In ye olde England, churches would compete to see who could build the highest steeple; in our churches it was always about who had the best preachers. These were fiery, inspiring, charismatic men who could be on their feet burning energy and sweating buckets as they called upon the Holy Spirit to come cleanse the sinner and reward the faithful. A good preacher could preach for four hours or more, non-stop. Others would call upon members of the congregation to step up and testify, then anyone who had a problem or who had something to say – something inspiring or a psalm they wanted to read – could get up and do their thing. Sometimes they were as good as the main preacher.
It was during one of these moments in church when I did what I call my very first public, or semi-public, poetry performance. It was my mother’s turn to testify. She was a good speaker and the crowd was expecting something special from her, but to everyone’s surprise, and mine, she stood up and said she was going to take a rest and that her son would read a poem.
Little me looked up at big her with a quizzical expression drawn across my face and shrugged my shoulders. She looked down on me with a ‘go on, my son’ look, and I felt I had no choice. I got up to perform but didn’t know what to say, as my poems up to that point were about playground politics, stupid adults and girls. I had no church poems or going to heaven poems. I did have a great memory when it came to words, though, and in Sunday school I practised memorising passages from the Bible and the order of the books therein.
I suddenly knew what I was going to do. I jumped up and began to chant: ‘Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, first and second Samuel.’ I danced as I chanted to a reggae-cum-ska rhythm, and when I got to Revelations I began to do them backwards. When I stopped there were shouts of ‘Hallelujah!’, ‘Praise the Lord!’ and ‘The Holy Spirit has touched him.’ Some even called me a little prophet. It was here that I was first given the name Zephaniah, by one of the pastors in the church, after he who prophesied in the days of Josiah, ruler of the Kingdom of Judah (641–610 BC). A lot of people think Zephaniah is a stage name. It’s not. It’s the name on my passport and on all of my documents. The name is thought to mean ‘he whom God has hidden’, or ‘treasured by God’. I always felt I was a modern Zephaniah.
From then on I was constantly asked to get up and do that performance, or to perform random passages memorised from the Bible. I was the star turn when we went to conventions with other churches. It didn’t matter how good their preachers were; none of them had a Bible-rapping kid like me.
It was nice being a bit special, but what I didn’t like so much – and I think most kids would understand this – is that all these women kept coming up to me, rubbing my hair, going, ‘Oh, he’s such a nice boy, give auntie a kiss’, and that sort of stuff. I’d be so embarrassed! I can’t understand why aunties think kids like that.
This church, like any other, had its fair share of hypocrites. That may seem a bit strong, but I can honestly say that nearly all the people I knew well were not practising what they preached. Many had secrets and vices, and when I asked them why they were doing the very things they were preaching not to do in church, I was told: ‘Shut up and don’t interfere with big people business.’
There was one pastor I used to get lifts home from, and there was always one woman he would drop off last. He’d say, ‘Sit dere, boy’, so I’d sit in his car while he disappeared inside the house with her. He’d emerge around half an hour later saying, ‘Praise the Lord!’ I never realised until much later what he was up to. I heard little whispers but I never put two and two together at the time.
After spending a long time moving around, my mother began to get close to another guy. But he wasn’t any ordinary guy; he was the head of our church. Known to everyone as Pastor Burris, he was a legend in his own church time. Originally from Jamaica, he was thought of as one of the best, if not the best preacher in England, and his knowledge of the Bible was vast. He wasn’t that tall, but he was strong, powerful and muscular, and when he preached it was an event not to be missed. Ladies would leave the kitchen, men would put down their instruments, and children would gather at his feet. He was so charismatic that as he preached and worked up a sweat those listening would sweat with him.
He too had a big family of seven children, and he had separated from his wife, Gwen. His relationship with my mother caused some controversy in the church. Although they weren’t living together at first, they kept getting closer and closer. He would help her if she didn’t have any transport, he would take her shopping and, if she wanted furniture delivering, he would fix it for her, but most of all, if she wanted company he was there. And he was there for me too.
He was the complete opposite of my dad. He would go to the park and kick a ball with me, and we’d go for long walks over the Malvern Hills. And he taught me how to play dominoes. He was a laugh, and he had real presence. He was always smart and wore big baggy suit trousers of the kind that a lot of black men wear, particularly churchmen. And he would normally wear a hat. At some quite important moments in my development he became like a father. He was the first man to give me proper advice about girls, money, survival and all those other things that puzzled boys. I got on extremely well with him, and he was never afraid to help me try and answer the big questions I was always asking.
He wasn’t well off but he was savvy. And he was really keen on saving. He’d say to me, ‘Benjamin, when you grow up and start work, say you get five pounds, what you gonna do?’
Of course I’d say, ‘Spend it?’
Pastor would say, ‘No, you’ve got to save. Saving’s important. Save one pound of every five you make so if you lose your job you’ve still got some to tide you over.’
I was learning stuff from Pastor Burris – perhaps more than I learned in school, as we were moving around so much.
