by Lenny Henry
Seymour’s collection included a considerable number of westerns, which all had semi-clad bar-room queens or glamorous Mexican ladies with low-cut blouses on the front; there were war books, with femmes fatales in tight army uniforms; there were spy books, of the James Bond variety, all of them with suggestive covers featuring 007 in a tuxedo, crisp white shirt and bow tie, his Walther PPK held aloft, and usually with a naked woman draped around him.
I’d go down to the cellar to look for the sauciest cover, one with the barest flesh on show. I was in heaven, though I didn’t quite know how to take it any further. For the time being, I was content just to stare at the covers, read a bit of the text and dream of kissing a Mexican bar owner in a low-cut frock. I’d be in my school clothes. To impress her, I’d doff my cap. Maybe she’d help me with my homework? My imagination ran wild.
I did this on a regular basis: wait for everyone to leave the house, hop, skip and jump down to the cellar, rummage around in Seymour’s crates and find a book with the prerequisite semiclad figure on the cover.
One week we had a power cut and the lights went out, so I had to improvise. I did what I’d seen someone on TV do – made a torch by putting paraffin in a milk bottle, using some newspaper as a stopper. Then I tipped the bottle upside down to soak the paper with paraffin, set light to it and read by torchlight. As someone later pointed out to me, ‘Len, you were actually reading by Molotov cocktail!’
I was having the time of my young life down there, reading about spies and sexy double agents whose clothes fell off at just the right moment. I was completely enthralled reading about their exploits, but I must have left the kitchen door open because there was a slamming noise upstairs, and as I jumped in surprise the torch fell into the crate of dry books, and with a huge WHOOF! it was aflame!
This was all in the space of nanoseconds. One minute I’m James Bond, the next I’m the boy with no eyebrows. What was I going to do? The flames were licking the ceiling of the cellar, as though it was the tastiest lolly on earth. I was in serious trouble, no idea what to do. I ran upstairs to get some water to put the fire out. I came back down and threw a tiny pot of lukewarm water onto the crate. SSSSSSSSSSS! The water disappeared into steam!
I ran upstairs to get a bigger pot of water, but by the time I got back down the flames had travelled from one crate to the next. WHOOF! And now they were dancing around the cellar, feasting on all the other dry bits and pieces of tinder lying around. Shit. I was in such trouble.
I left the house and ran for three minutes up Blackacre Road, then crossed over and went into the phone box to call the fire brigade. We didn’t have a phone at home, so when I got there I looked at the dial with all its complicated numbers and finger holes and didn’t know what to do. A very kind elderly person saw me shriek, ‘IT AY FAIR!’ at the top of my lungs and showed me how to dial 999. The fire brigade were on their way. I’d left the back door to the kitchen open so that they’d know where the fire was. It turned out there was no need to do that. As I approached the house I saw dark grey smoke billowing out of the window, like it was the back window of Snoop Dogg’s Escalade – the fire brigade would immediately know which house was ours. As I got closer I got a better look at the house. Yup – still on fire. I burst into tears and ran away.
I found myself at Bev’s house. She allowed me in, and I stayed at hers for the rest of the day. I made small talk, I helped her with the kids, I played with Mike and Kenneth and Trevor as though nothing was wrong. But deep down, I knew that (a) I’d burnt the house down, and (b) when Mama came home from work, I would be toast.
Bev was very kind. I hadn’t told her anything was wrong, but she’d guessed. She knew I was scared of Mama single-handedly picking up the car and dropping it repeatedly on my head. Eventually, she said, ‘Maybe you should go home now? It’s getting dark.’
I didn’t want to go home. ‘Can’t I stay here … till I’m twenty-five?’
Bev was insistent and pushed me out of the house. I walked as slowly as I could, dreading the beating that was inevitably about to happen.
I once got a letter from a black journalist who wanted to take issue with me about the stand-up I’d done about getting beaten by my mama. He said it trivialised physical child abuse, turned it into light entertainment, didn’t help us to grow and move past a stereotype of Third World parenting. I agree with all that, but the problem is, I grew up with beatings and clartings and bitch licks. It might be a trope, but it was true. My mama was brutal when she disciplined us. She once hit me in the face with a frying pan. She threw a chair at me. And, of course, she could punch you and knock you through a brick wall. I was so frightened on that walk back to what I was now calling ‘the ruins’ that I was literally shaking.
