Reluctant Neighbors

by Braithwaite, E. R. ;

I bore it as long as I could. Perhaps I was unable to separate myself from the other, less fortunate blacks. Perhaps the memory of my own rejection was too clear in my mind. The conduct of my white colleagues to black clients was not dissimilar from the conduct of the personnel officers and interview-board members I had encountered. These black clients were in the same dependent position as I had been. Needing reassurance and help. Receiving little more than poorly disguised contempt. Sometimes I’d overhear colleagues discussing one of their black “cases” in a way which would bring the anger boiling up inside me.

  “How was it today?” one would ask another.

  “Damned awful. Popped over to Brixton to take a look at the Smith case. Think I’ll have to recommend that those four children be taken from that woman and put into the Council’s care. God, the mess! Those blacks live like animals.”

  “How old are the kids?”

  “Five, four, three and a ten-month-old baby. The mother claims she’s too sick to work, but she evidently has no difficulty rolling over. People like that ought to be sterilized.”

  “Or educated.”

  “Educated? Those blacks? All their brains are between their legs.”

  I ended it suddenly.

  Merely for a change in the dull, daily routine of riding the Underground to work all the way, I left the train at Mile End Station and caught a bus for the rest of the journey, climbing to the upper deck. It was crowded but I spotted a vacant aisle seat near the front and squeezed my way up there. When I’d settled myself I noticed that my neighbor was black. His face, under a wide-brimmed hat, was turned towards the window as if he were deeply interested in the drab sameness of the scene which flitted by. I said, “Hi, there.” He turned, regarded me gravely for a moment, then, “Hi, man.” He was thin, and very young, the scraggly beard on his chin notwithstanding. No more than eighteen, I thought. Thin, evidently underfed. The thick clothing loose around a wiry neck and wrists. Long bony fingers.

  “Working around here?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I replied. “On the other side of the river. Near Brixton.”

  “You’re lucky. I’m going to the Labour Exchange, but I know it’s a fucking waste of time. Yet if I don’t go, it’s always the day somebody says they’ve been taking on men.”

  “Been out of work long?” From me.

  “Yes. Eighteen weeks. Feels like a hundred years. Every day I go down there and it’s the same thing. Nothing today. If I don’t feel well and I miss a day, they say I should have been there. They needed some men. I’ll sure as hell hear it again today. Nothing. All the time you see the notices up. Jobs. All kinds of jobs. Skilled and unskilled jobs. And every one with the fucking N.C. at the end of it. The white men don’t want those jobs, but still they put the fucking N.C. on them.” His voice became flat with hate. “You know what I think, pal? I think they just make up those cards and put the N.C. on them just to show us they think we’re shit. That’s what it is. Just to laugh in their guts when they see us come in and read those notices. They want us to know they don’t want us. Christ! I’d like to take all those fucking notices and stuff them right up their arse.”

  As he spoke I watched his face, and the stark, bitter hatred etched deeply in each line of it. At first he had seemed nondescript in the black-dyed ex-army greatcoat and the wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his face. Now his eyes were narrowed and glinting, his features squeezed into a sharp, vindictive mask. He was in pain, deep down in his spirit. Caught off guard by his outburst, I could find no words to say to him. Nothing strong enough, honest enough or meaningful enough to reach his hurt or touch the simple rightness of his hatred. All I could do was listen and understand, because I had been that way. I had walked that road.

  He wanted to work, to preserve his dignity and self-respect. But at each step he was thwarted by the very people who claimed that blacks were idle, blacks were lazy, blacks preferred to batten on welfare assistance rather than seek employment. I knew what N.C meant. No colored wanted. Two little letters at the end of an advertisement and yet they could engender such cumulative bitterness and anger. The greatest irony lay in the fact that the Labour Exchanges are government offices of the Ministry of Labour. Under the auspices of the highest authority that young black man was being pressured until all he had left was his hate.

