by Alan Moore
Half a century ago, back in the 1890s, Henry George admits he isn’t so much thinking of a life in England as a life away from the United States. Now in his forties with both parents gone he’s got no reason to abide there in a place that’s never done him any favours and has burnt its mark into his arm. The truth be told, he’s all for leaving sooner but his momma and his poppa they can’t bear the thought of all that distance over water. Unlike Henry, born down there in Tennessee, the both of them have been on a long ocean voyage before and aren’t in any hurry to repeat it. “You go, Henry,” they both tell him. “You go over there while you’re still young and got your strength, and don’t you worry about us.” But Henry’s not the kind of man could ever do that, and so he takes care of them and waits it out, is genuinely glad for every minute they’re alive. Soon as they’re in the ground, though, he’s got nothing holding him, nothing to keep him from his berth aboard The Pride of Bethlehem, come steaming out of Newark bound for Cardiff and in one sense drawing in the third line of an ancient triangle for Henry, a pointed and dangerous shape connecting Africa, the U.S.A. and England on the stained three-hundred-year-old maps. On those long, lurching nights of the Atlantic crossing, though, he’s not thinking about any of that. He’s flipping scornfully through Buffalo Bill chapbooks in the sliding lamplight and he doesn’t entertain the slightest thought or speculation about what the country of his destination might turn out to be like; rarely thinks of it by name but instead inwardly refers to it as Not America.
That isn’t Bernard Daniels’s view, from his perspective of Fourah Bay College in the middle of the twentieth century. Bernard hails from a Krio family comparatively well-off after years of service to the Macauley and Babington trade company, and he imagines Europe generally – and England in particular – to be the fountainhead of all civilisation. This belief is prevalent amongst the Krio, mostly the descendants of absconded U.S. slaves, who through unswerving loyalty to their British bosses are Sierra Leone’s dominant and most prosperous ethnic group, with native tribes such as the Sherbro, Temne, Limba, Tyra, Kissi, and more latterly the Mende people drawn increasingly together in a shared resentment. Bernard is brought up in the belief that the indigenous tribesmen who live in the Protectorate are savages; embraces gold-rimmed spectacles and stately waistcoats, throws himself with greater diligence into his studies in an effort to more deeply underscore the critical dividing line. He looks at the society around him, at the outbursts of unrest and tribal riots that have continued intermittently since the great Hut Tax war of 1898 when British troops are sent in to suppress the Temne uprising, and Bernard sees the writing on the wall. It’s 1951, November, and Sir Milton Margai, born a Krio but raised as an ethnic Mende, is attending to the draft of a new constitution which will set the stage for decolonisation. Bernard has identified with the oppressor. He has taken on the master race’s fears and snobberies and doesn’t want to still be living in the Lion Mountains’ shadow when the animals control the zoo. Having acquired his law degree, he swiftly and efficiently begins to plan for his departure. Bernard marries his devoted young fiancée Joyce, as keen to make the move as he is, and arranges both their travel and some suitable accommodation once they get to London. Within only a few dizzying weeks his misplaced vision of the mother country has been butted squarely in the face by 1950s winter Brixton with its lights and catcalls, tilted trilbies, unfamiliar tumults. Wheezing innuendo in the barbers’ shops.
His scrawny legs still rolling from the ocean, Henry stumbles down the gangplank into nineteenth century Tiger Bay and, lacking Bernard’s expectations, finds it’s not too bad and in no way is it a shock to him, all the black faces, all the funny sing-song accents. The most startling thing to Henry’s mind is Wales itself, in that he’s never in his life imagined anywhere so wet and old and wild. It’s only when he meets Selina and they marry and nobody says a thing about it that he starts to truly understand he’s somewhere different now, and among different people. From Abergavenny they hike up to join the drovers in Builth Wells and are alone a night or two, camped out there in the million-year-old dark between giant hills, nothing like Kansas. Come the morning and the pair of them are naked as the day they’re born and holding hands as they pick their way slow and careful down the steep bank to a shallow stream what they can wash in. It’s real cold but his Selina is a plump young girl of twenty-two and they’ve got some hot blood between them. Pretty soon they’re having married congress standing up in foam and flow with the clear water churning all around their shins, out in the pinkness of the early daylight with nobody anywhere around except for all the birds that are at that time waking up and trying out their voices. Him and his new wife are kicking up a noise as well and Henry feels as if he’s in an Eden where nobody fell, with little diamonds splashing up and beaded on Selina’s pretty rump. He feels escaped, and can’t remember any moment in his previous life filled up with so much perfect joy. Then, after, when they’re lying on the bank to dry and catch their breath, Selina traces with her fingertip the fading violet lines on his damp arm, the ribbon that might be a road, the shape above it that might be a balance, and she doesn’t say a thing.
