Who Am I, Again

by Lenny Henry

  A month later, Mama and Madge arrived in the UK.

  Upon arrival in Dudley, there were problems. For a start, Clifton could only really put up one woman in his flat. Since Madge had come to marry Clifton, she could discreetly make sleeping arrangements with him, but Mama had to sleep on the floor. Mama wasn’t pleased about this, but she did it anyway. She couldn’t afford anywhere else at this point.

  Though Clifton was as happy as a pig in the proverbial, Mama’s future was less golden. The mother country, with its promises of open arms, jobs and warm bonhomie, was not quite as welcoming as Clifton had described. Times had changed since the arrival of the Windrush in 1948. This was now a suspicious and, at times, bigoted England, one that refused to understand that the immigrant diaspora had been invited to the UK to make up for a gap in labour.

  Labour shortages opened up scope for migration from colonial territories and Commonwealth countries, whose people being British subjects were, in principle at least, free to live and work in the United Kingdom. Among this group, workers from the Caribbean, escaping high levels of under-employment, showed a particular propensity to take advantage of migration opportunities. Colonial and Commonwealth immigration rates are estimated at up to 10,000 a year from 1948 up to the mid-50’s, increasing to over 40,000 by 1957–8, before dropping back to a depression invoked by government deflationary policies to below 30,000 in 1958–9. Caribbean workers demonstrated that they were a useful addition to the UK labour market.

  (FROM Motherland BY ELYSE DODGSON)

  When she first arrived, being out and about was tough for Mama. She often described what it was like to confront racism on a daily basis: she would be followed down the street by children who wanted to know where she was hiding her tail; on the bus, women would feel her face with their hands and ask her whether her skin colour came off; men on the street would make monkey noises at her as she passed; and although she spoke perfectly good English, in almost every shop she entered the staff would speak veeeerrry sloooowllly.

  There were signs in the bed-and-breakfast lodgings saying, ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’ – so if you were a black Irish wolfhound you were buggered (© Kim Fuller). It was cold all the time, even when it was meant to be summer, and she never really got used to that. Soon she got sick – it was wintertime in England, when they had winters, freezing breezes easing in through the cracks in the windows and underneath the doors, a hoar frost forming on your exposed toes as you tried to snatch a couple of hours’ sleep, while your brother lay in bed, cuddled up to his future wife. Mama must have been furious.

  She got pneumonia, and it nearly did for her. On the verge of death, she moved out of Clifton’s place and found a room in an Indian-owned house that rented out bedsits. These were single-room spaces into which the landlords would cram a bed, a wardrobe, a dressing table, a dining table, some chairs and whatever else could be squeezed in. There’d be a ‘gusunder’ (Dudley parlance for a chamber pot) stashed under the bed so you could have a slash in the middle of the night.

  Which is where Albert Green enters the story. He lived in a bedsit in the same house, and he saw that Mama was unwell and unable to help herself. Albert – or Bertie, as he became known – looked after Winnie through her illness, making her soup, fixing the broken windows, locks and doors. Once she was better he helped her find work at any number of factories and acted as a guide around the Black Country, taking her to pubs and clubs. This relationship would have consequences.

  Mama was off and running, earning the money that would get Papa, Hylton, Bev, Seymour and Kay over to the UK. She did it with the sweat from her brow and the strength of her backbone.

  PAPA

  In 1959 Winston – my papa – arrived in the UK with my big sister, Kay. Papa was a walnut-hard man, dark-skinned, jet-black hair and barely a wrinkle. He rarely smiled or laughed, and when he did, it was usually at some mishap. I remember he laughed loud and long when one of our neighbours slipped on black ice in the street.

  Papa was smart as a whip. He spoke occasional Spanish, sometimes out of the blue and for no reason, and smoked Park Drive cigarettes. More importantly, he rarely lashed out and hit any of us. Strong-willed and authoritarian, he would come home from work and demand:

  ‘Turn the TV over, I want to watch the cricket.’

  Every night. Even if we were watching the bloody cricket, he’d say:

  ‘Turn the TV over, I want to watch the other cricket.’

