Boadicea (née Margaret), his common-law wife of forty-five years, still wears what look like fourteenth-century Mongolian steppe dresses.
They used to let their demented, long-haired trolls charge up and down Cazenove, getting in everyone’s way. Peaceman said his kids was free spirits who would change the world, see in a new era. Of what, eating birdseed?
They became, respectively, a tax inspector, an accountant, a solicitor, and a policeman.
He never got over the betrayal.
One time me and him was sitting outside the George during the period when Morris was sulking because I wouldn’t leave Carmel and live with him. I must have appeared glum, because Peaceman asked me what was up. I knew I could confide in my good trippy buddy, who believed in freedom as an abiding principle, not a passing trend.
Nonetheless, every time I went to open my mouth, the bat wings of fear flew out.
Peaceman reached out across the table and squeezed my hand, said he hadn’t seen me with Morris in a while.
My peripheral could tell his eyes was upon me, but mine stayed trained on the passing traffic of Church Street.
It was a . . . moment.
What I do?
I snatched my hand away.
What he do?
Calmly stood up, put on his red Moroccan fez cap and sauntered down Church Street in his Ali Baba shoes, his Turkish harem pants billowing.
Whenever I recall it, even today, I feel the urge to apologize.
Barry, you behaved bad, man.
A few of those natty dreads still around too—Gad, Levi, Elijah—from the Rastafication of Stoke Newington. Still wearing those massive woolen hats under which must lie a primeval forest of gray dreadlocks. These are the genuine ones for whom it was a proper religion and not what sociobabblers would call “a transitional identity crisis solution.”
Greetings in the name of the Most High . . . they say, as we bump fists.
I been greeting some of these fellas for as long as I been in England—since they had short hair and wore zoot suits.
The socialists, feminists, and worker revolutionists descended on Stoke Newington over time as well, and some of ours went politico too, because they’d had enough of being treated like second-class citizens and wanted to put the boot into “the system,” as they called it. All of the radicals used to have Saturday demonstrations to Ban the Bomb, Burn the Bra, Support the IRA, Free Angela Davis. Then there was the Anti-Racist Alliance, the Gay Liberation Front, the Right to Work—marching up Balls Pond Road en route to Trafalgar Square; women with short hair, men with long hair, our people with balloon hair; donkey jackets, dungarees, dashikis, bovver boots of many hues; and so forthly.
All of this transformation, transmutation, transculturation. Oh yes, I seen it all come and go.
Stoke Newington got dykeified too, and some of our women was at war with us male chauvinist pigs. Funny that, I’d say to Morris, because seeing as we they fathers, that make them piglets, right?
Pinkification been here a long time too, but fellas always had to be more discreet.
I should know, because Barrington Walker used to feel hungry, very hungry, very, very hungry. Some might say greedy, seeing as Morris was never less than obliging.
Late at night, whenever I got the urge, I used to tell Carmel I was taking my evening constitutional, or goin’ down pub, or whatever, when in fact I was making excursions into Abney Park Cemetery. It was like wild countryside back then, with brambles, trees, and hedges that provided camouflage for all kinds of covert negotiations.
This one night in 1977, at about ten o’clock, me and someone anonymous was getting to know each other, quietly, in the dark, with nobody else in our vicinity, minding we own business, when a gang of young ragamuffins came crashing in and jumped us. Big strong lads. Must-a been creeping around on the hunt. Blood sports. Cowards. They let the other chap run off when they saw me—a man from their father’s generation.
“Batty man! Bum bandit! Poofter! Antiman!”
Before I could defend myself, I ended up in the fetal position on the ground, my hands tryin’ to protect my head from several pairs of boots that each bore the poundage of a steel wrecking ball.
Any moment I expected to feel the cold blade of a knife slice into my flesh.
At some point in the proceedings, I blacked out.
When I resumed consciousness, I must-a managed to crawl home.
I told Carmel I’d been mugged. Morris never knew otherwise.
