Foreigners

by Caryl Phillips

  Two weeks after Turpin's suicide, Gwen Turpin sold her story to a Sunday newspaper. Carmen was now out of danger, and it was clear that she was going to survive, but Gwen was still trying to find some justification for what her husband had done to their child. In the newspaper she said, 'I think he wanted to take her with him because he had begun to look on the world as a place not fit for her to live in.' But Gwen knew that this was a world that she and her children would have to continue to live in, and she was now determined to protect her four children from any scrutiny and, if truth be told, from the Turpin family with whom, Turpin's elderly mother aside, she wished to have no further dealings. Never wishing to set foot again in the transport café, and realising that she could only stay with friends for so long, once it was safe for Carmen to travel Gwen took herself and the girls off to Prestatyn in North Wales. Gwen went home, remembering that her late husband had told her that she should always try and visit the Great Orme, for that's where they had been happy. In many respects, it was her love and support, and Turpin's devotion to his daughters, that had enabled him to survive the years of debt and anxiety that followed his retirement from boxing. His love for his family had meant that he persevered even when he could see no future, but in the end life's pressure finally defeated this proud warrior. But in Gwen, who was anything but a shy, retiring Welsh Valley girl, he had found a sustaining love, and after his death she deeply mourned the loss of her beloved husband. Eventually, short of cash, Gwen sold her late husband's Lonsdale belt for £3,000.

  In 2001, exactly fifty years after Turpin shocked the world and defeated Sugar Ray Robinson, an imposing 8'6'' statue of Randolph Turpin in boxing pose, on a five feet high stone plinth, was unveiled in the centre of Warwick. On the bronze plaque below his feet are inscribed the words:

  In Palace, Pub, And Parlour

  The Whole of Britain Held Its Breath.

  And beneath this 'Celer Et Audax' – Latin for 'Swift and Bold' – the motto of the King's Royal Rifle Corps with whom Turpin's father served during the First World War. Thirty-five years earlier, in 1966, Gwen Turpin had already chosen her own memorial words and had them inscribed on her husband's headstone. Randolph Turpin may have ruled the world for an extremely brief sixty-four days, but whatever his troubles she wanted this stubborn, often naïve man to be remembered as an English hero.

  TO

  THE DEAR MEMORY OF

  RANDOLPH ADOLPHUS

  TURPIN

  DEVOTED HUSBAND OF

  GWYNETH

  AND FATHER OF

  GWYNETH, ANNETTE,

  CHARMAINE & CARMEN

  WHO PASSED AWAY

  17 MAY, 1966. AGED 38

  World middleweight

  boxing champion 1951.

  *

  Annette is the older of the two Turpin girls sitting before me. Both Annette and Charmaine are now in their forties, and there is a joy to their faces and demeanour which immediately challenges any notion of seeing the story of their father as a tragic one. Charmaine's eleven-year-old son Ieuan sits to her side. Opposite him, and next to me, sits sixteen-year-old Rachel. She is Carmen's daughter, and both she and her cousin are quiet and conscientiously polite. It is now forty years since Randolph Turpin died, and on this hot July afternoon we are having lunch at an Italian restaurant on London's South Bank, only a few hundred yards from the National Film Theatre where some twenty-one years ago I watched a poignant documentary film about Randolph Turpin. Annette smiles. She informs me that she too was in the audience that day, and she liked the film about her father. But that is all that she says; that she liked it, nothing more. We decide to order lunch.

  Annette lives in South London, where she is a psychiatric nurse working with children and adolescents in a hospital outpatient department. Charmaine has travelled down with the two children from Prestatyn in North Wales, where she is employed by a company that manufactures military equipment. She is planning on spending the weekend with her sister. Carmen was due to accompany her, but she has recently found another job and so she has decided to stay behind in Wales. Gwyneth, the oldest sister, died of Hodgkin's disease in 1987, and their mother Gwen died in May 1992. She never remarried. As Annette and Charmaine study the menu, I look closely at the sisters and can see that they both have something of the Randolph Turpin twinkle in their eyes. They lay down their menus and then break into charismatic smiles which remind me of the film footage I have seen of their father being interviewed as he prepared to board the Queen Mary and sail to New York for the first time. However, it is the young boy, Ieuan – the grandson – who is truly blessed with his grandfather's features. I wonder how much he knows about Randolph Turpin, or if he is even interested. 'HMS Belfast and the Imperial War Museum,' says his mother, 'that's what Ieuan likes to visit when he comes to London.' Did Ieuan know that his grandfather, and his grandfather's brothers, served in the military during the Second World War? Did Ieuan know that his West Indian great-grandfather was wounded in the First World War and suffered wounds that later killed him?

  Having ordered lunch, the children now begin to talk to each other. Suddenly I feel the pressure to pose a question to the sisters, but it is Annette who asks the first question. 'Do you think my dad would have got proper recognition if he wasn't black?' I have to think for a moment for this is a somewhat blunter version of a question that I was hoping to pose to the sisters. 'Although,' continues Annette, 'somebody told me that there are only two statues to black men in England. One is just along the river here, the one for Nelson Mandela, and the other is of our dad. The one that's in Warwick.' For a moment it occurs to me that in a sense she has answered her own question, but she continues. 'But there should be more recognition for black people, shouldn't there? And the one in Warwick has happened relatively recently.'

