The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  The exiled family of a political prisoner and former minister, stranded in London, we attracted interest. There was a constant flow of visitors to the flat at Grenbeck Court. There were businessmen: British, Lebanese and Sierra Leonean; some had backed our father when he was in the APC, others were simply keen for an opportunity to curry favour for the future. There were student activists fresh from Freetown, former members of the APC who had defected to the UDP. Some had managed to evade the round-up and returned to London through Monrovia. They came back to their student digs, their law degrees and accountancy exams. They held meetings, and lobbied the British government as well as sympathetic British MPs about what was happening in Sierra Leone, and just as often they stopped by Grenbeck Court to exchange information gleaned from their network of contacts or to find out if we had heard anything new.

  In prison for three months now, our father and the other UDP leaders had still not been charged with an offence, and were still denied access to their lawyers or to visitors. Clarkson, the detainees’ wing of Pademba Road Prison, was filled to capacity. Shortly after reports of the arrests appeared in the international press the news came that the human rights organisation Amnesty International had declared our father one of their celebrated Prisoners of Conscience.

  Our case was handled by the German and Luxembourg branches of Amnesty and once, in the early days, one of the desk officers came on holiday to London and stopped by the flat to meet us. She was a young woman with golden hair, rosy cheeks and a wide, clear smile. Her name was Gita and she treated us all to supper. She ordered wine, which I had never had before, and let me try a little. She taught me how to hold the glass by the stem so my hand didn’t warm the contents, swirl the liquid round and sniff the rising bouquet. Then she gently tipped the glass back and took a sip, urging me to copy her. I rolled the wine around in my mouth: the vapour tickled my nose; I swallowed. The wine was unexpectedly delicious. We never saw Gita again but from time to time we had letters from Amnesty telling us what they were doing to draw the world’s attention to our father’s plight.

  And so we waited. The first months in London we behaved as though we were tourists: we visited Trafalgar Square and let the pigeons crawl over us; we marched the length of Oxford Street buying ourselves new clothes; we wandered awestruck through Harrods; we stood in Parliament Square and waited for Big Ben to strike the hour; Mum even bought us all tickets to Billy Smart’s Circus when they performed at the Earls Court Arena. But as the weeks went by our enthusiasm for the sightseeing trips tailed off. We were ready to go home and yet we couldn’t.

  We couldn’t continue to live as we had been, either: like guests in someone’s house. Mum decided she needed a job. She enrolled in a secretarial course and signed up with the Brook Street Bureau. I imagined her going to work like the smart girl in the poster at Earls Court Station dressed in a tartan mini skirt, a pair of patent leather boots and tartan peaked cap. Memuna and I were sent away to boarding school – Sheka had begun at his new school already. We said farewell to Miss Bird and at the start of the Lent term, as I would one day learn to call it, we took the train to the town of Horley to High Trees School.

  We arrived like snails carrying our homes on our backs: two grey trunks with our names stencilled on the sides, each containing several years’ supply of clothes – six pairs of brown regulation knickers, two brown tunics, six pairs of fawn socks, sandals for indoors, lace-up walking shoes for out, Wellington boots, a brown mac, two brown-check summer dresses, and a copy of the Bible and the English Prayer Book.

  That night, for the first time, I slept in a separate room from Memuna. She was put into the Blue Dorm with seven other girls; I slept in the Pink Room with the three youngest. We sat on the high iron beds in our flannel nightdresses, staring at each other mutely until Mrs Peebles, the Polish matron, came to turn out the lights. For a while I lay in between the cold sheets, under my candlewick counterpane, watching the patterns of moonlight on the wall. After a few minutes I heard sniffs and then a sob coming from the other beds. Within moments I began to cry as well. None of us said a word to each other and no one came to the door; we stifled our sobs into our pillows and eventually we cried ourselves to sleep.

