by Hannah Lowe
Wes was someone whose name I remembered, but didn’t recognise at the funeral. Years ago, when I was eleven or twelve, and for reasons I can’t recall, my father had taken me to the card club owned by Wes in Canning Town. It was winter and grey snow was thawing on the side street where we parked up by the club’s dark green door. The blinds inside were half closed and held the daylight from the large hall that smelt of cigarettes, perfume and stale sweat. It looked more like a community hall than a casino – worn-looking men and a few women sat in plastic chairs at chipboard tables, cards fanned in their hands. A television hung in the corner of the room showing horse racing with the sound turned down. People nodded to my father as he led me past the tables to the back of the club where a hatch revealed a strip-lit kitchen and a bored-looking black woman leaning on her elbows on the counter. He bought me a can of Coke and disappeared through a side door to attend to whatever bit of business he had come for. Wes popped his head out to wave at me, saying my name as though we knew each other.
Wes was Jamaican, very light skinned, almost yellow, in his late sixties when my father died, dressed in a good black suit, white shirt, his thin Clark Gable moustache slicked down. Outside the crematorium he had introduced himself and offered me a lift back to the house, and I’d accepted, intrigued, I suppose, by these men who knew my father, wanting to know more.
It was only a few miles in Wes’s little red sports car. A Christmas tree air freshener swung from the rear-view mirror. He drove with one hand on the steering wheel and with the other kept reaching for a paper bag of sweets on the dashboard, holding them out to me and saying ‘You like sweeties?’ again and again, before dissolving into high-pitched laughter. I sucked an aniseed twist. ‘How pretty you get,’ he said, looking over, one eyebrow raised, then laughing again as I willed the drive to be over, to be out of the car. ‘Your daddy never say how pretty you get.’
Later, at the house, he brought me glass after glass of Baileys, as though he could seduce me with sweetness. I prayed for him to leave. That old lech, my mother said when I asked about him later. Wes was on his fourth marriage, the most recent to a girl he’d brought over from Jamaica. She was twenty, two years younger than me. Imagine my surprise when I answered the phone a week later to hear Wes’s womanly laughter. He’d known my father for thirty years but was phoning to ask if I wanted to meet him ‘to have a nice time’.
Another picture: my brother’s friends – men in their late twenties, Essex boys grown. The twins, Jonny and Scott Morris, Mickey Walker and handsome Colin with his short dreadlocks – all of them in suits. I had loved these boys since they first came knocking for my brother, teenagers in their baggy jeans and Adidas trainers. I’d run to the front door, fascinated by the look and smell of them, by the rituals that went on behind my brother’s bedroom door where they drank lager and listened to old soul music and hip hop, their easy laughter sounding through the walls.
The strangest photo is of my father’s four children standing together – my half-sister Gloria, a small middle-aged black woman, born in America to my father’s first wife. Next to her is Tom, with wavy black hair and glasses, nearly fifty, my half-brother from my father’s second wife, and behind them, Sam and me, full brother and sister, both of us taller than the other two and entirely white in appearance. You wouldn’t believe our father was a black man or that the four faces smiling sombrely for the camera are biologically related. It was the first time we had been in the same room together.
♦
The rain continued. The water clung in wobbling beads to the patio doors. Inside, the gathering had a surreal, cheerful atmosphere. My Jamaican friend Claudette had come early to cook a feast of my father’s favourite food – what he’d asked for in his final days. Speaking through the fog of pain and morphine, he called for stewed chicken, plantain, rice and peas. Now we stood balancing our paper plates, gnawing chicken bones. The hum of conversation grew louder, cigarette smoke clouding the hot room. Billie Holiday sang in the background.
One last photo: me and Mac, one of my father’s oldest friends, but a man I hardly knew. His arm is slipped through mine. He wears a jacket with a leather collar, a gold chain, expensive clothes. His face is tanned below the neat crew-cut. A week later, he posted three plane tickets to the house, a set of keys and directions to his villa in a tiny village in Spain. He had money. He wanted to buy us a week in the sun, time to recover. Chick would have wanted it, he wrote. It’s the least I can do.