When I reached home, I was relieved to find that the house was still standing. The fire had been extinguished with a minimum of fuss and mess. The firemen had done their job brilliantly, cleaned up after themselves and gone on their way.
Mama was waiting in the front room. It looked like she had been crying. I prepared myself for the beating of all beatings. What would she hit me with now? I quaked in my boots and stood in the doorway, waiting for everything to be bounced off my head.
Mama took one look at me and said, ‘Go to y’bed,’ in a soft, resigned voice. So that’s what I did. I went to bed – and I spent the next four hours sleeping with one eye open, knowing that at any minute she’d sneak in through the bedroom door and start lashing my backside. But she didn’t, and I woke up the next day exhausted but relieved.
I think that Bev might have had something to do with my not being beaten. Although the cellar had been gutted by fire, the house had remained intact. Apart from an odour of burnt paperbacks, there was no real damage. What good would it have done to beat a child senseless because of an accident? I was lucky, I guess. Mama had thought long and hard about what my fate should be and decided that to hit me would only exacerbate things. She knew that if she’d reacted in the way that she normally did, I might not survive, and she couldn’t cope with that. So she controlled her traditional response and took another view. I’m convinced that my self-imposed mini-exile at Bev’s helped Mama to meditate on her future actions.
3
The H’Integration Project
ASSIMILATION
Mama lined us all up in the hall. I might have been six or seven. I remember our terrible flock wallpaper, peeling at the edges, odd patches of damp everywhere, the smell of last night’s oxtail stew wafting through from the kitchen and Mama in her work clothes towering over us. She looked serious.
Who Am I #2
I’m about eight or nine. We couldn’t afford the school tie, so I’m wearing something that in Mama’s brain is the closest thing. My hair’s combed and I’m kind of half smiling as I look at the camera. It’s not arch or cheeky or attitudinal; it’s bland, as if I don’t know what sort of face to put on in this situation, as if there were things I could tell you about my life at this point, but I don’t want to bother you with them. I’m not going to give away all the sweeties from my jar just yet. So right now I’m just going to sit here, have my school picture taken and split, ’cos I want to go out and play. And they tell me I’ll never leave here if I don’t have this picture taken.
I remember being shy, not particularly argumentative. There was no one-upmanship or ‘getting the last word in’ or ‘imposing my will’ where my mama was concerned. At this age, and pretty much until I was eighteen, it was best to agree with everything she said, because if you didn’t, the consequences involved hospital food. So here I am. I don’t want to get hurt and I don’t want to hurt anybody. So I wear my face like this and hope no one notices.
AT SCHOOL
By their very presence in schools, black children also threatened to undermine the education of white children, as teachers were forced to divert essential time, skills and resources away from white children to meet the linguistic and cultural needs of black children. Hence, black children’s race and cult
ural differences came to be defined as the problem, rather than the shortcomings of a system unprepared and unable to respond positively to their needs and aspirations.
Funds were made available under Section 11 of the local government act 1966 to enable teachers to provide black children with the skills that would facilitate their ‘successful’ assimilation into British society.
(DAVID DABYDEEN, JOHN GILMORE AND CECILY JONES (EDS), The Oxford Companion to Black British History, P. 138)
I think at the beginning my attempts at integration were thwarted by overenthusiasm. Also, when you’re one of three kids of colour in the entire school, they tend to lump you together. At Jesson’s junior school, Michael Colman and I were the only black kids in our year. We used to fight each other just for company. I drifted a bit at Jesson’s. I can’t remember what I learnt there, but I do remember reading almost the entirety of Charles Dickens’s canon. Memory’s a strange thing. I can remember fighting Michael and reading Little Dorrit, but I can’t for the life of me remember anything useful that was taught in those classes. Thankfully, just before the eleven-plus we moved to a new house, going from Dudley central up to Buffery Park. It wasn’t particularly far – about a mile or so – but the demographic changed considerably. Now I was attending St John’s primary school, where there were many more black and brown kids to contend with. At first I was afraid that I might get lost among them all, but it worked out in the end.