For Joyce and Bernard, twentieth century London is a different story. There’s a temperature inversion trapping car exhaust and factory smoke beneath low cloud, people are dying in their hundreds and the government are issuing the populace with useless paper masks in an attempt to look as if they’re doing something. Everybody’s coughing, spitting black muck onto overcast lanes with the Durex brand-name swimming forward out of backstreet fog in sticking-plaster cream and lipstick neon. Bernard realises belatedly that England too is a land of distinct and separate uncouth tribes – cosh-boys and market traders, socialists and spivs, white savages – united only by their grievance and an envy of their betters. Worse, nobody here seems able to appreciate the yawning gulf in status that exists between the black men of Sierra Leone’s Colony and those of its Protectorate, perceiving any coloured person as a coon regardless of their elocution or their bearing, irrespective of their spectacles and waistcoats. Joyce produces their first child, a boy named David, and is pregnant with their second while her husband finds that jobs for which he’s qualified, where his employers also have no qualms about his being African, are few and far between. It seems to Bernard that outside the capital there may be law firms who are not so used to the easy availability of quality employees as their London counterparts and who thus might be more impressed with his impeccable qualifications. He decides to cast his line further afield and at last gets a bite from a company of solicitors in somewhere called Northampton just as Joyce presents him with a second son, whom he proposes they name Andrew. Looking for accommodation in the new town, Bernard is confronted by a policy equating him with both dogs and the Irish while expressing a refusal to rent property to all three of these categories. His infuriating sense of being snubbed is only muddied by his sympathy for the position of the bigot landlords. If Bernard himself had space to let he knows he wouldn’t lease it to Dickensian criminals with vicious hounds, to drunken Irish labourers or to the great majority of his own workshy countrymen. When he gets news of rooms available not far from the town’s centre on a busy thoroughfare seemingly known as Sheep Street, Bernard’s celebratory mood endures until the final paragraph of the acceptance letter, where it states that this agreement is made on the understanding that just Mr. Daniels and his wife will be residing at the flat, and that there won’t be any pets or, most especially, children living there.
Meanwhile, in 1896, Henry and his young wife get carried to their new home on a vast and foaming tide of mutton. From what Henry understands, the landscape-bleaching herds are driven out from Builth and then persuaded to head east through Worcestershire and Warwickshire until they wash like bleating surf against Northampton. It’s a track been there a thousand years or more, and Henry hears how in the old days, century or so before, the drovers learn to stay away from inns where horses are tied up outside that look to be
in too good a condition. This is on account of how these well-fed horses more than likely turn out to belong to highwaymen, who have a habit back then of befriending drovers who are headed east, inviting them to call in for a drink on their way back when they’ll have traded all their sheep for money. Naturally, this means that on the return journey they’ll be more convenient to rob and get left with their throats cut in some Stratford ditch. Because of this, most of the herdsmen carry on out of Northampton with their sheep and take them down to London, so they can head back to Wales through Bristol and down that way, missing out the Worcester taverns where the highwaymen are waiting. It occurs to Henry that this Wales – Northampton – London route marks out another triangle much like the one connecting England with America and Africa, and in both cases it’s a kind of cattle being moved. And then of course you’ve got another similarity in that some of the animals that Henry is in charge of – although not that many of them, now he comes to think about it – have been branded. The main difference is the colour of the goods. Henry considers how the movement of his family over generations has been down these well-worn paths of trade, whether that trade be sheep or people, U.S. steel or Buffalo Bill chapbooks, and supposes that these lines of least resistance, which first get carved out by enterprise, end up as destinies. It’s down these money-trails that, say, your great-great-grandpa’s fondness for a drink or else your grandma’s big green eyes go wandering, around the world and through the ages. Henry and Selina don’t have much of what you’d call a plan behind their journey, figuring they’ll maybe carry on to London with the drovers and if they don’t like it there, why, then they’ll head on back to Wales. This is before they reach Northampton and get funnelled in through its north gate in a great swathe of white, where there’s that circle-church that’s older than the hills, there’s that almighty tree been scarred in all the wars, and Henry and his wife Selina, with her mile-long tick-infested bridal train trotting behind her on the cobbles, first set eyes on Sheep Street.