  Through nine years of teaching and nearly two years in the Welfare Department I had reached the point of nearly convincing myself that I had put every vestige of bitterness and racial hatred behind me. And yet, after little more than two minutes with that young man, a complete stranger, nameless to me, I felt it all again inside me, insistently alive, clamoring for attention. Looking around, it was immediately obvious that he and I, the only two blacks on that upper deck of the bus, were, to the other passengers, two black faces. Equally despised. Equally unacceptable. If I went with him to the Labour Exchange, I’d very likely receive the same treatment. N.C.

  Later that day I prepared my resignation and took it personally to the director of the department. After reading it, he said, “I hope you’re not serious about this, Mr. Braithwaite.”

  “Yes, Sir, quite serious.”

  “But we’re depending on you. We need you, Braithwaite.”

  “I really don’t think so, Sir.”

  “Come, come. Be sensible. No need to be precipitate. After all where do you think you’ll find another … ” Stopping suddenly as if aware that he’d said too much. I left him there, with my resignation in his hand, and the spectacles pushed up on his forehead like extra blind eyes.

  “Yes. I quit teaching,” I told him.

  “To write full time?”

  “Let’s say to write a book.”

  “What sort of book? What did you write about?” Interested now. Inching a little nearer. Not touching. Just a little nearer.

  “About myself.”

  “About yourself? An autobiography? At your age? What on earth made you think of that?” Pulling off the glasses to squint at me. Hell, the invisible presence no longer bothered him. At this rate he might get near enough to touch.

  “Just one of those things,” I told him. Leaving him there, on the outside, while I continued backtracking down the long corridors of memory.

  Writing that first book was as much an accident as my entry into teaching. Unexpected. Unplanned. It happened about a year after I was seconded to the Welfare Department.

  I was enjoying a short holiday during the summer, mostly sitting around the house or otherwise idling the days away. One morning I decided to give my room and its contents a thorough cleanup. In this mood I collected much of the trivia which over the years had attached to me, including the pile of notebooks, and hauled all of it into the backyard, intending to make a bonfire.

  The weather was lovely and I was in no hurry. Comfortably stretched under an apple tree I began leafing through those notebooks, that laboriously compiled record of nine years of teaching. From this distance of experience and hindsight it was sobering to realize how stupid I had been. The record stared me in the face, mocking me. I had written about my pupils, arguing with myself that I was observing them, looking squarely at them, learning about them. Reading it now it seemed that I had been looking down on them from the lofty height of my own background, education, my snobbish preoccupation with clothes and my supercilious contempt for their speech. I’d recorded the things they said and the way they said them, with tiny special notations on the way some words took an awful beating:

  “This bleeder sitting near me in the flicks cracking his bleeding peanuts I couldn’t hear what the bleeding bloke is saying on the bleeding screen,” all in one breath. Boys and girls.

  BOY: “Hey, saw your sister with a bloke down by the pub last night.”

  GIRL: “Okay, so you got two bleeding eyes.”

  BOY: “He her new steady?” Laughing.

  GIRL: “Mind your own bleeding b
usiness.” Angry.

  BOY: “What’s happened to that other bloke she had? In the clink?”

  GIRL: “Fuck you, Denham.”

  BOY: “What, now? Yes, please.”

  GIRL: “Oh, get stuffed.”

  Neither caring about being overheard.

  Reading and seeing them in the pages. Pamela and Pat and Angie and Sheila. And the others. The words coloring my opinion of them, my attitude toward them. Such words came out of tarts. The words and the bright, knowing eyes. They knew all about it. God, I wondered how I must have seemed to them! Have sounded to them! Venting on them the pent-up anger and spite from a hundred rejections. Pouring my scorn and contempt through the niceties of carefully correct speech and a determined refusal to be prodded into anger by anything they could do or say. Seeing them as too far beneath me to warrant my anger. Learning later to see beyond the dress and words and the aggressive posture to the decency and strength and beauty. Learning about myself through learning about them. Growing with them.

