Who Am I, Again

by Lenny Henry

  In the UK we had the working men’s clubs, which were usually affiliated to a factory, a local coal mine or a textile mill. You worked all week and then spent your hard-earnt cash at your local working men’s club. These places usually had entertainment in the form of a guitar vocalist, an organist and singer, or a comedian/compère. They also hosted mid-priced talent from all over the country. This is where everyone learnt their trade, including comics like Sammy, Charlie and Jos. Charlie had been a coal miner and had played football for Doncaster Rovers. He was as Yorkshire as they come – he just looked Caribbean. Charlie told jokes against himself in order to get the audience on his side. At the time, that was the way forward. I imagine if a black comic came on stage in the late 1960s/early ’70s and embarked on a set about Malcolm X and Black Power he’d get his ass kicked, so Charlie came on and said, ‘If you don’t laugh, I’ll move in next door to yer – that’ll bring your rent down.’ He’d also do jokes about growing up poor in Yorkshire and working down the mine: ‘We’re all t’same colour down t’pit.’ Charlie’s laugh was infectious; he genuinely looked as though he was having the time of his life.

  Here was a minuscule pool of black talent getting regular work on TV, but with no black producers, writers, script editors, directors, etc. – that was the 1970s. There were programmes like Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death Us Do Part (both written by white men) and The Fosters (adapted from the original American scripts of Good Times by Jon Watkins, who was also a white sitcom writer), but these were all attempting to address racial issues from the perspective of the dominant culture. Black people were not creating programmes for British television or taking clubland by storm.

  So I watched and subconsciously took in what the black comics were doing, but the majority of what I learnt came from what mainstream culture had to offer.

  THE GRAZEBROOK CONDUIT #1

  I count myself in nothing else so happy

  As in a soul remembering my good friends.

  (WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Richard II)

  This quote encapsulates my relationship with my friends in Dudley. My companions and running mates in my teens and early twenties – Greg Stokes, Martin (Mac) Cooper and Martin (Tom) Thomas – were and are compadres of the highest order. Our halcyon time together has passed into personal legend; they made my transition into broader society almost effortless, and I will always be grateful for that.

  We don’t see each other as often as we used to, but how could that be possible? From 1972 till 1975 we saw each other almost every day, whether we wanted to or not. We were glued together at the hip, forehead and side, good and bad, drunk or sober, funky chicken or the boogaloo. I loved every experience.

  My mother’s H’Integration Project for the Henry children was in action by the early 1970s. From the age of thirteen onwards my task was to get out there and socialise with white boys of my own age. I still hung out with my black friends, but this was different. This was a mission of the highest order, and pretty soon I was in a gang of sorts. Not gang-banging in a mofo-type gang, but more a ‘jumpers for goalposts, Fab ice creams, recording Alan Freeman’s Top 40 rundown on a Sunday night, watching Top of the Pops and falling in love with Suzi Quatro, eating a pork bap in Dudley on a Saturday morning, going up the Baggies on a Saturday afternoon’ type of gang.

  My mission, which I fully accepted, was to make friends and hold on to them for dear life. This was a telepathic lightning bolt from my mother every time I left the house. From 1970 onwards, for the duration of every six-week summer holiday I’d be in Buffery Park sifting for companionship gold. There were lots of people to choose from, but Greg, Mac and Tom were the gold standard.

  GREG

  I met Greg Stokes one overcast day over in Buffery Park and I liked him straight away, mainly because he didn’t present as a ‘type’: he wasn’t a skinhead or a greaser. He was normal, tall and floppy-haired, wearing corduroy trousers, boots, a checked shirt and a windbreaker. Greg said hello immediately. His Black Country banter was endless, as he told jokes and stories in a laid-back Dudley drawl. Our friendship was effortless. He was walking his dog, Butch, a collie who was really friendly and non-violent. I was able to crouch and say hello to Butch in a way I never had before.

