“Are we going to live here?” she managed to ask.
“Well, I know you will not like it, but this is the best I can do. You see, accommodation is very short in London, especially for black people with children. Everybody is coming to London. The West Indians, the Pakistanis and even the Indians, so that African students are usually grouped together with them. We are all blacks, all coloureds, and the only houses we can get are horrors like these.”
Well, what could she say? She simply stared. She said nothing even when she learned that the toilet was outside, four flights of stairs down, in the yard; nor when she learned that there was no bath and no kitchen. She swallowed it all, just like a nasty pill.
In the evening, the other tenants returned from the factories where they worked. They all came to welcome her. Then, to her horror, she saw that she had to share the house with such Nigerians who called her madam at home; some of them were of the same educational background as her paid servants. She knew she had had a terrible childhood, but still, in Nigeria, class distinctions were beginning to be established. Oh, Francis, she wailed inwardly, how could you have done this to us? After all we have friends who, though they may be living in slums like this, still live apart from this type of people.
“You could have tried, Francis. Look at your friend, Mr Eke - when he knew that his wife was coming with their daughter, he made sure he moved away from this lot,” she said aloud.
“Sorry, but I was too busy. It’s not bad, you can keep to yourself, you don’t have to mix with them. You have your children to look after, you don’t have to see them!”
“You make it all sound so easy - ‘I don’t have to see them’. You forget I have young children, and they will bring me into contact with the neighbours. You should have thought of that before. Have you no shame at all or have you lost your sense of shame in this God-forsaken country? Oh, I wish I had not come. I wish I had been warned. I wish …”
“Why don’t you stop wishing and face reality? It is too late now. We just have to make the best of the situation. I shouldn’t start moaning, if I were you.”
“Don’t talk to me. I don’t want to hear. You could have got better accommodation if you had really tried. But you didn’t try hard enough,” Adah yelled.
Francis’s temper snapped. He lifted his hand as if to slap her, but thought better of it. There would be plenty of time for that, if Adah was going to start telling him what to do. This scared Adah a little. He would not have dreamt of hitting her at home because his mother and father would not have allowed it. To them, Adah was like the goose that laid the golden eggs. It seemed that in England, Francis didn’t care whether she laid the golden egg or not. He was free at last from his parents, he was free to do what he liked, and not even hundreds of Adahs were going to curtail that new freedom. The ugly glare he gave Adah made that clear.
Then he spat out in anger: “You must know, my dear young lady, that in Lagos you may be a million publicity officers for the Americans; you may be earning a million pounds a day; you may have hundreds of servants: you may be living like an élite, but the day you land in England, you are a second-class citizen. So you can’t discriminate against your own people, because we are all second-class.”
He stopped to see the effect of his warning. He was happy to see that it had made an impression. Adah sat crumpled on the edge of the new settee, just like the dying Ayesha in Rider Haggard’s She.
Francis went on, enjoying the rhythm of his voice. That man should have been an actor, Adah thought.
He laughed. A joyless sort of laugh, dry and empty. “I remember at one of your Old Girls’ Association meetings where that white lady … yes, I remember, she was from Oxford, wasn’t she? -I remember her telling you all that young women with your background should never in all your lives talk to bus conductors. Well, my darling, in England the middle-class black is the one that is lucky enough to get the post of bus conductor. So you’d better start respecting them.”
At first Adah thought Francis hated her. This was his first opportunity of showing her what he was really like. Had she made a mistake in rushing into this marriage? But she had needed a home. And the immigration authorities were making it very difficult for single girls to come to England. You were allowed only as long as you were coming to join a husband who was already there. It was very bad, sad in fact. But even if she had nothing to thank Francis for, she could still thank him for making it possible for her to come to England, for giving her her own children, because she had never really had anything of her own before.
They made it up that night, forgetting, in their intense disappointment and loneliness which was fast descending upon them like a gloomy cloud, that they were not supposed to have more children for some time Adah did remember in the confusion that her nickname at home was “Touch Not”. But how could she protest to a man who was past reasoning? The whole process was an attack, as savage as that of any animal.
At the end of it all, Francis gasped and said, “Tomorrow you are going to see a doctor. I want them to see to this frigidity. I am not going to have it.”
When, days later, Adah discovered what frigidity meant, she realised that Francis had become sophisticated in many things. She kept all this to herself, though. There was no point in arguing with Francis; he was as remote as the English people Adah had seen at Liverpool. And the house where they now lived was a place in which one could not have a good family ding-dong in peace.
What worried her most was the description “second-class”. Francis had become so conditioned by this phrase that he was not only living up to it but enjoying it, too. He kept pressing Adah to get a job in a shirt factory. Adah refused. Working in a factory was the last thing she would do. After all, she had several “O” and “A” levels and she had part of the British Library Association Professional Certificate, to say nothing of the experience. Why should she go and work with her neighbours who were just learning to join their letters together instead of printing them? Some of them could not even speak any English even though it was becoming a colloquial language for most Ibos. To cap it all, these people were Yorubas, the type of illiterate Yoruba who would take joy in belittling anything Ibo. But Francis mixed with them very well, and they were pushing him to force her to take the type of job considered suitable for housewives, especially black housewives.
