‘Why is your dad in Africa when you’re all here?’ Caroline asked me. ‘And how come you never go home to see him?’
It was the first time anyone had ever enquired directly. I suppose I could have made an excuse, but I didn’t. A few minutes later, sitting on the damp grass of the lower playing fields, I asked Caroline if she could keep a secret. I told her my father was in prison and though I didn’t understand all the details myself, I gave her the best account I could.
When I had finished speaking. Caroline regarded me gravely and at length. ‘I’ve a secret about my father, too,’ she said presently in a low tone which spoke of confidences about to be shared.
‘What kind of secret?’ I was a bit worried I had said too much and now I was eager to be reassured in any way.
‘My father’s a murderer.’
I looked her straight in the face. I certainly hadn’t been expecting that. ‘Who did he murder?’
This is the story Caroline told me that day on the playing fields, while we watched the rest of the boarders playing a game of Stuck in the Mud: Caroline and her family had lived in the Cameroons, where her father was an executive with an oil company. They lived outside the capital, close to the rain forest in an area then being surveyed and scouted for drilling opportunities. In due course new reserves of oil were indeed discovered, the land was cleared and work began.
‘One day,’ Caroline recounted, ‘some Africans came up to our house, lots, a whole crowd of them. They asked to speak to my father. They were villagers and they said they used to live on the land. Now the land was gone they had nowhere to go and nothing to eat. They were so poor. They begged my father to help them, to give them something to eat.’
‘Why did they come to your house?’
‘Because my father was head of the company. They thought he would be able to help them. They didn’t know where else to go. They were just asking, begging.
‘They stood there for ages. My mother didn’t like it at all. She said they were treading on the flower beds and so in the end my father went out, but he wouldn’t speak to them. He told them to go away. He said they must get off our land. So they all went away. There were old people and women and children.’ Caroline stopped speaking.
When she began the story I had fancied maybe he’d pushed her mother down the stairs or put a poisonous snake into her bed. ‘But that doesn’t make your dad a murderer.’
‘The people went away and they never came back. I asked my father what would happen to them and he said he didn’t know. But one of the Africans who worked for us told me they’d all died. They didn’t have anything to eat and they died of hunger . . . all of them, even the children.’ Caroline had tears in her eyes. ‘So you see, your dad might be in prison. But mine’s a murderer and that’s worse. He killed all those people . . . he didn’t care what happened to them.’
I wondered if Caroline was right. After all, nobody had sent her father to prison for what he had done. Caroline called him a murderer. We were children guarding our parents’ shame, hiding from the world adult secrets we barely understood ourselves. Caroline never betrayed my confidence, nor I hers, although our friendship ebbed and flowed, as the affections of small girls are inclined to do. But even so, at some level we always remained close until the day we both left the school in 1975.
After the first letter, our father wrote to each of us separately and we came to expect his letters at the beginning of every month. Every now and again there would be an unexplained gap, and once for four consecutive months none of his letters reached us and none of ours reached him. When the airmails arrived at the flat in London Mum kept them until we came home at weekends and often I would ask her to read mine. I pretended I had difficulty with his doctor’s script, but really it was an excuse for me to curl up and just listen.
Since the day we parted we had not heard once from my mother. After she married our stepfather and returned from Mexico our father had written to her to say the Mexican divorce was not recognised in Sierra Leone. He went to court in Freetown and obtained a divorce himself, and then applied through the Nigerian courts for custody. It was under this authority that he arrived in Lagos to claim us back; our mother saw no alternative but to hand us over. Since then, throughout all the upheavals, there had been no word from her.
Finally a letter did come: Christmas cards arrived at Grenbeck Court, posted from East Africa. There were three of them. The illustrations on the front cover were all by the same artist, coloured drawings of Masai people. Sheka’s had a warrior carrying a spear, Memuna’s showed a woman with a baby on her back. My own, the most striking in my opinion, was of a woman wearing dozens of coloured rings about her swan-like neck. Our stepmother had called us together one day and handed the cards to each of us. Afterwards she asked me: ‘Do you remember your mother?’
‘Sure,’ I said, although I wasn’t. I had stopped thinking of her so much lately. Sometimes, and for a few days after the cards arrived, the three of us talked about her together in secret. We called her ‘Real Mum’ now and if anyone had ever overheard us they would have been confused. Mum was what we called our stepmother, and then there was Real Mum or Other Mum. Sometimes we called them both Mum and Mummy interchangeably – we always knew who we meant. When we talked about Real Mum we talked about her hair, mostly her hair. Or we rehearsed certain memories over and over, like the time Memuna found cockroaches in her Wellington boots. Once at school we had sung ‘Lord of the Dance’ in assembly. It was the first time I had heard the song since our days in Koidu and I didn’t understand why the words and the tune were so familiar, or why I knew them by heart. I suddenly felt overwhelmed by the memory of my mother and instead of singing along with the others I began to cry, cross-legged on the floor in the middle of two hundred other children. My form teacher picked her way across to me and led me out of the hall, assuming it was a case of homesickness. I asked Mum: ‘Are we going to see Mummy again?’