  Often you could be in the park and dudes wouldn’t acknowledge you, even if you had been chosen to play on their football team in a pick-up game. If you were black, you had to be thankful for whatever attention white guys gave you. Greg didn’t make me feel like that; he made me feel like an equal. Though only fourteen, I was hanging out with someone who was nearly eighteen and had a car! I closed my eyes and jumped into this new friendship. We spent the day throwing sticks for Butch and talking about the world and our place in it.

  He lived across the park, near the top of Blackacre Road, just round the corner from The Bush pub, which was very handy for his dad, Doug, a great bloke who liked a pint on occasion. His mum was called Avery, which I always thought was a lovely name. She made me feel welcome whenever I went to their house. She was shy but was incredibly kind and considerate towards not just me, but all of Greg’s pals. Greg had a sister, Jill. She was also shy, so we didn’t talk much, but she was cool.

  Greg’s friends were different to the people I knew from my school and from over the park. Quite a few of his grammar school friends seemed older than their years. Some of them had big sideburns or the beginnings of rainforest-like facial hair. Some of them were in a band that Greg dragged me to see in someone’s cellar. They were pretty good, sang ‘The House of the Rising Sun’. I was jealous that these kids who were only a bit older than me owned musical instruments and their own mode of transport. I was always the only black person in these gatherings, but the sting of being different and standing out would last a mere moment and then I’d just join in with whatever was going on. This wasn’t a time for being closed. I had to be open – to fun, laughter, difference and unusual drink combinations.

  Jump, Len, JUMP!

  Greg was a Bob Dylan, Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel-type guy. We had a wonderful time of listening to things repeatedly in the hope that I would be converted to folk music. I could certainly appreciate it, and I still love Paul Simon both on his own and with the tall curly-headed dude. Of course, I’m a Beatles fan – in our house Kay made sure that the Fab Four were all we listened to for the longest time. She even made me wear a mop on my head and pretend to be Paul McCartney so she could marry me.

  This was the start of me developing a broader taste in music. Elvis, Chuck Berry, glam rock, pop, R&B, disco and funk were still uppermost in my musical mind, but over the next few years, because of my yearning to belong and my friends’ eclectic tastes, I had to make room for different types of music.

  Greg’s car was a shocking, eye-wateringly green Austin 1100, which he christened the Lime Green Flyer. Once he had passed his driving test – after mastering the gears and parallel parking in supermarket car parks all over the Midlands – we began to explore beyond the boundaries of our small neighbourhood. We were all drinking in pubs now. I was a not-so-secret underage drinker, while Greg, Mac and Tom loved drinking pints. It was as though they were practising for an adulthood that didn’t really exist any more. I wasn’t a big fan of the taste of beer, but I craved their company and they were my peers, so I did what they did.

  Greg had a big say in where we went. When Mac and Tom had cars, they had an influence too, but in the first instance it was Greg. We went to pubs all over the Midlands. There was a weird yokel-style attitude going on in some of these places. We walked into one pub and there were all these raddled old white dudes inside. Greg went up to the bar to get the drinks in, and I went to check out the jukebox; there then followed a lull, a small silence, during which a man’s voice could be heard saying, ‘We don’t get many of ’um darkies in here …’

  I turned to see their puzzled eyes taking me in – for them, this was a close encounter of the Jamaican kind. I slid my coin into the slot, played a reggae banger (probably ‘Funky Kings
ton’ by Toots and the Maytals) and went back to my seat.

  There’s a first time for everything, I suppose.

  Greg even invited me to go out with him and his first girlfriend. She was a blonde bombshell whose dad owned a pub. Greg had met her at a party and she’d made it clear that she wanted to get together with him. I think Greg may have been a bit nervous because he invited me on their date, which involved going for a drink and then snogging in the car for a bit before he dropped her off at home. I think I was an excellent gooseberry, interjecting only when all the windows steamed up or a crap record came on the radio. I would wipe down the windows and then change stations until something funkier came along, before settling back in my seat and continuing to listen to the radio.

