Clifton added.
‘That’s not true,’ Patricia countered. ‘When did you see anyone with their eyes and mouth frozen shut? Only blind people’s eyes are shut and that’s cause they’re blind, and nobody’s mouth can close over unless it gets sewn up, stupid!’
‘An yuh see people wit dere fingers and toes fall off, Patricia?’ I asked.
‘Course not, but I know it’s true,’ she replied.
Clifton began to laugh, just the way he did when he was a very small boy and had suddenly remembered something that he thought was funny.
‘I did a pee in the garden when it was really cold and it turned into ice,’ he said.
‘How is that even funny? It just means you’re nasty,’ mocked Patricia.
Nevertheless, we all started laughing and, despite her retort, Patricia laughed the hardest. For a brief time, it was as if we were back on our island, laughing together and having fun.
Then a small voice came out of Sonny, ‘Erna, your boot a burn up!’
Suddenly, I could smell burning rubber and could feel the heat on the toes of my right foot. I snatched my leg away and removed the boot. As I did so the burnt area detached itself from the sole. My brand-new boots were ruined!
‘What in the name of Jehovah is going on?’ barked my mother, entering the room with a face like curdled milk. The smell of burning rubber was unavoidable. She marched over to the fire and turned it off.
We were already on our feet, ready to skedaddle as fast as we could, when she yelled, ‘Not you, Erna, wait!’ I stopped dead in my tracks. ‘I want you to know,’ my mother said in an icy voice, ‘that you’re going to wear those boots until they’re ready to fall apart.’
The Day I Fell Off My Island Page 17