Mum answered slowly: ‘I don’t think so, Am. I think she has a new family of her own now.’
‘You mean she has other children?’ This thought had simply never crossed my mind and it shocked me. ‘How many other children does she have?’
‘I don’t know. One? Maybe two? I don’t really know.’
Later I thought about what Mum had said and I wondered who they could be, these other children who had my mother now.
In my dormitory I had a friend called Helen, the only other person at the school, apart from Memuna, whose skin was the same shade as mine. Soon after I began at High Trees Helen had told me her mother was white and her parents were divorced. Helen lived with her mother, her new stepfather, who was white as well, and two half sisters. But Helen and her brother were the only ones sent away to boarding school; she said it was because her parents didn’t want them around.
‘Is that why you’re here, too?’ she had asked. We’d been sitting on our beds in the Pink Room. Helen was picking at a scab on her arm – it made me wince to watch.
‘No.’ At the time I had explained how really I lived with my dad, although he was in Africa, so we couldn’t actually be together. Helen looked at me and shrugged.
Poor Helen. I did not want to be like her. She had such an air of dejection about her that she attracted few friends. She spent most of her time alone, sitting on the swings or walking down to the main school. As the term strung out, long after the rest of us overcame our homesickness, I would hear Helen at night crying. I could see the outline of her body, her face turned to the wall, and though I leant out of my bed and whispered to her, she never answered me.
30
I was walking home with a paper bag of samosas from Bestways in my hand when the sound of car brakes snapped me out of my daydream. Up ahead a red car jolted to a stop.
‘Here’s an ugly one. Jesus look at that!’ There were three men in the car, all in their twenties, all with short hair through which I could see the pink scalp. Their mouths contorted with hate: ‘You’re a fucking ugl
y fella, intchya? You’re a right bloody, ugly one.’ Shouts of hard laughter crashed inside my ears.
I looked around. There was a man ahead of me: very tall, skinny, loping stride, shoulders hunched against the barrage of taunts. He had long ropes of black hair hanging down his back – I had never seen hair like that.
Next to him the red car revved, keeping pace with his walk. ‘You’re one fucking ugly nigger, intchya?’ The man walked on, ignoring the car, behaving as though he hadn’t heard. I followed on behind him. The engine roared and the car drove away.
Back when we lived at Grenbeck Court Mum and Mrs Cobally used to sit and watch Love Thy Neighbour, the tears coursing down their faces. Alongside The Liver Birds it was Mum’s favourite TV programme. At school I had sometimes seen The Black & White Minstrel Show. It wasn’t my all-time favourite programme, but I enjoyed the singing and dancing, the extravagant numbers and tap routines well enough. I was baffled, though, by the strange oily, black faces and white lips of the men and it took a while for me to realise they were supposed to be black men.
Once in a geography lesson I had told the class, at the urging of the teacher, that I came from Sierra Leone. I pointed it out in my Junior Atlas. It was one of the pink bits – the former colonies were always coloured pink. Afterwards the teacher talked to us about life in Africa, about how the natives lived and worked on coca plantations or grew coffee for the world market. At some point she segued into a description of rubber-tapping on a plantation, and showed us a picture of a brown man in a loincloth and turban cutting a V into the trunk of a tree. She asked me if I had ever been on a rubber plantation. I told her I hadn’t. I couldn’t seem to recognise any aspect of the Africa she described and I had begun to wonder if indeed I really came from there at all. I only realised after the umpteenth time it happened that people in England often talked about Sri Lanka thinking it was the same country as Sierra Leone.
A girl with dappled blonde hair two seats in front of me raised her hand. ‘Is it true that when children in Africa are born their parents drop them on their heads. That’s why they can carry baskets and things – on their heads – and we can’t. Because their heads are flat?’
‘Goodness, well . . . I really don’t know,’ said Miss Martin.
‘Mummy says that’s what they do,’ replied the girl with absolute certainty.
‘Well, I suppose it’s possible . . . I really couldn’t say. It sounds a dreadful thing to do,’ murmured Miss Martin, putting her hand up to her breast.
‘My mother says so,’ repeated the girl, adding with finality, ‘So does my father.’
I raised my hand. ‘No they don’t,’ I said. ‘Africans don’t have flat heads. In Sierra Leone no one drops their babies on their heads, not on purpose.’
The girl swivelled round in her chair to look at me; the pageboy swung round and settled perfectly on either side of her cheeks; china-blue eyes regarded me disbelievingly. ‘Well, how come they can carry so many baskets on their heads then?’ She held up her book and pointed at the illustration of a woman with a baby on her back and a stack of six or seven baskets on her head.
I didn’t know the answer. I wondered, too. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Well, then. I’m right, Miss Martin, aren’t I?’ The pageboy swung back the other way.
‘Well, I suppose you could be,’ concurred the geography teacher.
The next time we watched the minstrels dance down a staircase and drop to their knees, arms outstretched, grinning at the audience, the boy next to me asked: ‘Is that what your father looks like then?’