  He could focus on cricket for hours. He tolerated us making a racket around him and would only occasionally tell us to ‘Stop the blasted noise!’

  He argued with my mama a fair deal. One of my earliest memories is of sitting in my cot, hands on the bars, and watching him fly across the room at her. And then they’d get on fine; it wasn’t Terry and June, but they’d be perfectly civil to each other. Papa would hand his wage packet over at the end of each working week; Mama would take it and hand back his spending money. The point is, whatever they would occasionally scrap over, coming to the UK changed their lives for the better, whatever the calypso records said:

  Many West Indians are sorry now

  for they left their countries and don’t know how.

  Some leave their jobs and their family

  and determined to go to London city.

  Yes, they are crying now with regret,

  No kind of employment now they can get.

  The city of London they got to roam

  and they can’t find their passage to go back home …

  (‘Sweet Jamaica’ BY LORD LEBBY)

  Papa would do odd things like wear his pyjamas under his suit. He’d let his nails grow really long (I mean Catweazle long), and he liked a drink from the local pub. Us kids were dispatched there with some loose change from the pocket of his overalls and ordered to buy a jug of stout and to bring back the rest of the money. Kay and I would march up to The Bush, at the top of Blackacre Road, make cute faces at the bar lady and obtain beer and fags for both parents. We’d walk back verrrry carefully with our prizes. You never knew – we might get to keep the change or have a small glass of beer and a smoke ourselves.

  My father and I never really bonded. Mama did most of the child wrangling, and I was also distracted much of the time. I was born in August 1958 and, in many respects, I was a surprise – not least to my mama, who hadn’t banked on producing yet another Henry while her husband was still in the Caribbean. Sixty years later, and having been through the complications of relationships myself, I’ve slowly come to understand the complexities of displacement, loneliness and the need for companionship.

  Needless to say, when my father arrived with my big sister Kay (a smidge older than me and very bright), it took a while for him to thaw to the idea of this new kid. But even though it took a godawful long time, he did eventually grow to appreciate me. And throughout my childhood he worked very hard to make sure there was food on the table, clothes on my back and a safe haven for me. He worked really hard. He would come home from the factory and at least three times a week he’d go upstairs and run a bath and then lie in it for half an hour. I remember seeing the water after he got out: there was this dark-grey scum sitting atop the surface, with bits in it. I never, ever wanted to work in a factory if it made you that grubby after a day’s work. But he did it, five days a week for thirty years.

  Who Am I #1

  I’m about four or five in this black-and-white photo. I love black and white. There’s something about it that’s more real than colour. It has great power and conveys something much greater than mere verisimilitude. In this picture I’m a pageboy. My sister Kay is a bridesmaid. My brother Hylton is marrying Betty, and my memory explodes whenever I see this photo, because it triggers memories of other weddings that have been buried deep in my subconscious. I’m pretty sure my parents hired me and my sister out as pageboy and bridesmaid for every single West Indian wedding in the Midlands. I know it’s wrong to accuse those who are no longer with us, but I’m pretty damn sure
they pimped us out for spare change, because when I look at that picture I see a little kid, standing there as if to say, ‘When do we get paid?’ I look like a professional, like I’ve got cards printed out and a limo on its way to take me to the next wedding.

  I asked Bev about this, and she said that at the time there weren’t too many cute brother-and-sister combos, with their own attire, available for all the weddings that were happening in Dudley. So Mama would volunteer us for all sorts of weddings, even those of non-family members.

  I look at that kid now. He hadn’t really had time to form an outward-facing demeanour. He’s just all about being a tiny kid with a part-time job as a pageboy, and he’s happy to be anywhere.

  VICTORIA TERRACE AND MAMA’S COOKING

  After Papa came over, we all went to live in a tiny bedsit on Himley Road in Dudley. We weren’t there for long, though; it was much too small. With Papa’s help, we were able to move to Victoria Terrace, just up the road, to a huge (to my eyes anyway) house that could hold many more kids and family members. There were three bedrooms on the second floor, one on the first floor (probably a repurposed sitting room), while the attic had a teeny bedroom and a larger one. The order of sibling arrival ran thus: Kay arrived with Papa in 1959, then Hylton rocked up in early 1960; shortly afterwards, my big sister Bev and her beau, Charles, made the journey; and the following year Seymour eased in, seventeen, cool and groovy. They all made this little Dudley-born kid feel welcome.