  Greg and my other mates would often lend me money. Growing up in a working-class family and not having a Saturday job meant that I was often broke. The pocket money I received every Friday did not extend beyond a bar of chocolate and a can of Coke. I needed much more than that if I was going to go clubbing and drinking with my mates. Greg had a Saturday job at Mr Doughty’s corner shop and he was very generous, which meant that when we went out, he would often give me a couple of quid to pay for my admission into the club and to buy a drink or two. Tom and Mac did the same. Their financial assistance meant that I got to go and see places I would never have seen without them.

  Greg got cross with me at times about not having money, but never angry enough to break up our friendship. He’d been to my house and understood by osmosis that my family weren’t exactly rolling in it. By the time he went to Leicester University, I was already in show business and spending most of my time in London or on the road. There was no way we could continue our friendship in the same mode it had been in when we were in each other’s pockets every day for months on end. On the odd occasion when we did meet up, I would feel a fleeting pang of sadness as he regaled me with tales of all the new friends he was making, the new jokes and running gags, and how he was listening to different types of music.

  I think we’re better now at staying in touch than we were during that first instance of separation, and it’s a testament to our bond that we still want to be friends and see each other on occasion. I was very happy to read a poem to the congregation on Greg’s wedding day. We’re friends because we’re friends because we’re friends … and I’m glad about that.

  MAC

  Mac – aka Martin Cooper – lived across the park from me, past the substation with the mutant rhubarb and near the posher, more middle-class houses. He lived at the bottom of Grazebrook Road, and when we wanted to give our gang a name, the Grazebrook Crew was Mac’s idea.

  It took five or six minutes to run down to Mac’s house; ten or twelve if you were strolling on a hot day. Mac was tall, handsome, with squinty eyes (he would need glasses later), the inventor of weird dances at the Queen Mary Ballroom: the Chair, the Fly-Fisherman, the Charlie Chaplin and the Shovel were all Mac additions to the dance-move canon. He had a very quick wit, always ready with the fast comebacks, the gags, the smart observations. He was the most ‘out there’ of us. He liked to argue and loved a drink – I mean, loved a drink.

  I adored going round to Mac’s house, especially near Christmas. His mum was a legendary baker and would begin experimenting with pastries and fillings for her Christmas banquets as early as October. She always had sausage rolls and mince pies on the go, and I think I was a favourite of hers because I ate everything that was put in front of me. She’d often say, ‘Has Lenny got hollow legs? He hoovered that lot up in a second, didn’t he?’

  Mac and I got close because for the longest time we only had a black-and-white TV in the Henry household. The Coopers had a big-ass colour TV – it took up half of the living room. I loved going round to their house to watch Top of the Pops. Mac’s home was a different world to my usual environment: they had central heating, there was a constant flow of snacks and cups of tea – and a running commentary from Mac’s dad throughout every episode of Top of the Pops. Mr Cooper took issue with any male pop singer who displayed femininity, so performers like T. Rex, David Bowie, the Sweet and the Glitter Band had him apoplectic with rage.

  ‘Is he gonna eat that microphone?’

  ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’

  ‘Has he got a rugby ball down his pants?’

  ‘Military service for the lot of ’em.’

  And on and on and on …

  Mac would tease his dad throughout the programme, and I would laugh in wonder as I noted the cultural differences between my family and his. Mac was allowed free rein in that house; his parents let him do what he wanted most of the time. He cheeked his parents continuously and sat with his feet on the furniture – there was no front room. His was a house of plenty; there was never a sense of need.

  In our house Mama had very strict rules about what I could and couldn’t do. Proper meals aside, there was no spare food available for snacks, apart from hard dough bread and butter, or maybe some dry bun from the week before. If I cheeked either of my parents, I’d probably find myself in an ambulance, with the paramedics standing over me and saying, ‘She hit him with a frying pan? Who does that?’