Electing to take up their new address, there in the grey and tan Northampton avenues of 1954, demands that Joyce and Bernard make some hard decisions. Clearly, the “no children” rule presents the biggest obstacle to living in the Sheep Street flat and thus to Bernard taking up his best and thus far only offer of a job, but he thinks he can see a way around it. Up by train from London in a cloud of steam and coal-smoke for a visit to the premises he meets a would-be neighbour from the rooms downstairs, an amiable idealist from the International Friendship League. This is some form of thankfully entirely ineffectual English socialist conglomerate of the variety that Bernard generally avoids, but in this instance the old chap appears to offer Bernard a solution to his “no children allowed” predicament: the man suggests that he has room to hide a child in his downstairs accommodation during those occasions when the landlord comes to pay a visit, which would go at least halfway to solving Bernard’s quandary, the other half of which is his and Joyce’s second baby, little Andrew. Their new neighbour clearly doesn’t have the room to hide two infants, and as Bernard’s firstborn it seems only right that the two-year-old David should take precedence. After an unusually heated consultation with his wife, Bernard decides it would be best if Andrew were to stay in Brixton with some relatives of Joyce’s until they’re established in the town and can arrange a mortgage, can arrange a permanent address with room for all the family. In Bernard’s view, with Andrew being still a few months shy of his first birthday he’s less likely to have formed a strong attachment to his mother and will therefore miss her less than David would do. Bernard doubts so small a child will even be aware that anything is different. And besides, in later life the baby won’t be able to remember anything about it. It will be as if this admittedly less than ideal situation hasn’t happened. At last everything’s arranged, everything goes ahead and on their first night in the new flat with its view of that peculiar and hardly Christian-looking church across the street, Joyce doesn’t sleep and weeps until the morning. Bernard, frankly, doesn’t understand why she can’t just resign herself and make the best of it. They’re only doing what they have to do, and in perhaps a year it will all work out fine for everyone. Andrew will be all right. There’s no harm done.
Henry and his Selina make their way down Sheep Street to the market square so he can go collect his wages from the Welsh House that they have there, and he knows from the way everybody’s looking at him that he’s got the only black face in the town. It’s not that they appear resentful or they’re giving him the hard eye like he shouldn’t be there, how it would have been in Tennessee. The people of Northampton look to be more plain amazed, regarding Henry like they would one of them big giraffes that he’s seen pictures of, or something else so rarefied and out-the-way that no one had expected to see nothing like it in their town or in their lifetime. People smile or some of them look shocked but mostly they just stand there with their faces hanging out as if they don’t know what to do with them. For his part, Henry figures he must look the same way, gawping at the ancient town in all its queerness. It’s like Henry and Northampton are dumbstruck with mutual astonishment. First that round church, been standing on its spot eight hundred years, while down the street there’s that big beech tree must be pretty near as old, and then you’ve got a market square that’s from around the same time, from around the year ten hundred-something. That’s a long time, long enough to make his head spin. Why, back then the slave trade between countries hadn’t been invented, far as Henry knows. There’s no United States, no Tennessee, and white people have never heard of Africa. There’s just the circle-church, the beech tree and the woollen river winding between here and Wales. To Henry it seems like all of these centuries the place has been here are a kind of breadth or depth that he can’t see but which conspires to give the town a feeling of great magnitude that’s bigger than its visible real size. After they pick up Henry’s pay the pair of them go for a walk up from the market square and back to Sheep Street, where they make their way down this old alley with a sign up says it’s Bullhead Lane, so steep and narrow it feels like one of them nonsense-places in a dream, and that’s how they descend into the Boroughs. From the start it’s all around them, clamouring for their attention. There’s some tough old girls look fit to pull each other’s heads off rolling in the street outside one of the beer establishments, and anywhere you’re standing you can see around a dozen similar public houses, there’s that many of them. There’s a blind man playing on a barrel-organ, rabbits hopping right there on the cobbles, everybody’s got a hat on and nobody’s got a gun. There’s every kind of call and conversation, and in Scarletwell Street, where they spend a piece of Henry’s wages in advance rent on a house they take a shine to, they see Newton Pratt’s astounding beast drinking its beer and trying to stay upright just across the street there. Henry and Selina take it for a sign and move in right away. They’ve got a whole house to themselves, and though it’s small and wedged into its sooty terrace like a book jammed in a bookshelf it seems much too big at first, but that’s before the babies start to pour out of Selina in a happy babbling flood that rises to their ankles, then their knees, and in what seems like just a year or two they’re standing shoulder-deep in children.
