The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah

by Benjamin Zephaniah

  Inevitably her first child came along during that fun-filled post-college period. She met a young man and they courted Jamaican-style – under the moonlight with the palm trees swaying; a little bit of dancing and a little bit of rum. Both were enjoying themselves after leaving college, and then my mother fell pregnant and Tina came along.

  One day in the mid-1950s, Mum and her sister stopped to look at one of the many posters that were put up around Jamaica around that time as part of a campaign headed by a Conservative politician. The poster said: ‘The Motherland calls. Jobs and a great future await you in the land where the streets are paved with gold’. It is now well known that there was an extensive campaign in Jamaica and other Caribbean islands to get people to apply for the jobs that English workers wouldn’t do after the Second World War. The British were desperate for people from overseas.

  My auntie said there was no way she was going to England; she had heard it was cold and dark, but my mother wanted to give it a try. Once again, Uncle Moody stepped in. He was convinced it would be a good move for her, and she was very eager to go, but her daughter Tina was only two, so it would mean making a tough decision.

  The culture around having and raising children was a lot less formal in the Caribbean compared to Europe. In Jamaica big families were the norm, and they tended to live together and look after each other. Living under one roof you could find mothers, grandmothers, aunties, brothers and sisters, and all would offer support. Even members of the local community who weren’t blood relatives would provide plenty of free childcare, so she knew Tina would be well-cared-for.

  People were also fairly happy; it was only when they started coming to the UK and comparing themselves to people around the world that they began to consider themselves poor. But my mum never thought like that. She had money in her pocket, lots of dresses and lots of shoes.

  The decision to migrate to England was made easier by the fact that another uncle, Neville, was already there, and she would listen to the radio and hear advertisements calling for people to go to England and work. Neville would write regularly saying how good it was, so Uncle Moody paid her fare, and her mother said she would look after the baby. So that was that, the decision was made: my mum would go to the UK and stay with Neville in Sheffield.

  4

  COME ON OVER, VALERIE

  The weeks leading up to her departure were exciting because there was a lot to do. She had to go to Kingston, the big city, to get the papers and her passport, which in itself was a big adventure for her and the family members who went with her. There was great anticipation, but the mood changed on the day she left because, when it came to it, she found it difficult saying goodbye to her family and daughter and making the break. She remembered hearing people crying as the minibus came round to pick people up. Those being left behind were in tears because they didn’t know whether they would ever see their loved ones again.

  My mother and the others, mainly women, were taken to Kingston, to a hotel, where she paid £70, and the next day they boarded a huge cruise liner called the SS Peniah. The journey started in Jamaica, and then the ship went to St Kitts to pick up more people bound for the Motherland. When it was full of Caribbean people, it headed towards Europe. It stopped off on the coast of Spain, and my mother got off to buy souvenirs, which she found a peculiar experience. For the first time in her life she encountered people who didn’t speak any English. Suddenly she was very important; people wanted to shine her shoes, for a price, and offer her gifts, at a price.

  On the boat there were hundreds of migrants carrying the many possessions they had brought from Jamaica and the other islands. They slept in bunks in large dormitory-like berths, and they were called into a dining area for breakfast and then called back again at dinnertime. The passengers were speculating about what it would be like when they arrived; they talked about the weather and the conditions they might encounter. They talked about the people: Were they clean? Could they cook? Would they be nice? They spent seventeen days at sea in total. The conditions were good, and they all had a reasonably pleasant time, but most of all they had great expectations.

  Now, here’s a mystery. Mum says she came over on this ship called the SS Peniah, but I looked really hard – so hard I think I have the right to call it research – and I could find no ship from that time with that name. I spoke to the historian Arthur Torrington and other experts of the Windrush generation, who migrated from the Caribbean, and none of them have found a ship with that name, but my mum swears that’s the ship she came on. I can only conclude that either she has simply got the name wrong (maybe the Peniah was a nickname and the ship had a different official name), or she was an illegal immigrant. In which case it would have to be said that she did a great job, and I’m very proud of her.

  When the ship (whatever it was called) landed at Southampton in the first week of June 1957, people from companies that had advertised for workers were waiting. One such group met my mother and took her to a train station so she could make the journey to Sheffield. One of her earliest memories was of English houses. As the train headed north all she could see were factories with smoke billowing out of their chimneys, thousands of them.

  She clapped her hands in joy; with so many factories, work would never be scarce. Then a friendly native told her the truth. All those factories were in fact houses. It was a big letdown. In Jamaica only factories had chimneys, but in England every house had them, and every house lit coal fires to keep warm. She had made the mistake many people from the Caribbean made when they first arrived in England. Back in Jamaica most houses were painted in vivid colours and were usually only one storey, so Mum was confused by the small English homes, all drab and made from brick, and all so very tightly packed together.