  In the morning we struggled into the new, unfamiliar clothes laid out on the chairs next to each of our beds, starting with two pairs of pants, one on top of the other, and ending with the cardboard stiff blazer. When I had finished dressing I came across a narrow length of striped, silky fabric. I held it up. It was wider at one end than the other, tapering into a neat point. I had sort of an idea of what it was, but no earthly notion of how to wear it. So I draped it round my neck, where it hung limply. Moments later the bell sounded and I followed the rest of the girls down to breakfast – and for the whole of the first term until Easter that was how I continued to wear my tie.

  ‘Student revolutionaries from the West African state of Sierra Leone were being hunted by police last night after a coup and counter-coup at the country’s high commission in London . . .’

  The announcement on the lunch-time news came while I was away at school. Ten of the young activists who used to come by our flat at Grenbeck Court, all members of the United Democratic Party, had taken over the Sierra Leone high commission in Portland Place to demand the resignation of Siaka Stevens and the release of all the political prisoners. Among them was Bianca Benjamin, our mother’s old friend with whom we had stayed in Freetown during the election crisis in 1967, and Auntie Shineh, who was married to Ibrahim Taqi. The next morning their picture appeared in The Times. Away at boarding school without newspapers or television, we missed all the fun. It turned out Mum had known all about it, but she stayed at home because she worried that if she was arrested and ended up in prison, well – who would look after us when we came home?

  The students were let into the building by an unsuspecting caretaker early in the morning. Flourishing a toy pistol, they rounded up the high commission’s staff and locked them up in an empty office. Next door one of the protesters sat down at the high commissioner’s desk and used his telephone to call State House in Freetown. He asked to speak to the prime minister and the operator, thinking this must be the high commissioner himself, put him straight through. The student leader informed Stevens that the Portland Place building had been occupied and the staff were being held hostage; he offered their release in exchange for the freedom of the political prisoners. Stevens hung up on him.

  Upstairs the captive staff waved a handkerchief from the window and shouted to passers by, one of whom eventually went to raise the alarm. Meanwhile downstairs the intruders called a press conference and in front of TV cameras and press men they announced themselves as the new government-in-exile of Sierra Leone. Half an hour later the police moved in to clear the building but they didn’t manage to arrest the ring leaders who, in all the confusion, slipped away among the crowd of television crews and journalists.

  Britain was beset by strikes: four thousand in that one year. The postal workers were on strike, the miners were unofficially out, and workers at Ford were threatening to picket. The escapade at the high commission contained an element of high farce which tickled journalists who had spent weeks writing about the threat of power cuts and rising inflation. The high commissioner had been in the news just weeks before, for taking a second wife while he was in Britain. The students were smart and audacious: they had outwitted the deputy high commissioner, who had been left in charge of the office while his boss was recalled to Freetown, as well as the British police.

  In time their luck ran out. The students were caught and taken to Marylebone Magistrates’ Court, where a judge set their bail at a hundred and fifty pounds. The case dragged on for almost a whole year. Stevens wanted the students deported back to Sierra Leone and he ordered their government grants be stopped. The students took their case to the Court of Appeal and then the House of Lords. The Law Lords gave everyone a full or a conditional discharge, and all the students were awarded political as
ylum in Britain.

  Who can say for certain what impact the student demonstration had on Stevens back in Sierra Leone? But a week after the drama at the high commission the prime minister ordered the release of most of the political detainees from Pademba Road Prison, including the leaders of the UDP, John Karefa Smart and Mohammed Bash Taqi among them. But for us the elation was short-lived. Our father’s name wasn’t on the list of the people who had been freed. He remained in prison.

  A year later in Britain the miners were still out on strike and there were power cuts across the country. Over the Michaelmas term at school we ate our supper by candlelight and slept with socks on our feet and scarves round our necks. In Pademba Road our father slept and woke under the ceaseless burning of a single light bulb, day and night. Our stepmother gave up temping with Brook Street Bureau and accepted a permanent position as a secretary for a firm of Jewish architects in Soho Square. She moved us out of the flat at Grenbeck Court and into an attic apartment a few streets away in Philbeach Gardens. Mum, Memuna and I still shared a room but there was a tiny single room, a box room really, for Sheka. As the weeks trickled into months which widened into years, the visitors to our new place became fewer. We had come to Britain thinking that we would be there for a few weeks. We ended up staying three years.