As a grown man David Daniels can’t remember much about his origins there at the flat in Sheep Street, his two years as an official Boroughs resident. His infancy, that endless continuity of moments when each moment is a saga, has evaporated to leave only a thin residue of pictures and associations, brittle sepia snapshots taken from floor-level with the details and the context bleaching out around the edges. He recalls the endless plain of carpet in the living room, soft beige with fronds and curlicues that are an acre of gold fuzz now in his memory, stabbed by slanting blades of sunlight. There’s a flickering internal film-loop, a few seconds long, of David hooked up to his mother Joyce by leather reins and stumbling uncertainly downhill along a sloping path with crumbled loose-tooth tombstones rising up to either side, which he
now realises must be in the graveyard of the Holy Sepulchre, the old church just across the way. When he gets taken out for walks it’s always to the north or east of Sheep Street, never to the west or south. It’s always to the Racecourse just a little up past Regent’s Square and never down into the Boroughs, a disreputable neighbourhood where unbeknownst to him his future playmate Alma Warren sleeps sound in the bosom of her ordinarily peculiar clan. David’s initial recollections of his dad are more like memories of a ship than of a person, with the chest and gentle paunch thrown forward like a brocade mainsail swelled by tailwind. Thumbs hooked presidentially in waistcoat pockets and up past the crow’s nest of his tie-knot, Bernard’s proud face like a flag; a better-nourished Jolly Roger with its twinkling glass sockets gilded at their rims, sailed here upon spiced currents from High Barbary, from the lion hills of the old country in which David was conceived and which his parents very seldom mention. Then there are the days of mystery and adventure when his mother takes him on the huffing dragon train to London so that she can visit friends or family, he’s not sure which, and David spends the afternoons in unfamiliar Brixton parlours playing with a little boy called Andrew who seems nice enough, but whom he doesn’t know. When David’s four years old in 1956, Bernard and Joyce at last discover a white couple who’ll arrange a mortgage with the racially mistrustful banks. They move into a pleasant house in Kingsthorpe Hollow, funny little Andrew turns up unexpectedly to live with them and for the first time David comes to understand he has a brother, that he’s had a brother all this time and never heard a thing about it until now. He starts to wonder how much of his life is going on without his knowledge, starts to speculate on where and who his parents might have been before they suddenly materialise as a home-owning married couple in Northampton, just as though they’ve always been here. Why don’t David and his baby brother seem to have grandparents? Are his mother and his father born like gods out of the mud and sky, from the Northampton landscape with no mortal ancestors preceding them? He has the sense of a big, complicated story that he’s come in at the middle of, and an impression of a history that’s kept apart from him, in quarantine, like Andrew. How could they not tell him that he’s got a brother? He begins to worry about any more astonishing surprises that might be in store for him. Given their new house and new neighbours, given the way his family are encouraged to regard themselves now they’re not living in the Boroughs anymore, David begins to wonder whether he’s even actually black, if David is indeed his real name.