For a long time after, whenever I passed some drop-foot roughneck yout looking ready to pick a fight, I crossed the road. The problem was, plenty of Donna’s friends from Clissold School, boys and girls, used to come to her parties at our house, before they reached the hanky-panky age and I stopped them.
What if some of those boys had turned bad? What if I’d been recognized?
They was the same kind of kids who bullied any boy back home who wasn’t manly enough, who wore too-bright shirts, who was a bit soft in his manner, who needed straightening out.
Up to this point I’d been somewhat lawless. I came to my senses after that and stopped playing in my own backyard.
I affiliated myself with the North London Association of Midnight Ramblers, Hampstead Heath Chapter.
Cruising was a craving that became an addiction that lasted quite awhile, I have to say. And, even though fear had set in after my attack, it didn’t stop me none.
The summer of 1977 was also the Summer of Donna, who turned against me big time—losing herself in the throes of rebelment. Not against Saint Carmel, of course, but against the man who allegedly made her mother suffer. The man who’d committed crimes worse than Papa Doc, Baby Doc, and Pol Pot. She couldn’t be in my company five minutes without storming out.
Then she met some boy called Shumba at the 73 bus stop on Albion Road. Shumba meant lion, she told us, and he was an English Rasta, she added, a malicious gleam in her eyes as she watched us digest this particular piece of unsavory information.
Fast-forward to the end of the first week of courtship, by which time she’d twisted her hair into rat’s tails that she’d superglued together. “Instant dreadlocks,” she snapped, when I inquired about the gelatinous substance all over her head.
By the end of the second week she’d taken to wearing a maxi African wrapper, declaring it was her religion to keep her legs covered.
Third week arrived and the rat’s tails had disappeared inside a headscarf, which was no bad thing.
Then she asked me if this Shumba person could visit her at home, because his squat in Stockwell was overcrowded. I’d always been a liberal kind of fella, and, as I knew my elder daughter hated me and as I wanted to repair the relationship, I agreed.
The look on Maxine’s face when this embalmed cadaver walked through my front door, straight out of a horror movie, a-true. The fella had spaced-out black pupils in manically bright blue eyes, dutty blond dreadlocks in clumps, and a coat swamping him that was last worn in the Russian Revolution.
He entered our nice, clean kitchen . . . polluting it.
Carmel started stirring pots that didn’t need no stirring, splashing chicken curry on to the floor, laying the table like she was skimming stones on the pond at Clissold Park.
Little Maxine couldn’t take her eyes off this monster, as she described him to me later.
I remained calm and extended my hand forthwith to the creature, who smelled like he’d never heard of soap or shampoo and who looked like he’d never used a nail file or a toothbrush.
“Greetings and salutations, Mr. Walker,” he said, clasping my hand in both of his. He sat down without being asked, and spread his long legs out widthways and lengthways. I was surprised he didn’t put his boots on the table, he looked so relaxed, like he owned the joint. From his coat he extracted a pouch holding a rusty tin of tobacco and a packet of Rizlas; then he started rolling up, without asking permission first.
I kept my lips buttoned tight. I was not goin’ give my dau
ghter an excuse to storm out. So I resorted to the English thing and commented on how the summer was shaping up nicely so far, but it wasn’t as hot as last year, which was sweltering by English standards but came nowhere near the heat of the tropics.
“You know Bob Marley is living in London, right?” he said, interrupting me. “Mi and mi bredren aren’t impressed. He’s a coconut who only appeals to the Babylonians who don’t understand real reggae, the real roots reggae.”
I wanted to slap this fool and send him packing. Instead, I plied him with Guinness and started my interrogation. Turned out his father, a Lord Something or Other, owned three thousand acres of Northumberland.
“I man couldn’t deal with dat,” he said, shoveling yam, green banana, dumplings, and chicken curry down his throat with all the finesse of a pig at a trough.
“Really?” I replied, wondering how on earth anyone could not deal with three thousand acres.