  She arrived in Sheffield and found her way to the small house that was to be her new home. It was in stark contrast to the comfortable conditions she’d enjoyed in Jamaica. She had to sleep in the same bed as the other people she was staying with – three of them – until she eventually got a room of her own. The landlady found it difficult to say Faleta, so she suggested that she change her name to Valerie. She stuck to it, and when people asked her what her name was she would reply, quite proudly, ‘Valerie.’ Faleta was a beautiful name that conjured up images of the Caribbean sun and dancing on the beach, but Valerie suited Sheffield; it sounded much more English.

  Her Uncle Neville had wanted her to get straight into nursing but her first job was working for Batchelors Peas in a canning factory. She was swept away by the adventure of her new life but she missed her mother, Uncle Moody and other members of her family – and most of all she missed her baby, Tina. Like a lot of people from the Caribbean back then, she told herself she’d only stay in the UK for five years, make some money, then return home; but five years turned into ten, ten into fifteen, fifteen into twenty. The twenty turned into fifty.

  She tried to make a go of things in Sheffield, but after a few months she realised that as much as she loved peas she didn’t want to spend her life processing them, so when one of the people who’d travelled with her from Jamaica suggested that she look over the horizon to Birmingham, she did, and after nine months she left Batchelors Peas and made the move to the Midlands.

  She’d been told to be prepared because England would be freezing cold, but when she arrived in June it was quite warm. She’d also been told she would have to drink tea all the time, otherwise she would freeze from the inside out. There were lots of little stories about other people’s experiences, and lots of advice was offered, but everyone’s experiences were different. Much depended on the time of year they arrived, the city they arrived in and the houses they lived in.

  She kept in touch with her family back home by writing plenty of letters in which she would describe her living conditions: the carpets (or lino), the wallpaper, the pictures on the walls, even the smells she encountered. The moment she received a letter from someone back home, she would respond straight away. If, for any reaso
n, she took too long to reply, another letter would soon drop on the doormat, prompting her to write.

  Her big dream was to one day bring her mother over to England, but it was a struggle raising the money, so when she wrote home telling the family she hadn’t yet earned enough they told her not to worry, they were happy just to receive her letters. Despite some difficult conditions, Valerie, as she was now known, had begun to make a life in England; she made it her home and she was growing to love it.

  One of the things she found most exciting was the absence of authority. For the first time in her life she didn’t have anybody to answer to. There were no parents monitoring her every move, and if she wanted to spend her wages on soaps, perfumes, dresses or shoes, then she could.

  The home in which she found lodging was being shared with a nurse, who very kindly asked her matron whether there were any more jobs. There were jobs, so matron gave my mum a form to fill in, and pretty soon she’d passed the interview. She flew through her training, taking the transition from factory worker to nursing in her stride. And that was it: she was now an SRN, a State Registered Nurse.

  Now, my mother will tell you that she has never ever experienced racism, not since the day she arrived in England from Jamaica. She insists nobody has ever said anything racist to her or been unpleasant to her because of the colour of her skin. She doesn’t deny there is racism; she just says it’s never happened to her. This is something we disagree on. As a child I remember people calling her names as she walked past them, but she would insist they were saying something else and not talking about her. I remember being in shops where the shop assistant would serve everyone else before her, even when my mum was next in line, and she would say, ‘She’s serving them first because they’re in a hurry.’ Even when people were racist directly to her face she would make excuses for them, saying they were confused or upset. She was always trying to see the good in people, even when the people weren’t good.

  She had only one close friend in Birmingham – another woman who’d been on the ship with her. Mum was always looking for somewhere better to live, so her friend got her a better room in a larger house in Aston. It was while living there that she met and started to date Oswald Springer. He was from Barbados and had started to work as a packer in what was then called the GPO, the General Post Office. Now that was a good job, a job with a future. My mother’s future was beginning to look good too. She worked hard and she studied hard and, after taking more exams and getting a few promotions, she was soon working in a mental hospital, in the Chelmsley Wood area of Birmingham. She began to earn good money; enough to start sending some home.

  5

  MARRIAGE, MUSIC AND RHYME

  Her relationship with Oswald got serious; so serious that they got married. I don’t know much about my dad; he didn’t tell me much and, to be honest, he didn’t even talk to me that much. Most of what I know about him I’ve learned from Mum, but I knew that his mother died when he was still young, so his dad remarried, and he had two brothers and one sister.

  The GPO was the only company he ever worked for. He started as a packer, which strangely meant that he swept the floor a lot, and he worked his way up to management. He was very proud of his progression through the ranks, but even more proud of his dedication to one company. He really believed that by getting letters and parcels dispatched in and out of the country, he helped to make Britain great. The pinnacle of his career, much later on, was overseeing the upgrade of the telephone system in Barbados, so that Barbados had what was then the most advanced telephone system in the Caribbean.