  It was an old house with an outside toilet. My memory tells me we had to bathe in a tin bath by the fire, and that a passageway was built later to enable the family to use the toilet without having to brave the elements. There were loads of rooms, which were much in need. The combination of Mama, Papa, us lot and Bev’s growing family all under one roof meant chaos, confusion and, at times, conflict. There were arguments, complete with shouting and proper fisticuffs, like on the TV, when Simon Templar would hit the bad guy on the jaw and you’d hear, ‘POW!’ and then he’d go flying across the room. That’s the kind of fighting Mama and Papa did. But when it was over, they’d be fine and we’d all stop the noise and get on with our lives. There was also a big out-of-tune piano on the landing and music everywhere, plus the constant aroma of Jamaican cooking, with all its various components: chili peppers, Scotch bonnet peppers, garlic, thyme, pimento … mmmmm. Mama was an amazing all-round cook, a specialist in that normalised working-class genre that we love and revere called Mama’s Cooking. She had that ability to return from work and create magical meals from whatever was lying around.

  We’d be back from school and sat there in the living room – Paul, Sharon and me – watching kids’ TV. As soon as Mama walked in, we would hear, at full volume and all in one breath, this unvarying list of our shortcomings:

  ‘But stop! Lard Jesus Chris’, ef yu see my trial. Yu mean to say, mi haffe wuk every hour the Lard give, from six o’clock inna mornin’? Slave like a daag all day, mek one an’ two poun’, if mi lucky! An’ I wuk in this house, wit’ mi two sore foot bottom … an’ yu miz-a-rabble pickney couldn’t even peel one an’ two likkle potato, soak the rice, mek t’ree dozen dumplin’, season the chicken, sweep out the front room, mop the kitchen floor, ketch fire in the back room, re-tile the bathroom, plaster the facing wall in the lounge [etc.].’

  This was every night.

  She was right, of course. We’d come home, watch telly, do bits of homework, poke each other with sticks, naturally assuming that at some point before the news came on, a magical someone would make our dinner for us (by the way, it was always ‘dinner’, never ‘tea’). When I started going to my white friends’ houses, they would ask me if I wanted to have ‘tea’ with them, and I was amazed when their parents would bring out egg and chips and crisps and bits of ham or cheese and a mug of tea. The penny dropped: tea’s a meal, not just a drink! This is brilliant! And because their portions were almost always starter-sized, I knew I could go to my house afterwards and have a more Jamaican-sized dinner. This usually occurred at six o’clock and involved a large piece of fried or roasted meat, dumplings (boiled or fried), potatoes (ditto), rice and peas (or sometimes just rice), and something green (we laughed in the face of greens). There’d usually be a chemical-tasting orange/raspberry squash concoction too. This meal would be served on the everyday crockery, the patterns faded and with noticeable cracks, the slightest tap of the fork threatening to snap your platter in two. The food was always piled high, high, high on your plate, like a towering, savoury version of Carmen Miranda’s headdress.

  We always ate as a family in those days, everyone round the table. In the winter there’d be an almighty fight for who got to sit nearest the fire. We lived in a large-ish but cold and draughty house, so whoever got to sit by the fire had pride of place. However, the consequences were dire because as the heat rose and the room became more and more toasty, rivers of sweat would begin to pour from every orifice, soaking shirt, pants and bum crack. If I’d landed the seat by the fire, I’d soon have to begin the tedious process of bartering with my sister in the hope of changing position.

  Me: ‘Kay? I’ll give you this tasty piece of meat and this piece of yam if you agree to swap places …’

  Kay: ‘You mad? NO.’

  The food was almost always delicious. Mama had truly mastered stick-to-the-ribs food and knew how to make supplies stretch. Even though it was just the six of us, she always cooked for twenty-seven people – minimum.