  Mac had everything he wanted, including a record player and a brilliant record collection, mostly based on Radio 1’s John Peel Show playlist. He introduced me to Emerson, Lake & Palmer (particularly Keith Emerson’s bravura rendition of West Side Story’s ‘America’), Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, Ashton, Gardner and Dyke (‘Resurrection Shuffle’) and much more. Like Greg, he was eager to push the envelope of my musical taste. I wasn’t just some kid who only listened to Dennis Alcapone and Toots and the Maytals; I was listening to King Crimson and Yes too. OK, I was hypnotised by the mince pies and sausage rolls, but I was taking it all in. This was part of h’integration.

  Jump, Len, JUMP!

  Mac was a prodigious drinker, which was unfortunate because, like the rest of us, he couldn’t really hold his drink. Mac was strictly a two-pint guy. He was very interested in the idea of drinking lots and lots of pints, but if he exceeded his two-pint limit, a different kind of Mac would emerge, and we’d have to deal with the fall-out. The beginning of the pissedness was always fun and involved us trying to impress girls by being silly, doing stupid voices, cracking jokes or using one of Mac’s signature dances to pull focus. The Chair and the Fly-Fisherman always drew comment from girls, sometimes even favourable. But post-two-pints Mac could get bolshy, slightly cross-eyed, pugnacious. On noticing the signals, Greg would lean over and hiss out of the side of his mouth, ‘Start the car,’ and we’d escort Mac from the premises before he was chinned by an irate boyfriend, a bouncer, or both at the same time.

  TOM

  My most unlikely friendship, perhaps, was with Martin Thomas – although we all called him Tom. I’ll try to describe what this relationship was like, but I’ll preface my remarks by saying that there were two Toms: Before He Goes into the Navy Tom and Post-Joining the Navy Tom.

  I always felt that Tom hadn’t quite drunk the Kool-Aid as far as I was concerned. He had to be convinced that this raggedy, no-money-having son of Jamaicans was worth having around. At first he was all angles and attitude, acting tougher than he actually was. I always thought that he was hilarious. He had a baby face; no one believed him when he told them he was eighteen, and he was always being ordered out of pubs for being underage, while I – who looked older than my age – would get served immediately.

  He and I used to play-fight, and sometimes it would get rough. Because of my size I would always win, plus I wasn’t scared of Tom – he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. That would change, though, post-navy. I understood why he had accepted his nickname of Tom: it was more alpha male, made him sound tougher than he actually was.

  He also liked the idea of the Grazebrook Crew, but I think he would have preferred it if we’d gone up the football on a Saturday and kicked ass. Whenever we went up the Baggies, Tom always wanted to go round the opposition end a
nd cause trouble, but the rest of us were wimps – ‘Nah, you’m alright, Tom. I’m gonna get a pie and a hot Bovril.’ We really didn’t want any trouble at all.

  I couldn’t quite believe that this really intelligent guy was such a wannabe hooligan. His mum and dad, Harry and Sylvia, were such nice people; they couldn’t have known what was going on, and they wouldn’t have countenanced a boot-boy in their midst.

  Because I felt (quite wrongly) that Tom wasn’t that keen on me when we first met, I used to feel out of place at his house, but after a while he got used to me. We’d go and call for him, bang on his door, and his sister Judith might answer and let us in. There’d always be something good cooking or baking, and we’d all gather in the living room, which was a riot of yellowing stippled walls and corduroy furniture. If we were in the kitchen, we’d be offered biscuits and cups of tea in the good china. Tom’s mum, Sylvia, was very middle class, although I didn’t know it was called that at the time. She’d been a headmaster’s secretary at a local school and did everything just so. If it was teatime, she’d offer cheese on a plate.

  CHEESE ON A PLATE

  Ingredients

  Several thick slices of Cheddar cheese (strong)

  4 slices of bacon (cubed)