Who Am I, Again

by Lenny Henry

  Lenny Henry

  Who am I, again?

  For Mama

  To change your language

  you must change your life.

  Derek Walcott

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  1 Mama, Papa and Early Childhood

  2 The Magnificent Seven

  3 The H’Integration Project

  4 The Origins of My Comedy

  5 Entering Showbiz

  6 Minstrelsy

  7 Growing Up Fast

  8 Tiswas

  Afterword

  Notes to a Young Comic

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Preface

  Now, 2019 …

  I’m in the back of a black cab heading from Westminster, going past Victoria Station. Rain-slicked scaffolding, Hamilton the musical, fast-food joints, commuters and an onslaught of targeted advertising that beggars belief. London’s brilliant.

  I thought I’d attempt a bit of context before we dive head-first into my story. The first thing to say is that this is only part of my story – the early years. To create a memoir from where I am now would involve a massive amount of memory mining. I didn’t keep a diary when I was a child, so assistance from the past is not particularly forthcoming.

  In many respects I was a normal kid – I loved playing and pretending. There were TV programmes called things like The Saint and The Champions and Man in a Suitcase, and I loved them all. When I walked to school in the morning, I was Simon Templar or Amos Burke or John Steed. These guys didn’t look anything like me, but I wanted to be like them. In art classes, when I made a self-portrait of me as a secret agent or a kick-ass cop with super-powers, I invariably drew myself as a white guy, in a sharp suit and sporting a pointy quiff. That was my experience of what was on television all the time. Black people were usually the baddies or the trusty friend with a twinkle in his eye or the victim. I chose not to emulate those guys. I only wanted to be the cool-talking, martini-drinking, gun-toting hero – who was usually white.

  This was the early 1960s, so there were very few people of colour on TV. If we were ever spoken about on screen, it would usually be as the butt of a comedian’s joke. More often than not, we were a punchline. But as I reached my early teens in the early 1970s, things were beginning to change.

  In the meantime, I’m still in the cab, thinking about the way things were back then.

  In terms of this book, I thought it would be worth talking a little about my siblings – my fantastic brothers and sisters, Hylton, Seymour, Kay, Sharon and Paul – because they are a route to my mother, Winnie, who passed away in 1998. I’m also going to talk a lot about my three most prominent friends during my post-pubescent, most formative period: Greg, Mac and Tom. We called ourselves the Grazebrook Crew, after the road where Mac lived, and they remain a key part of my story.

  I’m going to discuss growing up and puberty and school and getting up on stage at the Queen Mary Ballroom (a dance venue at the top of Dudley Zoo. The animals watched us go in sober and come out drunk). I intend to talk about as much of my life as I feel can fit into this framework, which I reckon stretches from 1958 to 1980-ish. That takes us up to a crucial point in my development, and includes the first angry outbursts of punk and the related uprising of alternative comedy. Perhaps another book will take in marriage and Chef! and later versions of The Lenny Henry Show and Hollywood and the like. But right now, I want to focus on this quite tight time frame. It feels manageable.

  I’ve been communicating with my friends and family about the whole writing/memory-mining process. They all wanted to have their say, and I have referred to them when I thought it apposite. I do have a problem with dredging up old thoughts and memories, however. I find that sometimes things weren’t how you actually remembered them. You think it sort of happened like that, but there’s bound to be a bit you don’t quite remember; there’ll be the crystalline and honed dinner-party version of that story. But then there’s the crushing moment when your mum or uncle or sister or mate tells you, ‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ or ‘You didn’t exactly say that’ … and on and on and on. We reframe and re-edit our pasts: exam results change, our teachers become kinder or more ogre-ish, our sporting prowess more Olympian and our sexual exploits exhaustingly naughty, horny and relentless.

  There’s another reason for not entirely spilling my internal organs onto the page: there are some things about my childhood that I genuinely don’t know. The moments I’m not sure of I’ve tended to leave out like the least-liked Opal Fruit. The idea that memoirs are a time for settling old scores doesn’t gain much traction with me either. My gut tells me that if I was too cowardly or hesitant to sort something out at the time, what good would it do to dredge up the moment again and cross-examine it in retrospect? When I do discuss things or events where I felt hard done by or misused, I hope I’ve dealt with them fairly.

  In On Writing, Stephen King compares Mary Karr’s evocation of her childhood – as ‘an almost unbroken panorama’ – with his sense of recall, which appears like ‘a fogged-out landscape from which occasional memories appear like isolated trees’. I know what King means here: for some of us, memories are sketched, ghostly things – unreliable. The one phantom thread running through the forest of my story is ‘Who am I?’ or ‘Who should I be for the people around me?’ Who do they expect me to be? Son? Pal? Comedian? And so each time a new Lenny was needed, I jumped.

  For the most part, then, this book is not an autobiography, but a biography. Because I’m writing about someone I used to know.

  Nelson Mandela once said, ‘Forget the past.’ In many respects I think he was right. The past can appear to be this other country, this exalted place where you spent so much time and where so many things happened that were good or bad or painful, and it’s difficult to let go, but in the living of life there is forward movement and so you wind up letting go anyway, just by virtue of putting one foot after the other.