  When we came home from school and stared listlessly into the cupboards, we’d see geriatric tinned pilchards, asthmatic bags of rice and odd damp scraps of green somethings near the back. When Mama looked into that same cupboard, she would see the makings of a glorious feast. We always ate well, no matter how much Mama complained that there was no money. And she complained a lot about that. But still, she would conjure Caribbean banquets for less than a pittance.

  When she was older, I would visit her, and whenever I did, I’d always catch her watching daytime TV. Ainsley Harriott or somebody would be in the process of teaching a useless student how to make a nutritious meal for under £5. And Mama would laugh, saying, ‘Five poun’? Yu could feed a multitude of people with that!’

  I regret that I never learnt to cook under my mama’s tutelage. I was too busy getting up on stage and performing whenever I could. From the age of fourteen that was my life. My brother Paul became a really good cook because, as he escaped puberty’s iron grip, he was able to watch everything that Mama did, while I was at the Skylight Club in Workington, attempting to figure out why they weren’t laughing at the old Frank Carson joke:

  I said to the landlady, ‘I found a dead flea in my bed.’ She said, ‘One dead flea won’t kill you.’ I said, ‘I know, but 10,000 came to the funeral!’

  Paul was at home learning how to prep salt fish so that it flaked perfectly on the fork; or how to steam rice and peas so that they didn’t stick; or the gargantuan task of preparing Saturday soup from scratch, which seemed to involve simmering half a sheep for three days. These were my mother’s culinary masterpieces, but my early departure from home and hearth robbed me of the opportunity to actually learn how to make them for myself.

  Mama’s generous meal-making meant that we were all natural-born trenchermen who treated mealtimes as communal gatherings, full of love, laughter and wisecracks. It wasn’t just normal everyday meals at which Mama excelled – she could bake too! Whenever there was a wedding or christening, or just before Easter and Christmas, Mama would receive requests from the four corners of Dudley:

  ‘Miss Winnie, I beg yu mek mi a cake.’

  And as long as they paid a little for the ingredients and her time, Mama would undertake this confectionery challenge. In the lead-up to Christmas, our house smelt like a cross between a Caribbean cake shop and a distillery. There were all kinds of dodgy, arcane twirlings, swirlings and curlings taking place in our cellar, with the odd maniacal cackle thrown in for detail.

  Mama began cake preparation for the Chris
tmas season months and months before. Ingredients were bought in bulk and stored for what seemed like ages. Then, as autumn’s blush took hold of Buffery Park’s greenery, we’d notice that the giant mixers would begin their whirrings and stirrings – all weekend long – as the mixtures were assembled: not just butter, eggs, sugar and flour, but a plethora of raisins, glacé cherries, sultanas, berries, brown sugar, white sugar, biracial sugar.

  Mama never seemed to measure anything. I never saw her clutching her forehead and screaming at a cookbook, ‘Why won’t you just say precisely how many half-tablespoons of vanilla, Delia?!’ Mama didn’t do that. She used the time-honoured Jamaican baking technique of ‘dash in’. She’d take ingredients by the pinch or handful and simply dash them into the mixing bowl. She never measured the amount of alcohol; she’d just upend the bottle, let it glug a couple of times, pour herself a small glass, slug that, and then continue.

  Mama cooked like a skilled improvisational lead guitarist: she knew all the chords and scales, the flats and sharps, etc., but she could extemporise and make up her own recipes. In the way that Jimi Hendrix could play variations on a theme, Mama did the same with cakes; she didn’t need someone else’s formula. And then she’d batch-cook, three or four cakes at a time. The aromas drove us giddy, our nostrils mesmerised by the sensational smells emanating from the oven. People we hadn’t seen for years would suddenly show up at the house:

  ‘A’right, Winnie, remember me? I teef your car in 1965.’

  Mama: ‘Is what yu wan’?’

  ‘Yu bakin’ cake? It smell good, mi can have a piece?’

  Mama: ‘Yu wan’ mi call police ’pon yu?’

  ‘Call them, yes, but forward me a piece a cake in the meantime.’

  I think it was something to do with the alcoholic concoctions that went into the mixture: sherry, white and dark rum, Wincarnis (whatever that is), Ovaltine, cough linctus and the rest. Everything went in there, and whatever she added made it smell even better, more alluring, almost orgasmic.