I am smiling in all these photos, like my mother, caring always about impressions. I remember trying to put everyone at ease, highly conscious of the dynamics of that group, the intermingling. What would my well-to-do sister, who’d flown all the way from her comfortable life in America, whose relationship with my father was disjointed and strained, make of the shady characters he had fraternised with? And my friends – I couldn’t bear their sympathetic looks, the awkwardness. So I drank, I laughed, I chatted for hours, repeating the same hackneyed phrases: ‘He’d have loved to see everyone here’ and ‘This is the way he’d have wanted it.’
But was it? My father died in shock and pain. He wasn’t ready to die, he hadn’t decided the time was right. Cancer decided that.
Escaping from the room for fresh air, I stood in the hall to look at the photographs I’d pinned to a cork board the night before: my father as a young man and an old man. He was fifty-two when I was born, and my memory did not register this handsome fellow, light-skinned, black-Caribbean-looking, his Chinese blood apparent, perhaps, in the high cheekbones and broad forehead. In the older photographs, he was lean and sharply dressed.
An old man in a black overcoat and hat caught my arm. ‘You’re Chick’s daughter,’ he said in an East End accent so strong he sounded like a parody of himself, like something from an old film. His face was gnarled and barky. ‘I know who you are, darling, but do you know who I am?’ I didn’t, and I can’t remember now the name he told me. ‘I knew your dad for years,’ he said, ‘You know what your daddy did?’
Did I know? I thought I did. He laughed.
‘He played poker, darling. Dice. And oh, he was the best in London, what he could do with his hands. You should be proud. He was the best. And I’m not kidding you.’ He was suddenly serious. ‘The best, I’m telling you.’ He was holding my arm more tightly as I looked back into his wet blue eyes.
Outside, I stood alone on the front door step. I was exhausted. The cold March air was a relief from the heat of the house. Across the road, the high trees in the park were in silhouette against a purple sky. My father was dead. Chick was dead. I knew so little about him. The best in London? Sometime in the afternoon the undertaker must have brought the flowers from the crematorium back to the house. They were laid on the grass at the side of the path, lit by the street lamp’s glow and shimmering from the rain. Red dice and the ace of hearts.
3
A Touch of the Tar Brush
There are no stars tonight But those of memory
– Hart Crane, My Grandmother’s Love Letters
My earliest memories are of Nan – a rocking chair, a crochet blanket on her lap, a teaspoon of sweet tea from her mug. Nan came from Kennington –the slums, my mother said, but Nan had married up and out. My eccentric middle-class grandfather brought her from south London to his home in Ilford, the sprawling suburban town that joins east London to Essex, sometimes called the gateway to Essex. Ilford was always a place where the rich and poor rubbed shoulders – the north side of Gants Hill had big white houses set back from tree-lined streets, and the east side – Goodmayes and Seven Kings – was poorer, but not quite run down: road after road of identikit homes with pebble-dashed walls and small front yards. My grandfather lived in-between at Newbury Park, in a two-up-two-down he bought in 1910. Ilford has changed enormously since then. It still has those enclaves of affluence but it’s a shabbier place. It was shabby when I was growing up. I remember the shopping parade of pound shops and shops boarded up; the scrappy, vandalised parks;
the rough pubs where boys hankered for fights on a Friday night.
My dad was lovely, my mother said. Not like my mum. My grandfather, Walter Hart, died long before I was born, so I never met the man who made himself the black sheep of his well-to-do family – spurning a job in their stockbroking firm, denouncing God, refusing to fight in the First World War – who got divorced and married Nan, his cleaner, and, apparently, spent long hours teaching himself Sanskrit in order to decipher ancient Hindu scriptures. He must have loved her I suppose, said my mother, though God knows why.