This was all too much for Adah, and she recoiled into her shell, telling it all, as the Protestant hymn book says, “to God in prayers”.
But, as usual, God had a funny way of answering people’s prayers. An envelope arrived one morning telling her that she had been accepted as a senior library assistant at North Finchley Library subject to certain conditions. She was so happy about this that she ran into the backyard where she hung out the babies’ nappies and started to whirl round and round in a kind of Ibo dance. She was forced to stop suddenly because she was dizzy. She was unwell. She was, in fact, feeling sick.
Then she remembered that first night. Oh, God help her, what was she going to do? Tell Francis in his present mood? He would kill her. He had started accusing her of all sorts of things. He had told her that he married her in the first place because she could work harder than most girls of her age and because she was orphaned very early in life. But since she had arrived in England, she had grown too proud to work.
The news of the new job would have cheered him up, but not if it was coupled with the knowledge that another child was on the way when Titi was barely two and Vicky nine months old; not when the two children were not yet out of nappies? Oh, God, what was she going to do? Francis would say she had invented the pregnancy to avoid work. Had he not taken her to see a female gynaecologist the very next day because, as he said, no marriage succeeds without a good sex life? As far as he was concerned, marriage was sex and lots of it, nothing more. The doctor was very sympathetic towards Adah and guessed that she was frightened of another child. She was sent home equipped with all sorts of gadgets to prevent a baby that was already sit
ting there prettily. Oh, yes, Bubu was determined to come into the world, and nobody was able to stop him even though he chose a very unorthodox way of doing so, nine months later. Meanwhile his mother went through hell.
Adah felt very ill, but kept it quiet. Francis was dissatisfied and started shopping around outside for willing women. Adah was quite happy about this; she even encouraged him. At least she would have some peaceful nights.
As she expected, Francis blamed her for the baby, and was sure she would lose the job because there was to be a medical examination. Adah was scared about this, but she was determined to get that job.
She put on her best skirt and blouse, the set she had bought from St Michael’s in Lagos. She had not been able to buy any clothes since she arrived in England as all the money she had brought with her went on food. Francis would not work as he was studying and he said this would interfere with his progress. Well, she put on this outfit, feeling great. She had not really dressed up for a very long time. Apart from making her feel good, the skirt and blouse covered the gentle bulge that was already forming. Being the third child, it showed early.
She stopped panicking when she saw that the doctor was a man, and an old man at that. There was a woman sitting by him, though, a scribe or something, for she held a pen and paper and sat on a chair, as stiff as dry twigs. Adah ignored the latter and set to work on the old doctor. She beamed at him, charmed him and even wanted to flirt with him. In short, the doctor got carried away and forgot to look at Adah’s belly-button, even though she was stripped to the waist.
She got the job. Only God Almighty knew what happened to the poor doctor, especially as it was clear from the first month that she was pregnant and she enquired about maternity leave. Adah was sorry for him, but what could she have done? If she had not got that job her marriage would have broken up, and that would have been very difficult because she did not yet know her way about. The fact that she was still laying the golden eggs stopped Francis from walking out on her. As before, her pay bound him to her but the difference was that she now knew it.
She had had to travel all the way from Lagos to London to find that out, and to discover another very weak point: she cared for Francis, she wanted him to make good, she hated to disappoint him. So, sorry though she was for making a fool of an old doctor, this was just one of those cases where honesty would not have been the best policy.
4
The Daily Minders
Adah started work on the first of June. It was almost three months since she arrived in the United Kingdom. She was so proud of her job and so happy on this particular June morning that she found beauty in everything. She saw beauty on the faces of her fellow passengers and heard beautiful sounds from the churning groans of the speeding underground train.
Spring had come very late that year, because it had been a long and bitter winter, and although it was June, the freshness in the air was like that of the first day of April.
At Finchley Central, the train emerged from its underground tunnel into the open air like a snake from its hole. Adah let down the window and breathed in the cool, pure, watery air. It had rained the night before and there was wetness everywhere.
She saw the back gardens of many, many houses, gardens with flowers of many varieties growing in profusion: lupins and peonies, delphiniums, sweet peas and columbines. The wonderful glow of alyssum on the verges of many garden paths gave a tidy edge to the carpet of green grass which seemed to cover the ground. The trees had burst into green, ceasing to look like the naked, dried-up, juiceless old women they had reminded Adah of when she first landed in England.
Now, everything was young, clean, moist and full of juice.