  29

  The pale-blue aerogramme arrived on 6 July 1971. On the right-hand side, above the address, was a red eagle, with the words: ‘Sierra Leone, Land of Iron & Diamonds, 9 Cents.’ It was addressed to ‘Sheka, Memuna and Aminatta Forna’ and arrived at Grenbeck Court a few months before we moved to our new place. It was from our father. Inside, at the top of the page, was the oval stamp of the prison office in purple ink and our father’s prisoner number: D 6/70. I looked at the address at the top of the letter, the signature of the prison censor, and I thought about my father being in prison and what that meant.

  At Minister’s Quarters a group of prisoners had come to clear the garden. We had watched them from the upstairs bedroom window as they scythed the overgrown grass. They wore ill-fitting, buttoned cotton jackets and trousers that had once been white. They were barefoot and worked silently, uncomplaining, before they were herded back into the unmarked prison Land-Rover. They did not look awesome or frightening as I thought criminals should, but rather small and skinny and old. Nonetheless we did not venture out to play until they were gone. We went to the garden where they had been working, looking for I don’t know what – some evidence of their criminality left behind on the lawn, perhaps – then we saw the enormous pile of cuttings and we jumped into it, laughing, and rolled about there for the remainder of the day. Next morning we were back: we leapt straight in to begin again, only to find the cuttings were now alive with thousands of red and green caterpillars.

  On our way to and from town I had seen gangs of prisoners by the side of the roads. Their legs were chained and they worked clearing ditches and mending potholes. After my stepmother had finished reading the letter from our father I asked her: ‘Does Daddy have to mend the roads and work in people’s gardens now he’s in prison?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. And I told her what I remembered seeing: men stripped to the waist; they had looked like moving shadows beneath the glare of the sun.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. He doesn’t have to do that.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he?’

  ‘Because he’s not that kind of prisoner.’

  ‘He’s not what kind of prisoner?’

  ‘The kind that has to mend roads.’ She meant he wasn’t a criminal, although the Daily Mail in Freetown did its best to portray him as one. All the same the idea of my father being forced to labour in front of crowds of onlookers chafed at my imagination. I could not let go of the terrible image.

  At school on Sundays we wrote to our parents after we had been to church and eaten our lunch of grey meat and colourless vegetables. We filed into the unheated classrooms for letter-writing, sat at our desks and filled our fountain pens with ink, while a teacher handed out paper: plain white, ruled paper for everyone except the overseas pupils, who were issued with floating leaves of onion skin.

  My father slept in a cell no more than six foot by eight foot. It had no natural light, except for a small opening protected by steel bars high up by the ceiling, but the electric bulb hanging in the middle of the room glowed day and night so that there was never a time when it was dark. After years under the bright light many detainees left prison with their eyesight permanently ruined. In the centre of the door was a peephole which allowed the guards to see in, but my father could not see out. The cell contained nothing except a blanket and a chamber pot, which was emptied once a day. On the first day he was stripped naked and issued with prison clothes. He was held in solitary confinement and fed a plate of rice and stew twice a day for two weeks, after which he was allowed out for a single hour of exercise in the evening. A whole month elapsed before he was taken to the shower block and given a bucket of water to wash. In time, through lawyers, he was able to request books, which he sometimes received: novels by Morris West, Edwin Fadiman and Solzhenitsyn’s five-hundred-page volume Cancer Ward, which parallels a prisoner’s life on a ward for the dying in a Soviet labour camp, and the cancer at the heart of the police state. After the first few months he was given writing paper.