Nan was the only grandparent I knew and everything about her spoke of another time. Her rooms downstairs were musty and old – the kitchen worktops of yellow, cracked Formica, the fragile china mugs and tiny antique silver teaspoons, the bobbly cardigans and drab blue housecoat she wore every day. There were dusty hairnets on her mantelpiece, dusty ashtrays full of her crumpled butts. Even her pale hair seemed to have a coat of dust. She is only half there in my memory, as though she were already slipping away. The images I have of her possess a certain quality, like the faded lustre of cinefilm. I see her in the flower garden in her polyester bathing suit, her scraggy legs of knotted veins, or her shaking hands spooning jam into pastry cases, or pushing an old-fashioned pram along the road, a floral headscarf tied under her chin. It might be me in the pram, as though I see us from the outside now. Of all the memories, the most striking and clear to me is the morning I pushed open her bedroom door to find her and two of her sisters, Edith and Lily, sleeping top-to-toe on the brass bed’s white eiderdown. Old ladies in pale nightgowns with loose, long hair, snuggled into each other like small girls.
I remember the cups of sweets Nan gave to Sam and me – the strange ritual each morning when we went downstairs to her like Hansel and Gretel, lured by sweetness and sugar, knowing she’d have filled a cup for both of us with broken chocolate and honeycomb, bonbons wrapped in greaseproof paper, barley sugars, cubes of fudge. We loved it, of course, but my mother hated Nan giving us sweets and begged her not to when she’d just got us into the routine of cleaning our teeth.
The day I turned eighteen, she tried to rule my life, she said, decide my friends, my boyfriends, who I married, how I brought you children up. My mother originally met my father through his cousin Joe, whom she had dated some years before, when my grandfather was still alive. Joe was a saxophonist and my mother loved jazz. Every weekend, she’d tell Nan she was staying with a friend and catch the bus up to the East End club he played in. Joe was Jamaican – tall, handsome, always broke, often drunk, and devoted to music more than any woman, and there were many overlapping women. He was thirty-two, my mother eighteen.
‘Joe? Who’s Joe?’ Nan said. ‘A darkie? No! Not on your nelly, lady!’ She was appalled when she found out and wouldn’t look or speak to Joe the one time he came to the house. She cried into her mixing bowl. She couldn’t sleep. My grandfather begged my mother to lie to Nan, to say they’d broken up – he thought the fret might kill her. But Nan needn’t have worried. Eighteen months of lending Joe money, enduring his drunken rages, not knowing where he was, was enough for my mother. She gave him the elbow in a letter she handed him solemnly at Ladbroke Grove Tube station.
By then, she’d already met my father at the house he had shared with Elsie, his second wife, when Joe took her there one Sunday for tea. Joe loved to gamble and thought his cousin was the bee’s knees. Six years later my parents bumped into each other at a hardware shop in Seven Kings. My mother was back from teaching college, dispatched by Nan to buy iron wool. My father had just split with Elsie and was living up the road in a rented room. He was out buying saucepans and asked my mother’s advice. And that was that, she said. They rented a flat together three months later, much to Nan’s disdain.
By anyone’s standards, my parents were an unusual couple. She was a young, white teacher – he was twenty-three years older, an immigrant gambler. Only later did I wonder what drew them together. On my father’s part, my mother was young, attractive and educated. He had a great respect for education. He loved that she was a teacher. She was also English. My father’s upbringing in colonial Jamaica had left him conflicted – on the one hand he was committed to anti-imperial politics, on the other, he revered England and all things English. Socially, my mother might well have represented a ‘step up’ to him. Or maybe this didn’t come into it at all. On a simpler level, my father was in his mid-forties, living alone, two marriages behind him, two children. He might just have been glad that anyone would have him.
As for my mother, she’d already been out with Joe, who spent half the time ignoring her, half the time sponging off her. My father compared well. Like Joe, he was handsome and well dressed. Unlike Joe, he was charming and thoughtful, had money and liked to spend it, although it took my mother a while to realise where he got it. He was well-read and articulate. He had a sense of humour. He liked to cook. He came from another place, a million miles from Ilford. He was a way out from her mother. Or so she thought.