  So while I’m relatively happy to look back, right now I’m in a cab moving forward and, when I reach where I’m going, I will continue putting one foot in front of the other – and then I’ll jump.

  1

  Mama, Papa and Early Childhood

  MAMA

  Before anything else, I remember Mama. She was the Jamaican Wonder Woman. I’m being a bit facetious – there were lots of women like my mama. She was of a particular stock, the kind of person who had worked very hard from a very young age. She had powerful hands, and if you were swiped or punched by either of them, you knew about it.

  Mama’s feet were large. As a child, I would try on her shoes. They were huge – massive boats with heels and a buckle at the front. I would slide around in them pretending to be important, because, whether she wanted the title or not, Mama was the alpha in our family. Papa was tough and ‘manly’ in appearance, but at home it was very clear who was in charge. Mama was just better equipped for the trials and tribulations of raising a large family in a semi-hostile environment.

  Her legs were incredibly powerful. She had obviously spent many years walking the highways and byways of the Jamaican countryside. As a subsistence farmer and market trader she spent hour upon hour working in the fields and carrying straw baskets of fruit and veg to and from the market. Having seen some of these fields, highways and byways for myself, it’s clear that walking long distances was the norm for people like Mama and Papa. I now understand why walking was such a big part of her life here in the UK, where she would clock up miles trudging around Dudley and beyond.

  Everyone in Dudley seemed to know my mama. As a small child, out with Mama on an apparently endless S
aturday shopping trip (when else would she have the time to shop? She was a working woman!), I would note the countless familiar nods from Caribbean men and women. Mama spent most Saturdays going up and down Dudley High Street nodding at every black person she saw. She had a relatively plain face. The experience of growing up in rural Jamaica, working in fields and performing back-breaking tasks for little money, obviously affected her habitual demeanour. She smiled rarely, but when she did, it was fantastic. Most days she wore a mask of granite that said, ‘Don’t mess with me. I’m Winifred Henry, and if you try anything funny, I’ll knock you through a brick wall.’ Because she could.

  Saying that, she laughed a lot, but mainly in the confines of the house. She was a gifted storyteller, charming, funny, with a great sense of description, outrage and mispronunciations: she didn’t say ‘certificate’, she said ‘cer-fi-tick-et’; she didn’t say ‘film’, she said ‘flim’. Like a lot of Caribbean people, she would watch her favourite soaps – Crossroads and Coronation Street – and commentate throughout. Of Coronation Street’s resident lothario Len Fairclough:

  ‘Yu see yu? Yu favour dog.’

  Of busybody Hilda Ogden, also from Corrie:

  ‘What a way she nosey-ee?’

  Because I spent a lot of my childhood being disciplined by this woman – with belts, branches, boots, sometimes the occasional pan lid – seeing her laugh was a revelation. All that anger and worry would disappear from her face, and this other Mama would appear – huge smile, sparkling eyes, honking laugh, which I would often satirise, for my own comedy purposes, later on in my career. I loved this Mama; I wasn’t so keen on the other one – she was too vexed.

  Just before Mama died in 1998, she cleverly set me and my siblings a challenge. She was in her pomp, safely ensconced in her bungalow near Brierley Hill. We were all there, in various stages of distress. Mama looked at us and said, ‘Humph … I bet when I’m gone you’ll scatter to the four corners of the earth and never see each other again.’ So, when she finally passed away, we vowed that we would meet up at least four times a year.

  And that’s pretty much what we do, sitting and talking about the things we love to talk about:

  – Mama’s cooking; her burnt Christmas cake.

  – Her way of laughing at things, which came in three stages: a very high-pitched, plosive ‘Ha hiiiii’, then a ‘Woy!’ and perhaps a knee slap, and then, finally, as if she’d just remembered she needed to put a punctuation mark on the whole thing, ‘Jesus Christ!’ (This was before her born-again days, obviously.)

  – The way she’d crunch ice from a bowl as she watched telly (that’d be in the summer), or the way she’d snack on Scotch bonnet peppers (one of the hottest chili peppers in existence – think molten lava, and then double it). There’d be no hint of pain as she ate, whereas I remember eating a Scotch bonnet fragment by mistake and having to spend the rest of the evening upside down under the cold tap.

  We talk about the way Mama was, who she was, her unshakeable Christian faith in her later years, what she achieved in her time on this earth and what we all learnt from her, because remembering and reflecting on the struggles of the previous generation equips future generations with the wisdom and coping tools that they, in turn, can pass on to their children.

  Mama’s story begins in Jamaica.

  The West Indian migration to Britain in the 1950’s was part of a history of migration from the Caribbean islands which had started over one hundred years before. It began with the migration of former slaves, very soon after emancipation in 1834. As free men and women many soon discovered that there was little opportunity and hardly any fertile land left for them to develop. One of the means of overcoming poverty was to leave their island altogether – to migrate. Migration was also thought to be a form of protest whereby former slaves could demonstrate their hatred of a system that had tied them for so long to one place.