“Nah man,” he said. “I don’t take a penny off-a mi fadder. Mi can’t deal with all-a-dat hereditary, capitalist bullshit becorse I is re-varrrrr-looo-shan-arrrr-eeeee . . .”
At which point I realized this boy was as high as a kite. Completely off his trolley.
My hitherto feisty daughter, Donna the Daft, sat meekly, mutely at his side, gazing in adoration as if this eedyat was Mahatma Gandhi.
Next day I cornered her (before my “prehysterical” three minutes was up). Turned out his real name was Hugo, he’d been to Eton, and he stood to inherit the family title and the estate.
I joked, “Go to Gretna Green. Get a quickie. Start a family and I’ll find a good lawyer to represent you in the ‘acrimony and alimony’ proceedings.”
“No way, Dad. Marriage is a vehicle for female oppression,” she retorted, flaring up. “No way am I going to end up like . . .”
Donna never had no sense of humor then, and she never acquired one along the way.
I hoped the dreadlocks would pass as soon as the boyfriend did.
She cut them off the day he dumped her for another sistren who was a better cook (fair dues). She left those disembodied rat’s tails on the bathroom floor while she bawled her heart out in her bedroom.
“Go away! I hate you!” she screamed when I knocked on the door to offer fatherly succor.
After that she started bringing home boyfriends her mother would like. Actually, Carmel really did like some of them. Oh yes, she would flick the fringe of her wig and flirt, which made Donna squirm.
Then one of these boyfriends cheated on Donna with her best friend or somesuch teenage soap opera, and Donna went hard core, in tandem with the times. Turned up for breakfast with her head shorn like a boy, wearing green combats, an oversized army sweater—riddled with what looked like bullet holes—and what they used to call “bovver boots.”
Oh my days.
Carmel went to object but I put a finger to my lips.
Not having the desired effect must-a vexed Donna real bad. She took a couple spoonfuls of the cornmeal Carmel had prepared for her, slung an original gas-mask khaki bag over her shoulder (just in case of Hiroshima II), flicked away the multicultural curtain beads of the kitchen door, and shuffled down the hall.
Soon thereafter I took a one-day “Introduction to Feminism” course at Hackney Adult Education in order to better understand my elder daughter. I listened respectfully to the teacher lecturing us about the perpetuation of patriarchy and the oppression of women, until I couldn’t take no more of being treated like a punch bag.
“Excuse me, mzzzzz,” I said, rising up myself. “Pray, did not the greatest philosopher of ancient times, Mr. Aristotle, declare that the female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities; that we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness?”
Well, the whole class went into uproar at that, especially the teacher, who said it was Simone de Beauvoir who’d exposed exactly those kinds of offensive attitudes. The two wimpy men in the class joined in the onslaught on their brother too. I got their number, sucking up to the women to get into their practical, black, oversized panties.
Nonetheless, I’d paid my money and I wasn’t leaving without having had my say.
“The female problem is twofold,” I continued, overriding their cacophonous offendedness. “First, they menstruate twelve times a year, or, as I like to say, mentalate, which incapacitates them physically and psychically. Second, they are charged with bringing forth new life, which likewise incapacitates them for nine months and thereafter for eighteen years of motherhood. Anyways, anyone thinking women are oppressed should meet some of the bush women from my part of the world. Trust me, if they could get away with it, they’d cut off a fella’s balls, pluck them, chop them, marinate them, stew them, serve them up on a plate with rice and peas, and present the fella with a bill.”
Mzzzzz recovered enough to banish me from her class forthwith. I told her she had nuff issues as I left, suggesting she get some of that newfangled therapy to deal with them.
What happened to the idea of free speech in this so-called democracy, by the way?
Needless to say, relations with Donna continued to deteriorate. She’d buy her clothes at this Laurence Corner army-surplus store up by Euston Station. Soon as she got home, she’d rip the garment up, only to put it back together with safety pins, no doubt influenced by those punk rockers. Selfsame ones who’d also descended on Stokey and who, one might say, if one were writing an essay on deconstruction for a cultural studies class, “turned the quotidian safety pin into the quintessence of subversive fashion.”