At the library, she was quickly taken under the wing of the chief librarian. She was a Czech, explosive in her welcome and very, very friendly. Mrs Konrad was a wide lady, with wide hips, a wide waist, and a face like a flattened O. She had fine lines around her eyes, and these lines deepened when she smiled, which was most of the time. Even her smiles were wide, displaying her creamy, even teeth.
She seemed to have little time for make up. Her brown hair was cropped, just like a man’s used to be before the arrival of Jesus fashion. She left a handful of bulbous curls at the back of her head and another at the front, the latter had a funny way of collapsing onto her forehead, and she was forever pushing them back into their rightful place. The curls at the back just stayed there unperturbed, even when Mrs Konrad shook with laughter.
Her skirts were always gathered and home-made. She wore woollen gathered ones in winter and cotton gathered ones in summer. She was untouched by any passing fashion. Come tight skirts, wide skirts, come midis, minis, maxis, Mrs Konrad always wore her gathered-skirts. This, together with unusually tight blouses, gave her the look of an overblown ballet dancer.
The other girls were assistants, very young with long, skinny legs; most of them seemed to be all legs to Adah. Unlike their superior, they were all fashion-conscious. They made Adah feel out of place, so she never really became too familiar with them. They made her feel inferior somehow, always talking of boy friends and clothes. Adah would have liked to join in, for she was the same age, but she knew that if she opened her mouth she would sound bitter. She would have told them that marriage was not a bed of roses but a tunnel of thorns, fire and hot nails. Oh, yes, she would have told them all sorts of things. But why, she asked herself, must she spoil other people’s dreams? So she preferred to listen and smile noncommittally.
Soon she settled down to work. She hardly ever sat down, and this was purgatorial to her feet. Only God knew what the people of North Finchley did with all the books they borrowed. The queue sometimes stretched so far that some people had to stand outside, waiting, just to borrow books. This was a big contrast to the library she had worked in before. In the consulate, they had to bribe people to make them read fiction. They were only keen on reading text-books in order to raise their status economically. No one bothered with fiction. But in North Finchley, the number of fiction readers was so staggering that Adah decided to emulate them. She, too, started to read the works of many contemporary novelists, and that helped her a great deal culturally.
In her new job, she had to be very fast in filing books, in filing tickets, in making out readers’ tickets, in tracing lost ones. And all the time she was forever saying “Thank you”; “Thank you” when she accepted the returned books, “Thank you” when she gave the tickets back, “Thank you” when she handed over new books. In fact, working at the North Finchley Library was more of a “Thank you, thank you” job than anything else. All in all, Adah was happy she’d got a first-class job; she was happy that her colleagues at work liked her, she was happy that she was enjoying the work.
It was all right for her, being a first-class citizen for the part of the day when she worked in a clean, centrally heated library, but what about her children? Who was going to look after them? Since it was nearing the end of the summer term, Francis did agree to look after them temporarily. While it was still news that she had got herself employed in a library, doing a first-class citizen’s job, Francis was prepared to look after their children, but soon her job was no longer news. Everybody accepted it with a sniff.
“Who is going to look after your children for you?” Francis asked one day when she was tucking the babies into their settee bed. “I can’t go on doing it; you’ll have to look for someone. I can’t go on looking after your children for you.”
Adah spun round, aghast. She was not really surprised that Francis said this, she had known it was coming; but what she hadn’t realised was the resentment over the children which was accumulating in Francis. She could sense the suppressed anger when he referred to them as “her” children, not “theirs”. In Nigeria, when children were good, they were the father’s, they took after him, but when they were bad, they were the mother’s, taking after her and her old mother. Adah was frightened.
She could feel their neighbours speaking through Francis. Their l
andlord and landlady were in their late thirties. They had been married for ten years or more, but the wife had had no children. They had resented Francis’s idea of bringing his children to England in the first place. They had warned him that it was going to be difficult for them, but left him alone when he told them that Adah had already paid for their fare. They consoled themselves with the fact that, after all, the children would not stay with their parents at Ashdown Street. They would have to be fostered. Most Nigerians with children sent their children away to foster-parents. No sane couple would dream of keeping their children with them. So rampant was the idea of foster-parents that African housewives in England came to regard the foster-mother as the mother of their children.
They say that in England Nigerian children have two sets of mothers - the natal mother, and the social mother. As soon as a Nigerian housewife in England realised that she was expecting a child, instead of shopping for prams, and knitting little bootees, she would advertise for a foster-mother. No one cared whether a woman was suitable or not, no one wanted to know whether the house was clean or not; all they wanted to be sure of was that the foster-mother was white. The concept of “whiteness” could cover a multitude of sins.
This was all right for the Nigerian wife who, for the first time, was tasting the real freedom of being a wife. She was free from the hindering influences of her kith and kin, she was free to work and earn money. Any type of work would do: cleaning, packing goods in a factory, being a bus conductor; all sorts of things. The money she thus earned went partly to the foster-mother, and the rest was blown on colourful outfits from some big department store.
Second Class Citizen Page 5