  (FROM Motherland BY ELYSE DODGSON)

  Throughout this memoir, I will plump more for my feelings than for accuracy. Knowing my mother’s stories so well, research might feel redundant when compared to the actual heart-felt reasons for my mother’s actions.

  Before I was born, Mama had four children by her husband, Winston Jervis Henry: Hylton, Bev, Seymour and Kay. She also lost three other children – one stillborn and two miscarriages – before producing Kay, her fourth surviving child. I didn’t find out the truth about the dead babies until I was making a documentary retracing my family’s roots in Jamaica. My brother Seymour took me to our village and, first, showed me the family home, which was basically two broken-down walls amid a plethora of overgrown greenery. Then we drove down the road to Grandma’s house, behind which we found a group of family graves, among which were three tiny, cigar-shaped gravestones.

  My papa was thirteen years older than Mama and, to my eyes anyway, a hardened stoic. He probably thought that they’d just go on pushing a plough and having kids and hardly eating. My mama had other ideas. So did her brother, Clifton.

  * * *

  It was Uncle Clifton’s fault. I can see him now: a spiv’s moustache, a trilby, which he always wore perched on the back of his head, and a sheepskin car coat. He had made the great leap to the United Kingdom first, to test the waters. He found a place to live in Dudley, in the Black Country, and got a job at Bean’s Industries, a company that supplied components to the car industry – anything from crank cases to gearboxes. They were based in Tipton, which is a cough and a spit from Dudley. Clifton worked there for a while and then realised two things:

  (a) he missed his family, particularly his sister Winnie;

  (b) he needed a wife.

  So he wrote to my mother and told her of the great advantages to be had by moving to the UK. You could earn thirty shillings a week, and there were all kinds of factories in which to do so. Hadn’t Enoch Powell, a British Tory minister, come to Jamaica and invited West Indian nurses to pack their bags and find jobs in the UK? The dream of a better life.

  I imagine Clifton’s letter went something like this:

  Dear Winnie,

  It is I, your brother Clifton, writing to you from the Black Country.

  It would be good if you could come here. There are plenty, plenty jobs here, and you could get one easy. Women can earn as much as 30 shillings a week, and I’m sure you’d be able to do other things to make up your weekly allowance.

  I know you’re tired of breaking your back to feed all them kids back in JA. Tell Winston to get off his arse and bring everybody to England as soon as possible.

  It cold here but them have job! Come soon.

  Your loving brother

  Clifton

  P.S. Bring me a wife.

  By all accounts, this tempting invitation went down like a cup of ice-cold sick. My father, Winston, had already forbidden my mother from embarking on a life-changing journey to the southern states of America. Some black American preachers had seen my mother testify in church and they’d told her that she should go to America because she could make good money preaching at the tent shows and on the gospel circuit. Mama wanted to go, to leave Jamaica and seek her fame and fortune, but Winston put his foot down. No way was any wife of his going to pack a bag and jump on an airplane to God knows where in the southern states, where they had Jim Crow and all kinds of segregation. And what? Was she expecting him to look after the children on his own? He had things to do as well; he was the man of the family and he wasn’t going to allow her to wander off into the sunset. I’m putting words in his mouth, but I can imagine his disdain for this short-lived dream of hers.

  For many years Mama felt that she’d been denied her shot at the good life. When Uncle Clifton’s letter arrived, she knew this was her chance to break free from patriarchal, poverty-stricken life in rural Jamaica, an opportunity to prove she was someone who could do something significant for her family. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, so she saved up money from her work at the market and eventually squirrelled away enough for a ticket a
nd subsistence once she arrived in the UK.

  The crossing was £75 or thereabouts, so assembling that kind of dough was no mean feat. And I bet my papa moaned about using that money to catch a hold of some silly dream. But she did it, despite his disapproval. She also managed to find Clifton a prospective wife: Madge, someone she knew, whether via the church or just from around the way. Arrangements were made and Mama embarked on her life-changing journey, accompanied by a very excited Madge. She left Papa, my elder brothers Hylton and Seymour and my big sisters Bev and Kay and got on that boat, her and Madge. She was ready to go.

  (FROM Motherland BY ELYSE DODGSON)

  Elyse Dodgson’s Motherland describes how aspiring immigrants went about leaving their homes, family and children:

  ‘I sent Sharon to the shop to get a cake and when she came back I was gone.’

  ‘I was very sad leaving my kids behind. But y’know, since I had that plan to send for them, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I see them again.’

  ‘I wasn’t at all worried or upset because we have always lived in the extended family. I merely lived with my grandmother. I wasn’t worried or upset. I just got a bit fed up with my grandmother.’

  Once I’d read these words, I contacted my sister Bev and asked her how she’d felt when Mama left. She replied:

  ‘I was 15 when Mom got on that ship; I felt the separation and cried.’

  I sent the same request to Seymour. His reply was typically Seymour:

  ‘Len dats a long time ago. What/how we felt is a distant memory. We were jealous of the guys who had both parents but the money in letters compensated …’