I felt sad for the man walking in front of me down the London street, although I felt confused about what exactly had just happened. I gazed at the Rastafarian’s receding back, his lanky legs. He did not know I was there. At that moment, while my eyes were still upon him, I saw him flinch: a shudder that ran through his body like a convulsion. The red car was back. The men had driven round the block and now they were circling us like wild dogs. The car horn bayed:
‘Hey monkey!’
‘Show us ya face, monkey man!
It occurred to me that if they noticed me, which they hadn’t so far, they might pick on me too. Our flat lay beyond the wasteland of the Earls Court Exhibition Centre car park on the other side of the Warwick Road. I still had quite a long way to go. I was wary of attracting attention by suddenly swinging back the way I had come. There was no side road I could turn down, no choice but to keep walking. My urge was to run up to the Rastafarian and walk with him, not because I wanted to show solidarity, although I felt deeply sorry for him, but because I was now genuinely scared and I thought he might be able to protect me when my turn came around. I was shaking, could hear myself breathing. I put my head down and walked on.
In the winter of 1972 on our portable TV set we watched men, women and children arriving at Heathrow Airport from Uganda. The pictures reminded me of our family, when we came to Britain dressed only in our cotton clothes. These people – ‘Amin’s Asians’ they were called by the newspapers – mostly wore billowing trousers and tunics. Their arrival, broadcast in black-and-white news images, looked chilly and bleak.
Sometime later I had managed to lock myself out of our flat during the holidays while Mum was at work. Memuna and Sheka were off somewhere else together, so I sat on the doorstep to wait. A Ghanaian woman who lived in the basement saw me there and called me in to wait in her living room. While I sat on the sill of the bay window and watched the street, she went about her business.
In the room a radio was playing very loudly. The show was some kind of discussion programme. A man was asking: ‘Is it all right to call black people niggers, wogs and coons?’ He was going up to people in the street and asking them the question. I thought it wasn’t all right at all. I had never heard the words ‘wog’ or ‘coon’, but I knew what ‘nigger’ meant. I couldn’t understand why the man was bothering to ask. But to my surprise there seemed to be lots of people who thought it was just fine.
‘Is it acceptable to call black people niggers, wogs and coons, madam?’
‘It don’t matter. My dad always calls them wogs. That’s what they are, in’t they? Don’t mean anything really.’
‘Do you think it’s all right to call black people niggers, wogs and coons, sir?’
‘It’s our country. If they don’t like it they can go back to Paki Land.’
‘. . . black people niggerswogsandcoons, sir?’
‘. . . sticks and stones can break my bones. It’s harmless, really.’
. . . niggerswogsandcoons . . . niggerswogsandcoons . . . niggerswogsandcoons . . .
I watched the woman. She seemed to be oblivious to the words coming from the radio; she was unpacking her shopping and storing things in the fridge. The room was cold and the air was heavy with stale cooking oil; the carpet was wrinkled and grey; the draylon curtains sagged unevenly on the rail. She was a large, slow-moving woman, with a wrap tied around her head, wearing an old cardigan and a pair of men’s shoes. She acted as though she were deaf. As the radio blared she went about her business unceasingly: a poor African woman, away from her people, alone in a foreign country. Who was she to tell these people what she ought to be called?
At High Trees I suffered the early indignity of being forced to play Mowgli in a school production of The Jungle Book – wearing nothing but a pair of regulation knickers. We were all more appalled by the fact that my perfectly flat chest was on display to the class than anything else. In general we were of an age where children do not find differences of race or class remarkable. Gradually I moved on up the school, left the Cottage, where the junior girls slept, and moved into the main building with the senior girls.
In my first year in the upper school, when I was eight, nearly nine, a new girl arrived to join us. She was a weekly boarder and went home at weekends to ride her horses, and she left school two afternoons in the week to train and to compete at a place called Hickstead. Her name was Susan and she was worldly and self-confident i
n a way I had never encountered before. I had seen other new girls arrive: they sat in the empty seats at the front of the class and hung around together at break, shouting their presence silently, tongue-tied and trembling. It was ages before they made any friends with anyone. Susan was loud, with a habit of biting the split ends off her straight, sun-bleached hair and chewing her nails. On Mondays she came back to school with chocolates and sweets and shared them in the dorm after lights out. Susan and I instantly became friends.
We spent most of the term in each other’s company. By then I had been at High Trees long enough to have earned a certain amount of respect and I taught Susan everything I knew: the dance routines to the tracks by the Bay City Rollers and Mud, the endless and minute modifications in games of Jacks; the complicated skipping routines we all practised for hours on the tarmac outside the kitchen annexe. Susan wasn’t terribly interested, to be honest, but she went along with it up to a point, then she would cast me a look. At that moment we would break away from the game and wander off to sit and talk – well, mostly Susan talked about her life outside High Trees and I listened.
‘Eeenie, meenie, macka, racka . . .’
We were in class waiting for the teacher to arrive when Susan told me it was her birthday soon. Two girls next to us were performing an impressive clapping routine and everyone was watching, except the swots who already had their books out.
‘Rae, rye, dominacka.’
Susan whispered to me that she was planning a big party at her house in a few weeks’ time, and everyone was invited. I was the first person she had told.
The Devil that Danced on the Water Page 27