  Where were they now, nine years later? Some kept in touch. Pamela. Beautiful, red-haired, statuesque Pamela. Modeling clothes for several smart West End shops, and sharing a flat with her mother in Hampstead. Denham. Sergeant P. Denham, now with Her Majesty’s­ Army of the Rhine. Still determined to be his own boss one day. No longer limiting his ambition to owning a “fruit barrow.” Now it would be a greengrocer’s shop, one of his letters had informed me: “ … big, fancy shop with only the best stuff at fancy prices for toffs, like you ….” Seales, in the final phase of apprentice­ship with English­ Electric, safely through his City and Guilds examinations. The one, long, informative letter ending, “ ­… Pam and me are planning to get married the end of next month. Nothing big. Just her parents and me Dad. So I’m not inviting you, just want you to know … ” I wondered about Pam. Was she white, as his mother had been? Guess so. Tich Jackson, tiny, irrepressible Tich, a page at the Savoy Hotel. Marie and Betty married to twin brothers. I’d received the sliver of wedding cake, carefully wrapped in the tiny, decorated box, but inedibly hard after three days in the post. Others I heard about. Meeting Moira Joseph accidentally on the Underground, prim in her white nurse’s uniform and dark blue cape. Her pride in showing the medal for heading her graduating class. Her gay chatter and the faint, pleasing, antiseptic odor.

  Laughing together over old times. Sir, you remember when … Still “Sir.” Yes, I remembered when … That pompous speaker from, was it the Ministry of Information? He’d come to address the class on “Life in Ceylon.” Large and tight-packed in a heavy woolen suit. Evidently a man who made concessions to no one, not even the summer weather. Speaking of the “fine Singhalese people” as if he personally owned them. Boring the hell out of my class and making me nervous as I wondered what stunt they might dream up to end the boredom. A dragonfly had saved the day. From whatever distant pond, it had fluttered and found its way up between the space where the two halves of the hinged window never quite met, and now buzzed and banged itself up and down the panes striving to be free once again. The speaker droned on. The pale sun filtered through the grimy window to stir brief reflections from the insect’s iridescent wings. One by one the class nudged each other’s attention to the little drama above and behind the speaker’s head. Ripples of concern as the dragonfly would move to within half an inch of freedom, then abruptly turn to bang itself stupidly up and down the window. Again it rested on the space, the doorway to freedom, and again veered off to continue the unequal struggle with the panes. The speaker was in full flight, perhaps seeing all those faces interestedly focused in his direction. Again the insect lit on the lower window. This time instinct and accident merged and in a flash it was out and away. A soft sigh from the class, timed to perfection with the speaker’s final words. He later expressed his pleasure at the rapt attention he received.

  Reading it and laughing now as Moira and I had laughed, recalling the time and the happening and those of her former schoolmates whom she occasionally saw or heard about. It was gratifying to believe that I had played some small part by encouraging her towards earlier achievement. Mum coming out to ask what was causing me such amusement. I read to her at random from the pages.

  She had heard it all long ago when it had happened and she shared the reminiscing. Soon Dad joined us and together we talked of those days of struggle, their charity omitting any reference to my own conduct which must have been very painful to them. Mum asked why I had brought the notebooks outdoors and was alarmed to hear that I intended burning them.

  “Why don’t you put it all together into a book?” she asked.

  The idea had never occurred to me. Now it startled me. I argued that I could never write a book. People who wrote books would have studied literature and understood the techniques of writing. I love reading. Every time I see a book I am conscious of the monumental task involved in putting all those words together to make interesting and sometimes exciting sense. I could not see myself doing it. However, she argued, and finally with Dad’s support took the notebooks back indoors.

  Hardly a day would pass but she would find some way of reminding me that instead of just sitting around, I could be working on the book. To my surprise, and somewhat to my dismay, Dad joined her. So one day I thought to myself, “Okay, if she wants a book she will get a book.” With the little money I had, I bought some typing paper and hired a second-hand typewriter. I put a collapsible bridge table under the apple tree in the back yard, took the notebooks and beginning from page one of book number one, typed what I had written down. All of it.

