But with each child my mother found her skin darkened, almost as though it were a side effect of pregnancy. By the time we moved to Glasgow she was virtually transformed into a full-blooded Negress. People began to treat her the way they sometimes treated my father. They stared at her as she walked with me in the pram, my sister perched on the back and my brother following behind; and they cast remarks under their breath, barbed like a fisherman's fly, deftly designed to land just within earshot.
When my father was with us men would yell, ‘Look at the darkie!’ and spit the word ‘whore’ with guttural emphasis. If we were alone then quite often old ladies would come up to say how cute we children looked, and stroke our heads.
Bellshill Maternity Hospital, where I was born, served the working-class outlying Lanarkshire suburbs. It was a massive concrete edifice, entirely surrounded by council houses, like a factory producing baby Glaswegians by the score. I went back only once in my life on my way through from Aberdeen to London, when I looped round the country via Glasgow to see my first home. As I walked into the maternity hospital I was forced to squeeze past a group of heavily pregnant women, dressed only in pastel dressing gowns and slippers to guard against the damp October air, chain-smoking outside the front entrance.
Outside our bungalow in Ardgay Street I sat in my car, waiting, trying to make up my mind whether or not to knock on the door and explain to the inhabitants that I had once lived in their house. My drive through the neighbourhood had told me it was poor, but beyond that I hadn't much idea of what sort of people lived here. I had seen no black or brown faces, but then again there had been few people on the freezing streets. I dithered, folded and refolded my map. I reached for the door handle. At that instant the door of 19 Ardgay Street flew open: a man with a shaved head, holding a piece of wood, stood there and seemed to stare straight at me. A Rhodesian ridgeback bounded past him and up to the front gate. My nerve failed. I started the ignition and drove away.
Back then we were broke and we were black. We survived on my father's grant, stretched to meet the demands of each new baby. It was tough to find anyone who wanted to rent us a place to live. Lots of the advertisements specified no blacks'; sometimes it said no foreigners’, which was another way of saying the same thing.
Searching for a house could be so difficult that one medical student put a large advertisement in the local newspaper in capitals: BLACK DOCTOR SEEKS ACCOMMODATION. He said it cut short the process of going to see apartments which were always gone the moment you showed your face. My father went to Bellshill Maternity Hospital, where he was taking up his internship, found another black doctor who was leaving to go home, and asked him if he could rent his apartment.
The five of us lived in two rooms in Ardgay Street. The Shettleston house was owned by a couple who ran a driving school and lived in the other wing. Above the door was an inscription to ‘Our Lady of Fatima’. There were times on a Saturday night when a brick would crash through the two windows facing the street; but my mother said it was because they were Protestants and thought we were Catholics, not because we were black.
The hospital where my father did his rounds and delivered babies was a different world; he was treated with great respect and his patients adored him. People talked about his wonderful ‘bedside manner’. It was years before I understood what they meant. I imagined my father sitting next to his patients, eating from a table elaborately laid with every kind of silverware, de-boning a sole or delicately peeling a peach with a knife.
When I was six months old a letter came from the family in Sierra Leone. It was from our father's father. Ibrahim, one of my father's elder brothers, had died; our grandfather begged Mohamed to come home at the earliest and help take care of the family.
We sailed on the passenger ship the Aureol. It docked in the Canaries, where the crew filled the pool on the deck with sea water; then we set sail for Freetown. The other passengers were mostly returning former colonials, who played cards, organised a fancy dress party and sat at each other's tables in the evening without ever inviting us to join them.
When the ship docked alongside the massive warehouses of the Queen Elizabeth II quay, the first thing my mother saw was the fedora belonging to my father's friend Dr Panda bobbing in the surging crowds. She stepped off the boat and into the throng of Africans and she was transformed, once again, into a white woman.
In Freetown people stared at her wherever she went, especially when she rode by on her bicycle. ‘Look! White woman dae ride bicycle!’