For a while, me and Mum were living in Stourbridge, just outside Birmingham. We rented a small room in the house of a Pakistani family. Although the room was small we were the only tenants and Mrs Chupty was happy to let us wander all over the house, even into their living space. This is where I developed my love of South Asian food, my favourite being channa, but I loved all types of vegetable curries and would happily devour ten chapattis in one sitting.
We lived next to a pub called the White Horse, which was next to a field called White Horse Field, and in the field there actually was a white horse. He would be moved to graze from one corner of the field to another, and whenever he was there we would play football at the opposite side from him. I spent about four months in a school there, which was unusually long for me; I have never met anyone who has been to more schools than me. I normally spent a couple of weeks in a school and then we would be forced to move on.
I was quite happy in Stourbridge, but one day something came over me. I suddenly had the feeling that I had to get away from the town, away from the house, away from my mother, away from it all. Looking back, I think it wasn’t so much about getting away from anything or anyone; I think I was just missing my brothers and sisters, so I ran away from home. Well, let me be precise: I walked away from home. In fact, I walked all the way from Stourbridge to Fentham Road in Birmingham, which was some walk. It would have been about eighteen miles door to door, a long way for a young boy of ten. In all those miles, along fast main roads, no one stopped me, not even the police.
I did the journey from memory, with a little help from road signs. I knew the route because I’d done it on the bus, so I walked through Dudley and West Bromwich, and then I followed the signs for the biggest place of worship in north Birmingham, Villa Park – the home of Aston Villa Football Club.
When I arrived in Fentham Road, Dad was suspicious, looking behind me and saying, ‘What you come home for?’
I said, ‘I just wanted to come home, you know . . .’ but as soon as I arrived I felt like a stranger, even though I was back with my brothers and sisters.
Mum contacted Social Services and they told her I’d g
one back to Fentham Road. So I stayed for a while, although I never felt completely at home there or fully part of the family. I always thought they were talking about me behind my back. There was just something about it; it didn’t feel like my family. At least Dad didn’t try to capitalise on the situation with the authorities, like he was better than my mum or anything because he was looking after all the kids.
A woman used to come in and do domestic things while Dad went to work. Mum came back as well, at one point, to try living with Dad again, but she couldn’t take it, said he hadn’t changed, and left again. I agreed with her, and was fed up with his interrogations. Not long afterwards – maybe a couple of months later – I decided to go back to Mum.
It would have made sense to return to the place where we were living when I left – Stourbridge – but for some strange reason I was drawn in another direction. It was a guess, it was risky, but I walked for a couple of miles in the other direction, to Pugh Road, where you could still see the Villa ground (but from another angle), to the house of Pastor Burris. There he was, with all of his seven kids, Stanley, Peter, Lena, Brunetta, Jimbo, Kern and Trevor, who were all very surprised to see me, but they couldn’t understand why I had come to them. I couldn’t understand either.
Pastor questioned me on the doorstep; he kept asking, ‘Why do you think your mum is here?’ And all I could say was, ‘I want my mum.’ Eventually he let me into the house and sat me down in the front room. In the back room, where the rest of the family was, I could hear something that sounded like a negotiation going on, and I presumed they were talking about what to do with me. Then Pastor came back, looking rather serious, and said, ‘Now boy, who told you that your mother is here?’
I told him nobody had; I just felt that she was, and if she wasn’t maybe he could take me to her, because it was a long walk and I didn’t want to hurt my feet again. The atmosphere was tense. He stood up, opened the door to the other room, and Mum was standing there. She didn’t smile. She looked behind me, as if waiting for something to happen; they must have all thought it was a set-up and Dad was going to leap out. After I reassured her that I came alone and that no one had followed me, she too asked me how I knew she was living there. I could only refer her to my previous answer, but later on in life I put it down to a son’s intuition.
So that was it – from then on I would live with Mum and Pastor Burris and his kids and we’d all make a new home together.
8
MY OTHER, WILD FAMILY
Mum and I stayed at Pugh Road for a couple of years and I loved it. I loved the neighbours, I loved the area and I loved the family. It was very lively with the ten of us, and usually there’d be someone else round for a chat as well – perhaps a friend or Pastor’s sister, Aunt Maud, who lived down the road with her kids. We’d take turns eating our meals on our laps, as although there was a table, there wasn’t room for us all to fit around it.
My biological family was a little naughty at times but on the whole they were pretty well behaved. The Burrises, however, were absolutely wild. Every time we went outdoors it was an adventure. We would find hills to climb, canals to explore and people to chase us. We would often get into fights and come home dirty or with cuts and bruises. It was a very rough area. Trevor and Peter were fighting all the time. If somebody gave us racial abuse, we didn’t go home and tell the grown-ups, we’d get stuck in and have a fight. If somebody said something bad about a family member, we’d get stuck in and have a fight; even if somebody said something bad about Aston Villa, we’d get stuck in and have a fight. We liked fighting. And if we came home and told Pastor that we’d got into a fight and lost, he’d send us out again to have another go until we won. I fought one boy in Erdington four times before I managed to beat him, and when I finally triumphed, he shook my hand and said, ‘Well done.’