  In his letters my father urged me to work hard at school, praised me on my grades when they were good, and asked me if I had stopped sucking my thumb. I told everyone I had, but secretly I continued to suck it at night. He asked about the goldfish Goldie and Orangie, and remembered the names of the girls with whom I was currently friends at school. I wrote back in turn begging him to allow us home. I was allergic to England – my skin was dry and ashy, my lips were cracked and I couldn’t help licking them, which only made the problem worse; my hair had turned frizzy and my fingers were tattered with bleeding rag nails. I hated being stuck at boarding school and I hated being in England, and in my mind one was synonymous with the other.

  Our father placed an unshakeable faith in the British education system – as did many Africans in those days. They believed the key to success lay in a British education, of which by far the most superior was one acquired at boarding school. Going to Bo School had changed his life immeasurably. My father wanted me to become a lawyer (I got as far as completing my degree before I gave up law for journalism) and Memuna, who was the brightest of us, to become a doctor, as he had been. I can’t remember what ambitions he had for my brother – something equally elevated, certainly. As an adult, when I spoke to other friends of mine - other children of the empire growing up in Commonwealth countries after independence – I found we often shared similar experiences. Most of our parents did not own their own homes; foreign holidays were rare or unheard of; the bulk of our parents’ income went on their children’s schooling – this was the price of securing our future. Many years later I finally began to understand the sacrifices our parents had made to give us our education and why they cherished this particular dream. But at the time I felt as if I were being punished.

  I must have gone on begging and pleading with him, and Mum must have described in her letters how I clung to her legs on the platform at Victoria Station at the start of every term and the end of each exeat, forcing her to prise me off and hand me over to the teacher escorting the Horley train. Three months into our second year apart, my father wrote to me at length: ‘The Fornas, men as well as women, boys as well as girls, are brave people and they never cry. So you should not cry. Okay? The Fornas face everything bravely.’ He promised, when the time was right, we would be a family again one day. But not just yet. Never just yet.

  One Sunday at High Trees a new teacher came in to supervise our letter-writing session. His name was Mr Newman; he had a fat grey moustache and silver spectacles. At the end of the session we lined up as usual while Mr Newman wrote out our parents’ addresses neatly on the front of our envelopes. When it was my turn I gave him our address in London.
Mr Newman asked why, if I lived in London, my letter was written on airmail paper.

  ‘My father lives in Sierra Leone.’ I gave the most minimal and discouraging reply I could.

  ‘And what’s your father’s address in Sierra Leone?’

  ‘I don’t know. My mum has it. We send our letters to her and she sends them to him. That’s the way she likes to do it.’

  ‘Well that’s a bit of a silly waste of time, not to mention stamps. Why on earth don’t you just post the letters from here, you daft girl?’ I quite liked Mr Newman, really. He was very funny and when he called you daft he didn’t really mean it. It was just his way. But I still couldn’t tell him the reason my letters weren’t posted directly to Freetown was because no one at school, neither teachers nor pupils, knew our father was in jail.

  I left the old Nissen hut that served as a classroom with Caroline, one of my closest friends. I had spent a weekend at her home near Winchester and, in return, I asked her home to Philbeach Gardens. Caroline was clever, small and neatly turned out, with matching clothes and the kind of grown-up manners English children have.

  ‘How do you do, Mrs Forna?’ Caroline extended her hand confidently, formally. A beat passed before Mum took her hand. She greeted her pleasantly, but there was an expression upon Mum’s face I couldn’t quite read.

  At Caroline’s house I had slept in the spare bedroom, where everything matched the sprigged yellow paper on the walls: curtains, eiderdown, valance, dressing-table cloth, cushion covers. In the corner was a washbasin and a bowl of miniature, scented soaps. When I invited Caroline to stay with us I imagined showing her to a room just like the one I had stayed in. But we didn’t have a spare room and I shared the same bedroom under the eaves of the building with Mum and Memuna. At bed time it occurred to me for the first time there was nowhere for Caroline to sleep. I had spent the night on the divan in the sitting room, while Caroline took my bed. It made no difference to our friendship, but I hadn’t invited anyone home since.