During this sociopathic late-teen period, Donna was the Princess of Metamorphosis. A shape-shifter straight out of Greek myth, a-true. One day she was a moody but nonetheless feminine girl dressed all flowery; next, she was all rat’s tails and African wraps; then she swiftly mutated into this war-veteran hobo character. What had happened to the girl who just two years earlier had pleaded with me to take her to that pretty Laura Ashley shop on Regent Street for her fifteenth birthday, where she’d picked out floaty frocks that mothers, aunties, and grandmothers would approve of?
Then the plot thickened.
One evening she brought home a girl whom she whisked upstairs to her bedroom. Well, the girl looked more like a skinny teenage boy than a girl. Morning time, Donna came down to take tea and toast upstairs to her new “friend,” who later escaped out the door without coming into the kitchen to greet the master of the house.
As she didn’t need no permission to bring her girlie friends home, I couldn’t say nothing.
Over the next couple of weeks I saw flashes of the mysterious friend, who always appeared and disappeared without being introduced. So I suggested (mildly, smilingly, nonantagonistically) to Donna that we meet her. Carmel agreed. I could tell she didn’t have a clue. Carmel’s naïveté is and was a thing to behold. Most things go over her bewigged head. (Just as well.)
Still, Donna managed to elude the parental introduction.
Eventually I caught them sitting on the doorstep one hot Saturday night when I was returning home from a splurge with Morris at a drinking hole down by London Fields. They was sharing a cigarette and a can of lager on the front steps of the house, wearing matching men’s vests and boxer shorts. Soon as I appeared in the driveway, Donna jumped up and tried to drag the girl inside, but her friend was having none of it.
“Hello, Mr. Walker,” she said, a bit wary but pleasant enough.
I parked myself on the wall of the stoop, ignoring Donna, who’d bundled her knees up to her chest and buried her head.
It transpired the girl’s name was Merle, she worked in a so-called women’s print collective down in Dalston, she was eighteen, was born in Montserrat, and . . . she halted . . . before blurting out that she was “a lesbian and proud of it.”
Donna’s head shot up and her eyes nearly popped out in that hereditary, genealogical way passed down through the maternal line. I was caught off guard, but Merle stayed transfixed on me with an openness
that was prepared for either a negative or a positive response.
What a brave little girl she was.
“Merle,” I said, “that’s fine by me. You do what you want, because I ain’t no bigot. You girls have my blessing, but I can’t speak for the wife,” I added, gesturing toward the upper floors of the house. Me and Merle shared a chuckle.
Donna was furious. She’d wanted to thrash her head against a concrete wall, only to discover there wasn’t no wall there.
“You’re really cool,” Merle said, slipping Donna a glance that said I wasn’t quite living up to the image of the mass murderer she’d expected. “I wish I had a dad like you. Mine kicked me out a year ago when he caught me with my ex. I had to move into a hostel.”
“You love and support your children no matter what,” I replied, feeling rather sanctimonious: the Good Understanding Kind of Father. “Where yuh mother?”
“Back in Montserrat. They divorced when I was young.”
“Well, far as I’m concerned, you girls do as you please. So long as my daughter happy, so am I.”
We fell silent, me and her quite comfortably, quite naturally.
That night, that faraway night, with its deep-blue-summer-night-star-filled sky. With the streetlamps giving off a fuzzy yellow light.
That lovely warm summer night, with no cars revving or roaring, no buses rumbling in the distance, or horns honking, and no people walking and talking, or dogs barking, or planes soaring.
That night, that long-ago-in-the-past-of-my-life night, with Carmel and Maxine safely asleep inside the big house that Barrington Walker had bought for his family.
In that moment, I wanted to tell this stranger, this Merle, this girl from the tiny island of Montserrat, that I had commensurate preferences too, but I couldn’t be a brave warrior like her.
Mr. Loverman Page 11