I was fighting all the time but I never really got the mob-fighting over football thing. My Uncle Simpson, on Pastor’s side, used to take me and Pastor’s sons to Aston Villa and put us on his shoulders, but we’d inevitably get racist abuse. I remember one match when Villa were winning 3–0 and the white fans were going, ‘You’re our mascot.’ Then, in the second half, Villa lost it, and it was, ‘It’s your fault!’ and the racist chanting would begin.
In later years, when we were older, Trevor and I would go to matches at the Villa. West Ham and Manchester United fans would always come and have a go at us. United’s firm once organised to meet Villa fans at Birmingham New Street Station for a battle. The route they took went right past our house, and Mum closed the curtains in daytime – something she had previously talked about doing only if someone had died. And I started thinking, Why am I going to fight these people from Manchester? If I lived there, I’d probably support them. I didn’t go to another match for years.
One of our favourite things was to leave the house and say, ‘Right, we’re gonna get lost.’ We would keep going until we got lost and were hungry, then the adventure was finding our way home, and if we really couldn’t find our way home (and that rarely happened) we would simply ask a policeman and, if he wasn’t helping an old lady across the road, he would sometimes take us home. Oh, the good old days when the bobby was on the beat and your dinner was in the oven . . .
There was one incident around this time that did involve the police but it didn’t involve fighting, and I guess it was the sort of thing that happened to a lot of kids. Trevor and me and a couple of others were playing in Aston Park one day when a boy about our age – eleven or so – came up to us and said, ‘Wanna see a wanker?’ So we followed him across the park to the toilets, which had those glass bricks that were used a lot in the ’60s and ’70s. One of them was broken, and we all craned our necks closer and saw this white guy in there down below, masturbating. Of course we made a load of noise, falling about, going, ‘Argh, look at him, he’s wanking’, not really understanding what it was, but knowing it was something ‘wrong’.
He heard us and looked up. ‘What you doing?
‘We’re just watching . . .’
He said, ‘Wanna go to the graveyard? I’ll give you a shilling each.’ That sealed it. So we said, ‘Yeah, OK.’ And he gave us each our shilling and we stood and watched him do it in the graveyard. He didn’t touch any of us, but at some point he mentioned, ‘When you’re having this kind of sex’, and I thought, Ah, so this is about sex. I don’t remember feeling scared. The only thing I was fixed on was the amazing pair of winklepinker shoes he was wearing. After that, we just giggled and went about our business.
A few days later the police came round with stern faces, wanting to talk to me and Trevor. So we sat round the table with Pastor Burris while the policeman tried to get the story out of us.
‘What happened?’
‘We went to the park and we saw this man. He didn’t touch any of us.’
He was really pushing us on this. ‘Well, we still want to speak to him. Tell us what happened.’
So we told him how events unfolded and then mumbled our way through the nasty business, muttering, ‘He started . . . doing it . . .’
‘Doing what, boys?’
‘You know . . . doing it . . .’
‘Doing what?’
Long silence. Me and Trevor looked at each other, then looked at the ground.
Finally Pastor Burris shouted at the top of his voice: ‘DOING WHAT??!!’
And we answered as quietly as we could: ‘Wanking.’
‘Right! Why didn’t you say that?’
There was another long pause, then Pastor asked, ‘What’s wanking?’
‘Can you leave us for a minute please, boys?’ said the policeman.
Me and Trevor left the room and were in stitches, creasing up behind the door. We were a bit scared about what might happen, but then we started imagining the conversation going on behind that door, between the cop and Pastor.
‘Is he gonna take it out and show him?’
‘Do you think the cop is gonna start wanking?’
A couple of days later they caught the offender – because of the shoes. They drove around until they found him, like the burglar who’d robbed our gas meter in Farm Street. It was still all a bit like the Beano to me.
Pastor didn’t give us pocket money. If we wanted money we had to earn it. Sometimes we washed windows, sometimes we ran errands, but I then broke with tradition and got a job peeling potatoes at the local Chinese takeaway. All my friends had paperrounds and things like that, but I worked better hours and got a bag of chips at the end of it.
There was something about life back then that really helped me in my future years. I loved the way we were left alone and were encouraged to think for ourselves. Most of our toys were homemade or recycled. If we wanted a bicycle, we would get a frame, find a pair of wheels, then clean them up, get a chain and some brakes – although most of the time one brake was enough – and then we’d put them all together.
Trevor and me loved fixing things, and we started a little cycle repair business in the garden. It was nothing grand; we’d do jobs for a few pence, but we built up a reputation and lots of pennies made lots of pounds. We made sleighs at Christmas, we fixed prams and train sets and we made and mended go-carts. But our biggest earner was minding cars.
When Aston Villa played at home we would stake out a patch of a couple of streets, and as the drivers were getting out of their cars we would run up and say, ‘Mind your car please, sir?’ If they said yes we’d note the car and make sure no one messed with it. If they said no we would leave it. Sometimes car thieves would come and we would beg them not to touch our cars, but we’d turn a blind eye if the car wasn’t on our list.
We were learning how to work and survive. Although we lived in a house, we were really like street kids who were left to our own devices. Mum had gone back to nursing, working all hours, and us kids looked after each other.
The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah Page 5