St John’s was a rough place, with oversubscribed classrooms, a tiny playground and very few resources. Strangely, I remember it as being a relatively happy experience. There was some racism and a bit of bullying, but you came to expect that in those days. If someone pushed you, you shoved back. The big event at St John’s was the eleven-plus exam, which sifted the proverbial wheat from the chaff by determining who would go to the grammar school and who would not. We would not only be answering questions on the actual curriculum, but also tested on our verbal and non-verbal reasoning, yet I don’t remember any preparation for this exam. It was a fiendish IQ test as much as anything else, and we were not forewarned at all. My friend Greg Stokes tells me that at Kate’s Hill primary, the kids were sat down and told about the eleven-plus exam the previous year, and then, pretty much every week, given past papers to study. I’m still pissed off about this; it’s probably the reason I took up further education later in life. I just wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t thick; that I could, given time and fair warning, learn something.
Needless to say, I flunked the exam. Even though Seymour had waved a ten-bob note in my face and said, ‘If you pass the eleven-plus, this is yours,’ I failed miserably. I turned the page of the exam sheet and saw non-verbal reasoning questions for the first time in my life and had no idea what I was looking at. A cold sweat engulfed my entire body and I shut down. End of story.
My mama and papa didn’t seem too bothered about my failing the eleven-plus – ‘You’ll work in the factory or something. Nuh bodder yuself wid it.’ This was the Midlands, after all, where there were more factories than paving stones. It was more or less expected that an able-bodied boy would end up working in a car factory or labouring somewhere. Tony Foley’s dad worked as a scaffolder and throughout his entire school career you’d hear Tony saying, ‘I don’t have to do this ’cos me dad’s a steel erector and I’m gonna work with him.’ Getting a job wasn’t the problem; the problem was finding a career that you could be proud of. Unless you were lucky enough to go to university, the idea of embarking on a career you might actually enjoy seemed out of the question.
After the eleven-plus debacle, I wound up going to Blue Coat secondary modern on Bean Road, which was a three-minute walk from Douglas Road, near Buffery Park. To get there you had to cross the notoriously tricky Blackacre Road, where my brother Paul had his accident. Blue Coat had formerly been an exclusive Church of England school, housed in very sacred buildings, with a large playground and, I presume, church services at every opportunity. It had been in existence since the sixteenth century; old pictures showed the student body in cap and gown, but the uniform in the early 1970s was blue blazer, grey trousers (pleated skirt for girls) and a blue-and-yellow tie.
Once again, the demographic of the school was mixed, but predominantly white, though there was a healthy mix of Afro-Caribbean and Asian kids. There was the usual racist stuff to contend with. For a brief period I had a fight every single day with a kid who didn’t like what I looked like. He would utter, ‘Move, coon,’ or ‘Oi, nig-nog,’ or whatever as I walked through the school gates. Now one thing everybody knows about me is that I cannot fight. If you asked my sister Kay whether I can handle myself in a scrap, she would throw back her head and cackle like a witch. I was hopeless. Every day I’d be rolling around on the ground with this kid who hated me because I was black. After a while I got tired of this constant scrapping and tried to think of a way out. The particular escape route I chose would lay the foundation for my future career.
I walked in through the school gates, this kid said his usual, ‘Hey, darky/nig-nog/coon,’ and put his fists up, and I said something like:
‘Not this again. Ya must really fancy me, ’cos you’re always tryin’ to get me to roll around on the ground with ya.’
Him: ‘Shut y’mouth, coon.’
Me: ‘Here we go. You hit me, I hit you, we fall on the ground and hug. Why don’t we go and have dinner and a movie first? Cut out all the fighting?’
Him: ‘Are we gonna fight or wha’?’
Me: ‘You could buy me a ring – mek it official?’