White again, my mother was accepted, on certain conditions, into the ex-pat community in Freetown. She joined a Scottish dancing group that met at the Railway Club and at the exclusively white Hill Station Club. Before independence black people were not even allowed up to Hill Station unless they worked in one of the big houses. A special train was sent down every day to bring the workers up to the hills. Certainly, there were no African members of the Hill Station Club. My mother was popular there: she had grown up performing songs and dances and she entranced everyone with her outgoing personality. Her only disappointment was that at the end of the evening the other members never invited her to their houses for drinks or supper, and she made her way home alone.
Marriage to my father turned my mother into a multi-hued chameleon. He, by contrast, had been a black man in Scotland and was a black man in Africa. Once I asked my mother how my father regarded her patronage of the Hill Station Club. She said she didn't know.
‘What if he'd wanted to come too?’ I pressed.
‘Well, he wouldn't,’ she replied. ‘He didn't know the Scottish dances.’ That was the way she thought about these matters. It was as simple as that.
My father's visiting brothers were kind to her, especially Uncle Momodu. He had an appetite for all things western and always wore western clothes. He came down to Freetown ‘on business’, he stated enigmatically, and, when he wasn't at one of his assignations, he flicked through the magazines my mother brought with her from Britain, questioning her about life ‘over there’. Momodu wandered in and out of the house, played with the babies and loved to tease his serious younger brother's wife. But Maureen felt frozen out by the wives of my father's friends who, she thought, disregarded her, though she could never quite put her finger on the problem because it lay in what was missing from their welcome rather than what was present.
Soon after we arrived Pa Roke, my grandfather, came to visit, bringing with him several live chickens, some sacks of rice and one of his junior wives. He cast an eye over my mother: ‘So you went to the sea and turned into a fish,’ he said to my father in Temne. He'd warned his son not to come back with a white wife. There were a lot of local families who would have liked to make a match. ‘How much did you pay?’ He meant how much was the dowry. She was young; her breasts hadn't fallen yet.
‘Ten shillings,’ my father replied straight faced. That was what he'd been charged at the register office on the morning of the wedding. Pa Roke smiled: he was pleased. His son's wife might be white, but she had come at a good price.
In Koidu as we passed people waved and called out to my mother and me. Young men offered to carry her packages; shopkeepers ushered her over to look at the latest imported fabrics. Everyone recognised her. She was the doctor's white wife. And there was only one white woman in Koidu. And only one doctor.
6
A few months after our clinic opened a battered bush taxi drew up in front of the house. There were quite a few people crammed inside; at first it was difficult to see exactly how many. They struggled out, among them a woman so emaciated and feeble that she couldn't walk, as well as a boy of around eight or nine who looked as if he were unconscious.
Our father came out and helped carry them into the surgery; it was obvious he was upset and angry: ‘Why do you bring them to me when it's too late?’ No one replied. And he knew the answer: they had nothing, there was no way to pay a doctor.
The woman was close to death. The boy, who was perhaps her
son, had died in the back of the car a short while before: his body was still limp, no signs yet of rigor mortis. My father asked the family about the woman's and the boy's symptoms. Were there others? They nodded. Yes, they replied, there were many others in the village, too ill to make the journey.
My father didn't have a laboratory but it took him less than a minute to reach his diagnosis: what the people described was a cholera epidemic. He took his bag, swept up armfuls of drugs, threw them all onto the front seat of our Austin and left. The family sat in the back giving him directions to their village, cradling the body of the small boy wrapped in a sheet.
My father didn't come back until much later that night, until after he had traced the source of the contamination and persuaded the village headman to stop people using the water. It was never easy; there was often only one well or stream; people didn't understand the basic principles of infection, spread and cure. Outbreaks of disease were almost always blamed on witchcraft. He taught them how, at the first sign of diarrhoea they should shake the gas out of a bottle of Fanta or Coca-Cola and drink it at room temperature. It was a simple trick: the equivalent of sugar and salts. But it was a life-saver.