  Marriages between people from different Caribbean islands were not actually that common. People from Barbados called Jamaicans loud, uncontrollable criminals, and Jamaicans called people from Barbados small-minded, small-island people who ate monkeys’ fingers. Marrying in England would have been easier than marrying in the Caribbean, but when Mum wrote home to tell the family who she was marrying they were all surprised. Some said they thought England had run out of Jamaican men, and she must have got very desperate; others said they were worried he might eat her.

  In late summer 1957 she was working at Marston Green Hospital and all was going well, but one day she felt unwell. She went to a doctor in the hospital and told him she was having stomach problems and, without checking her, he said: ‘Now, you just got married. Could you be pregnant?’ She said it was a possibility but she didn’t think so. She was sent next door to the maternity unit and was examined straight away. She was pregnant, and the newly married husband and wife were happy, but when she went for a check-up a few months later, she was X-rayed and was told she was carrying twins.

  Mum had been forewarned of the possibility of having twins in the future after having her first baby back in Jamaica. The nurse had given her an examination and told her she could see ‘twin eggs’ on her womb. I don’t know that much about reproductive biology but I’m sure it doesn’t work like that. Mum swears the nurse was right, though, and after the arrival of me and Velda, it’s hard to convince her otherwise.

  Having children in England was a very different experience to having them in the Caribbean. When Velda and I were three months old, Mum had to return to work. There were no grandmothers, aunties, sisters or friends to look after us. No network of neighbours who would lend a hand. That’s why she started working nights – she had that option as a nurse – while Dad took over when he got home from his day at the GPO.

  After Velda and me came Millie, in May 1959, Joyce, in September 1960, and Tippa in January 1962. And then, in 1963, Mum had yet another set of twins, Mark and Paul. By this time the house was full, with nine mouths to feed. Eventually it became impossible for both parents to work and maintain their ships-in-the-night marriage. There were so many children, with so many demands, that Mum had to stay at home. We were noisy, playful, naughty children who were always up to something. Our house sounded like a school playground. Someone was always hurt or kicking a ball around; someone else was demanding food, and another was trapped in the cupboard.

  We didn’t have much to distract us. There were no smart phones or fancy electronic devices; we didn’t even have a television. Only well-off people had television, but we did have a radio and Mum and Dad listened to the BBC Home Service.

  Then there was the music. My parents had an old-fashioned Blue Spot radiogram in the front room – the room reserved for entertaining, with its three-piece suite and cushions and colourful wall hangings showing a map of Jamaica and a hummingbird and a picture of Jesus with a slogan saying something like: ‘Christ is the head of this house’. A typical scene would go like this:

  Most likely it would be a Saturday afternoon and the drinks trolley had been wheeled out to entertain Dad’s friends and my uncles (Mum’s brothers), who had not long arrived from Jamaica. The men would be pouring rum and wearing suits and ties, and the women were in the kitchen mixing punch and looking crisp in their colourful dresses. There would be much chat and gossip and laughter. Everyone would be excited and looking forward to hearing the latest sounds from back home as if they were a gift from God.

  And then Uncle Everett would bring out some new records from his bag and there would be much excitement – such as when the needle landed on Prince Buster’s ‘Al Capone’ for the first time. The men liked the theme of Buster’s lyrical characters: gangsters from the 1920s, whose ‘guns don’t argue’, or catchy songs about horse races. Prince Buster had already established himself as a star in Jamaica with ‘Madness’, rhyming with gladness, ‘Blackhead Chinaman’ and ‘Wash Wash’. Next up maybe we’d hear Mum’s rather scratched copy of ‘Oh Carolina’, and soon everyone would be swaying to the sound and having a good time.

  The records were all played lots of times – there’d be Alton Ellis, Desmond Dekker and Millie Small, who’d recently had a chart hit with ‘My Boy Lollipop’, but Prince Buster most often won the day with his cheeky-sounding voice and lyrics that spoke of Caribbean life and places I didn’t yet know, like Orang
e Street, in Kingston, where the majority of the records were produced.

  I’d be in among the adults, tangling myself up in all the long legs and loving the sound of the bass and the beat. I knew not to touch the radiogram anymore, though. Once I tried to be the DJ, and I was doing quite well until I pretended it was a jukebox and dropped coins onto the turntable. Although it didn’t affect the functioning of this wonderful contraption, Dad went crazy and told me never to go near it again. I obeyed him for at least a week.

  But the main reason I loved the music is that this was where my rhyming began in earnest. When the record finished playing I carried on. I’d pick up the theme of the song and put my own spin on it, talking about what was happening in the kitchen or about one of my brothers or sisters being told off. I would do a running commentary, similar to my playground game at school where I’d make up rhymes for the girls I liked when we played kiss chase. So while all the other boys were getting out of breath running around, I’d make up a sweet little rhyme about the girl and she would pay me by giving me a kiss. No running required.

  For me, rhyming was normal. Poetry, storytelling and music were a part of everyday life, not as I imagine it would be in a middle-class white family, where a parent might sit a child down to read poetry and then praise him if he did it well. We just did it. It was how we communicated with one another.