One Boxing Day they drove out into Essex, to Theydon Bois, where my mother’s elderly aunts lived in a little bungalow. They managed to feign politeness towards the only black man they’d ever had in their house, serving tea and cake and trying not to be caught staring at him. Driving home along the country roads, my parents got to talking about my father’s past, and somehow he found himself telling her the story of his life – his sad childhood, running away, leaving Jamaica. They pulled up on a lovers’ lane somewhere – a freezing night, snow melting on the banks. They put the heater on and sat smoking and talking past midnight. That’s when she fell for him, she said – when he told her his story.
If going out with a black man caused her trouble beyond Nan, my mother never said so. She was broad-minded and expected other people to be the same. While Nan was bigoted and full of class anxiety, my grandfather was a progressive free-thinker, irreverent of convention and fascinated by other places in the world. My mother inherited his liberalism. Years later, I asked her what she saw in Joe and my father. I just found them fascinating, she said. Compared to local blokes. All the things they’d seen and done. Just as my father might have had an investment in my mother’s Englishness, she was pleased to be married to a foreigner.
They lived for a year and a half in a flat on Empress Avenue in Ilford, a place my mother always mentioned with a wistful look in her eye. Then my grandfather died, and Nan, scared of being lonely, made my mother a proposition. She had some money, my parents had none – she would put down a deposit for a house they could share. Despite my mother’s reservations, together they bought a house in Ashgrove Road in Goodmayes, a semi that backed onto the railway tracks. My childhood home. Nan lived downstairs and we lived above. I must have been mad, my mother said.
When Nan found out my mother was expecting Sam she told her, ‘What a mess you’re in. You’ll have to keep on working. I’ll look after the baby.’ Over my dead body, my mother told my father, but she couldn’t stop Nan from interfering. My mother used to put Sam in the pram and park him on the lawn so she could see him from the upstairs window. She had a theory babies should be in the garden, rain, shine, or snow. But every time Sam so much as blinked or whimpered, Nan came running out the door, whisked him up and took him in. She wouldn’t give him back, my mother said. We used to have a tug of war.
The wedding came later. A photograph outside the registry office shows my mother plump and smiling. I worked the dates out – she was four months pregnant with me already. ‘I suppose we should get married,’ my father said the night she did the pregnancy test. Always a one for romance, my mother said. I said, I suppose we better. Nan didn’t like my father any better than Joe, and she didn’t want my mother marrying him, even though they had one child together and were expecting another. In Nan’s mind, the immigrants were taking over, and her only daughter planned to marry one and parade their miscegenation right above her head.
Every plan they had, Nan was against. They saved up for an extensio
n to give her a bigger kitchen. Weeks talking about it, all the plans made. Nan would stay with us because she couldn’t breathe with all the dirt and dust. But the day before the work was meant to start Nan declared that all she needed was a cooker and a sink, and when the workmen arrived – Charlie White and two Jamaican chaps – she refused to come upstairs. ‘Didn’t know the blacks were coming in,’ she said. ‘I can’t be leaving all my things for them to get their grimy paws on.’ I could have killed her there and then, my mother said. When she told my father, he went down and grabbed the sledge hammer, flung it through the window of her kitchen, shouting, ‘Now you have to come up, don’t you, don’t you?’ Nan went running out the house without her coat, and into next door, telling the neighbours about the terrible son-in-law she had, the black man who’d just assaulted her. She stayed there all day. But in the evening she was upstairs at the dinner table. Nan never missed her dinner, and knew my mother had a bit of liver in. She always loved a bit of liver and bacon, your Nan, my mother said.
My mother was relieved when Nan died, but I remember loving Nan – her spindly hands, her smoky breath, her long face with its deep grooves. The evening she fell ill I was curled on her lap like a cat. She was fidgety, wheezy, out of breath. She had emphysema. They took her away in an ambulance in the middle of the night. In the morning there were no sweets, no knees in the rocking chair to rest against, no more teaspoons of sweet tea.