What I’ve missed out is the glorious bit. Whenever we had our arguments at the school gates, other kids would gather in a circle and yell, ‘FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT!’ until they either lost their voices or the altercation had finished. This time these kids actually laughed at what I was saying. And even though the kid gave me one and two pops upside the head, the laughter made me feel immune. I kept on making the funnies even as he continued to kick and punch. Eventually, someone in the crowd said, ‘Jesus, leave him alone, man.’ The rest of the crowd joined in, and soon my attacker simply stopped and walked away. Sure, there were other times when I was racially abused or attacked for no reason, but I had a handle on what to do now. I had a weapon – humour. Result.
By the time I was twelve or thirteen, I’d had an epiphany. I knew I could make people laugh with the things I said, but now I was doing something else: I’d begun to impersonate voices, people, things all the time. Humour would be my armour. This really helped with the H’Integration Project too, because if you can make people laugh, you’re breaking down barriers – and I really needed to break them down at Blue Coat secondary modern. Girls ignored you, teachers belittled you – it was no picnic. Even our headmaster admitted that Blue Coat was a ‘school on a racist sink estate’. So I needed all the help I could get. Luckily, this was a boom time for people like me who wanted to entertain their friends. The TV output in the UK in the late 1960s and early ’70’s was perfect for kids like me. Every teatime there were cartoons such as Top Cat, The Flintstones, Atom Ant, Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Huckleberry Hound and Deputy Dawg. There were great programmes on in the evening too, and if you begged and whined enough, you might even be allowed to stay up and watch them: Burke’s Law, The Prisoner, The Champions, The Saint, Thunderbirds, Stingray, Captain Scarlet, The Avengers, Doctor Who, The Tomorrow People, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and many more.
I watched all these and absorbed the way people moved, talked and cracked wise. I imitated gun shots and explosions and rocket blasters. I watched Mike Yarwood, the premier impressionist at the time. He could do almost anyone – Harold Wilson, Tony Hancock, Frank Spencer, Steptoe and Son, Denis Healey, Edward Heath. I watched him and copied every intonation, every grimace, every eyebrow-raise. Yarwood learnt his voices by taping radio and TV programmes and mimicking the voices fastidiously. I learnt them by copying what he did.
I also watched Who Do You Do? on London Weekend Televi
sion, a much more raucous and cheaper version of the Mike Yarwood set-up. A group of impressionists from clubland would dress up as various characters and tell jokes or engage in repartee. Peter Goodwright and Paul Melba shone here. There were a lot of impressionists on the scene – maybe this was something I could do? I stole jokes from every light entertainment show I could watch, whether it was Opportunity Knocks with Hughie Green or Sunday Night at the London Palladium or The Comedians. The latter was my favourite because it was basically one comic after another telling jokes to an unseen audience. This high-rating programme made stars of people like George Roper, Ken Goodwin, Stevie Faye, Colin Crompton and Bernard Manning. Goodwin’s jokes suited my schoolboy style:
I was walking down the street – settle down now – and I saw this bloke with a dog that was wearing brown boots. I said, ‘Why’s your dog wearing brown boots?’ He said, ‘His black ones are at the mender’s!’
I was a fan of Stevie Faye:
This docker’s left the dock gates and he’s doin’ 40 miles an hour and the dock policeman’s chasin’ him, and he’s neck and neck, and then – wham! – he rugby tackles him.
The policeman says, ‘What you runnin’ for?’
The docker says, ‘I was timin’ yer for tomorrer!’
So as my body exploded with acne and hormones, I began to develop an arsenal of voices and ideas and jokes that would stand me in good stead for the next thirty years.
The Comedians also boasted a triumvirate of black performers: Charlie Williams, Jos White and Sammy Thomas. These three were an enormous influence on me, simply because I’d never seen black comedians on TV before. I’d seen films on TV in which African Americans looned around and popped their eyes while playing servants and maids and crazy-legged dancers, but I’d never seen a black guy in a suit telling jokes. In the US they’d already experienced Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Flip Wilson, Nipsey Russell and many more, but the demographic is different in the States and they also had the Chitlin’ Circuit, where black comics could ply their craft and earn a crust. Eventually, mainstream TV would come knocking once they’d established themselves.