When my mother was alone in the city and our father was in the regions planning the clinic, a measles epidemic gripped Freetown. In Britain measles is an ordinary childhood illness; in Africa the same virus kills as recklessly and easily as a child tumbling a tower of wooden blocks. That year hundreds of children died. At Connaught Hospital they didn't have space to admit any new cases. All three of us children were infected; spots even erupted down the inside of my brother's throat. My father wasn't due back for many days and there were no telephones up-country, no way to reach him. So my mother nursed us at home, letting us sip flat Fanta when we were too weak to eat anything else.
Eventually a colleague of our father's was reached and he drove over to see us. He put my brother on a drip and told my mother she had done just the right thing. She was so relieved when we began to improve after ten days that she ran across the road to Patterson Zochonis, the expensive and only department store in Freetown, where she bought us absurdly expensive Swiss maraschino cherry ice cream, and spooned it down our tender throats one by one.
In Koidu there was so much to do and no other doctors with whom to share the load. The building of this clinic was the realisation of a simple dream for our father. Many of the western-trained doctors preferred to stay in Freetown and work in the larger hospitals. With a modest private practice on the side within a few years they could own a Mercedes and be waited upon by servants wearing white gloves, like Dr Panda and his wife. But our father had a vision that one day there would be a network of cottage clinics across the country. The success of our clinic was important to him and his motives were plain.
When our father was a child during the war, a vaccination programme was announced. Scores of families left their villages to make the trip to the mission hospital. They settled on the rows of long wooden benches under the sun in the courtyard, alongside patients who arrived with other complaints. When the benches were full, the line continued along the walls and encircled the building. My father sat for hours on the ground, his back against the wall, listening for his name to be called. In front of him in the queue was an old man. When the Fornas appeared, the old man asked for help going to the toilet and he gave my father some cola nuts in thanks afterwards.
The hours passed and when at last his name was called the old Pa seemed to have fallen asleep, so my father leaned over and shook him lightly. The man slumped over sideways and lay face up, blue cataract-filled eyes reflecting the sky. A few minutes later the orderlies pulled him up by the arms and carted him away. They were used to it: the old ones who died before they made it to see the doctor.
Following Ndora's death our father left the village to live with Teacher Trye. Soon after he left, a second tragedy struck his tiny family. A letter arrived in Bo, written by a hired letter-writer, informing Mohamed that his elder brother Morlai had died ‘of a headache’. He lay down one afternoon saying his head hurt and simply never got to his feet again.
We never, ever turned a patient away. And if someone couldn't pay, we treated them for free. It was hard to imagine, given the principles that governed our father, that the clinic was making money but remarkably it was.
In the town there were a small number of extremely wealthy diamond dealers. They operated cheek by jowl with the Sierra Leone Selection Trust, who paid the government millions to exploit the country's reserves, as well as the Diamond Corporation, a holding of the De Beers empire, who held the rights to buy the lion's share of gems. Some independent dealers bought government permits allowing them to mine restricted quantities of gems. Others dispensed with the law and sent teams of their own men to dig illicitly in the restricted area. Many did both.
After dark on most nights just outside Koidu hordes of young men and some women scaled the fences, easily avoiding the single SLST helicopter that patrolled the area with search lights. In the early morning they wriggled back under the wire, gritty brown diamonds wrapped in small pieces of cloth tied round their necks. The dealers paid their illegal diggers a retainer to bring the gems, which they then sold on through the official government offices or shifted illegally on the black market. The world of the dealers was a closed one, a tightly run business controlled by a few men who maintained a private code of honour designed to hold on to their monopoly and increase the sum of their wealth.
The men who risked their health and liberty to dive hundreds of times to the bottom of the river bed and bring up pans of silt had no option but to sell the gems they found to their patron at the price he chose to give them. There were frequent accidents: several times we were all roused in the middle of the night or early morning because there had been a drowning. Sometimes the illegal diggers were caught and prosecuted – they were the only people who ever were. If their patrons couldn't bribe the judge to let their man off, well, he'd be well compensated for doing time on behalf of the boss. In Koidu everyone knew their place.