  Whenever I came to an interruption in the record, I could easily from memory introduce something which bridged the gap. It was going very nicely, when, talking to Mum one day she remarked, “That’s not how you began. Why did you go into teaching in the first place?” She knew the story just as well as I did. I reminded her. She said, “Don’t tell me. Put it down.” I thought to myself, “Why should I put it down in the middle?” So I got some more paper and started all over again, beginning now with why I went into teaching and then taking the story on from there. When it was finished, I had quite a pile of typescript.

  Altogether I took about three weeks to do the transcription. Completed, I took the pages to a local printer and asked him to staple them together for me. He even put some pasteboard on either side. Just to hold the thing together. I thought to myself, “Mum wanted a book so I’m going to give her a book.” I needed a title. At the end I had related how the kids had made me a gift, a large box of cigarettes. They had gone to W. D. and H. O. Wills in London and ordered five hundred cigarettes, each one with my initials E.R.B. on it, packed in a beautiful presentation box. On the wrapping of the box, they had stuck a piece of paper and written on it, TO SIR, WITH LOVE. Underneath this each one of them had signed his or her name. Looking at this I thought, “Can I call it To Sir, With Love? Oh, well, it’s just for Mum. She’ll understand.” So I entitled it To Sir, With Love by E. R. Braithwaite.

  The following morning at breakfast time I put it on her plate. She looked at it and said, “So you see, there it is. Now do something with it.” “Like what?” I asked and she said, “I don’t know. Just do something with it.” Just to please her I took it with me to ask the advice of the local librarian. He suggested that I let him read it. Two days later I visited him again. He said, “I think it has something, but I’m not sure if I feel that way because I know you or because of some quality the thing has. Why don’t you take it to an agent, somebody who doesn’t know you, and could offer a real opinion?” I told him I couldn’t afford to employ an agent. “It won’t cost you anything,” he said. “If the agent thinks it’s good he will try and place it for you and take a percentage. If he doesn’t, he’ll tell you so and that’s all there is to it.” From one of his shelves he reached down The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. We looked through this to find an agent, deciding on the firm of Peam, Pollinger, and Higham, established year
s and years ago in Dean Street. Soho. London.

  The following day I took the manuscript to the London agent. Everything about the place, the pretentious doorway, narrow lobby and rickety stairs upward to the receptionist’s cubicle, suggested age. I could easily imagine Charles Dickens coming to this place. It was intended for important, established authors. What was I doing here? The receptionist seemed out of place. Too young, too attractive, but when she spoke to me neither her voice nor her manner was encouraging. Looking me quickly up and down as if capable of determining my literary pretensions, all in one comprehensive glance, she said, “Yes.”

  I was immediately filled with the wildest urge to say something like, “But you haven’t yet heard my proposition,” and as quickly decided against it. It was amusing to recall how diffident I had been in approaching these people during my job-hunting days, when I had believed that they were part of the hiring process and I should be particularly courteous to them. Actually, they often proved to be no less contemptuous than their employers and may have even enjoyed the sight of my diffidence and unease. Now I said to this one, “I have a manuscript here which I would like to have considered with a view to possible publication.” Cool. Even casual. Laying the thick book on her desk. Those level gray eyes studied me, as if the mind behind them was now testing my voice for quality. Abruptly swinging the eyes away she let them traverse the shelves which lined the three sides of the reception area. Most of these shelves bulged with fat packages, some held together with string. When the gray eyes returned to me the neat eyebrows were lifted quizzically. I got the message and reached for the manuscript but her quick, manicured hand was there ahead of me, spread-fingered.

  “What’s your hurry?” No trace of a smile.

  “Well, if you don’t think … ”

  She turned the manuscript around the better to read the title and author’s name. Again the eyebrows going up. Was it the name or the title?

  “If you will write your address and telephone number somewhere on the top,” pointing with a smooth, shiny finger, “I will send it in to our editorial section.”