Regularly men would arrive at the clinic bearing notes which simply stated to whom the final bill should be sent – inevitably one of several Lebanese dealers: After my father had treated their ailments and given them drugs, he sent the bill through to my mother to prepare and he instructed her to charge the dealers at the highest rate. At least eight out of every ten people who passed through our clinic paid nothing, even for their medicines, which my father fetched from the dispensary in the house and handed to them; people who could afford it were charged at the regular rate; and between them the diamond dealers paid for the healthcare of the rest of Koidu and the surrounding villages.
Almost always people who had not been charged came back on another day with something in return: a pair of live chickens, a sack of oranges or a basket of yams.
Late one night we were all woken up by a frenzied rapping on the door of the house, so loud it sounded as though they were trying to hammer their way in. When our father undid the bolts, there on the step was a young man, sweating and teetering on the edge of hysteria: ‘Oh, Doctor, I say do ya help me. I get syphilis.’ He babbled in Creole, fidgeting and jumping, utterly unable to contain himself. ‘I able feel am crawling pan me skin.’ He shuddered at that. We all did. ‘I need tchuk.’ He made the motion of giving himself an imaginary injection in the left arm. Our father, still half asleep, led him through to his surgery and treated him then and there. When the young man confessed he had no way of paying, our father waved him away.
A few weeks later my mother was out at night. She had been to a dance at the Diamond Corporation, alone because my father was working. On the way home she drove over a pothole and burst a tyre. The road was dark and empty as the DiaCorp compound was some way out of town; dense elephant grass grew up on either side to well over seven foot. She couldn't see a single light and within a few moments she began to consider her predicament: a woman, in an evening gown and high heels, without a t
orch on an empty road in the African bush. She had been there some time when she saw a car's headlights in the distance. Conflicting thoughts occupied her mind and she prayed that this was someone who would help her, perhaps someone else on their way back from the party.
As the car came closer she saw that it was dented and old, obviously belonging to a local because no European would drive a car in such a state. It drew alongside, slowed and stopped next to her. My mother could see that there were several young men inside.
‘Na de doctor een wife,’ someone announced. It was ‘Tchuk’. He jumped out grinning and proud, evidently in the best of health. Within a few moments Tchuk and his companions changed the punctured tyre and saw her away.
By the time we had been in Koidu a year our father's name and reputation had spread for miles. As with my mother, everywhere he went people greeted us, yelled and waved at the passing car. Yet to me at that time he was a distant figure.
My days were spent in the house, playing with our dogs Jack and Jim, and being guarded by Big Aminatta. I say ‘guarded’ because that is just about what she did: she pursued her many chores around the house, of which I was just one. Her task was to make sure I didn't escape or run into trouble. She kept me within the confines of the compound by telling me of the devils lurking in the elephant grass beyond the screen of trees that marked the compound boundary. Devils with faces like gargoyles just waiting for the opportunity to feed on a child like me. At night she got me to clean my teeth with stories of cockroaches that crawled onto pillows and feasted on the crumbs left at the side of a sleeper's mouth.
At that time we had two Old English sheepdogs. With their heavy coats they were hopelessly unsuited to both the humidity and the ticks that burrowed into their flesh, but they seemed to manage all the same. Given to us as puppies in Freetown, they were at first presumed to be mongrels until they grew into apparently full-blooded Old English sheepdogs. My mother called them Jack and Jim and they were the only pedigree dogs I ever saw or have ever seen since in Sierra Leone. I spent my days tumbling with Jack and Jim in the yard and kissing them on the nose, playing in the dirt until I contracted enormous tropical boils, which my father lanced for me from time to time, and generally ingesting enough germs to give me a lifelong immunity to hepatitis. In the evening our father came back long after we were all in bed. He literally worked every hour of the day.
The Devil that Danced on the Water Page 6