  Two days after winning the world middleweight title, twenty-three-year-old Randolph Turpin found himself on the balcony of Leamington Spa Town Hall with a microphone before him and being asked to make a formal speech. He began, but clearly he was not comfortable with the situation he found himself in and so he departed from the text and decided to thank the crowd in what he called 'me own language'. There was nothing pretentious or affected about Turpin. He was a working-class kid who was neither overly proud of, nor ashamed of, his roots. He was not hoping to secretly ascend through the ranks of the class system and become 'accepted' by the middle or upper classes. I suggest to the sisters that a combination of race and class probably operated against their father being fully recognised, and I ask them what they think he would be doing now were he still alive. Both are sure that he would still have something to do with boxing, probably working with youngsters as a trainer of some kind. 'How about media work?' I ask. They think for a moment, but I quickly continue. 'His face wouldn't have fit, right?' Charmaine nods. 'Yes, that's probably right.' In England issues of race and class frequently operate hand in hand, and had Randolph Turpin lived it seems clear to me that he would undoubtedly have 'suffered' as much for his class as for his race.

  Annette steals a quick glance at Charmaine. 'You know, our grandmother had to deal with a lot of racial abuse after her husband died. She got it because she had black kids. Five of them, but she always stuck by her children. Mum told us that. Mum never told us anything about anybody that was bad. When we were growing up she just let us make our own minds up about things.' Charmaine nods, and then takes over from Annette. 'But if we wanted to know then she would tell us her opinion, but only if we asked. After our dad died we left Leamington Spa, but we would sometimes come back and see people. Our mum would bring us from Wales, but she didn't badmouth anyone.' Annette's eyes light up. 'For instance,' says Annette, 'I idolised my Uncle Dick.' She stops abruptly. 'Mum never said anything to me until I started to ask questions about what had happened with the family, but even then it was just her opinion. You know, you should see pictures of her back then in the fifties. She was beautiful and glamorous, just like a film star. But when it came to family and questions a
bout our dad she just let us make our own minds up.'

  Shortly after her husband's death, Gwen took her four daughters back to Wales where she once again became part of a Welsh-speaking community. But none of her daughters can speak Welsh, which leads me to wonder if they consider Wales to be home. Charmaine casts a quick glance at the two children, who are now listening carefully. 'In a sense, yes, of course, but Leamington Spa is also home. Maybe it's really home.' Annette looks across at her younger sister and picks up her cue. 'When we go there we always take flowers for the grave, and the last time we were there we went for a walk down the street we used to live on, and it felt strange. Of course, the café is no longer there as it's now a car park, but the place is full of emotions, both good and bad. It's still home, though. At least to me.' She pauses. 'Mum told us that towards the end she would have preferred to sell up and go back to the Great Orme. This was when they still had both the café and the Great Orme, but for some reason Dad made his choice and he chose the café and Leamington and Mum went along with it. But when we did go to Prestatyn after his death we were never made to feel like outsiders in Wales.'

  After we have all finished eating we pause for a moment and think about ordering dessert. It transpires that only the children are interested and Charmaine begins to guide them through the choices. Annette is deep in thought, and then she looks up. 'You know what my mother's father said to my dad when he told him that he was going to marry Mum? He said, "Just take care of my daughter." That's all he said. "Just take care of my daughter." My dad was the only black man around that part of Wales, and maybe the only one some people had ever seen, but in Wales everybody accepted him for what he was. They were friendly and generous, and he didn't get any abuse. They didn't care that he was famous, and they didn't want anything from him. For the first time in his life he was free, and he was also among nature. He liked to work on the hay in the fields and do farm work on my granddad's farm, but when he was in Leamington if he had a fiver in his pocket they'd want £4.50 of it and you know he'd just give it to them. In a way he could be happy in Wales because he could just be himself, and for him it was really a big change from Leamington. I reckon things might have been different if they'd left Leamington and gone back and took over the Great Orme again like Mum wanted. But that's not what they did. They stayed in Leamington.'

  Having finished their dessert, the two grandchildren run off to play by the water's edge. Annette is the more talkative of the sisters, but being five years older her memories of her father are undoubtedly stronger than Charmaine's. We order coffee, and Charmaine keeps glancing anxiously over my shoulder in order that she might keep an eye on the children. Annette remembers that when she was a girl there was another black family in Leamington Spa. 'Dad used to leave the café at the end of the day and take plates of food, stacked up high, to other poor families in Leamington, including this black family across the street. He'd still feed them even when we had nothing, but he was like that. He looked after loads of people in Leamington, poor people, old people, and he didn't make a fuss about it.' Annette pauses. 'But there was this black family, and years later I met a guy who was a kid in the family and he remembered my dad bringing them food. I think my dad made a lot of black kids in England realise what it was possible to achieve, so his story isn't just gloom. I'm always meeting people who remember Dad, and whenever they talk about him they always smile. Nobody has a bad word to say about him, isn't that right?' Charmaine nods her head somewhat sadly, and then she picks up the thread of what Annette has been saying. 'You see, Dad lost a lot, but he always had dignity and he was good to people.' Suddenly Annette remembers. 'He made that trip to New York near the end, and Mum said that it made a big difference to him because he was really down.' I mention to them both that Muhammad Ali was a fan of their father, and he talked extensively with Turpin at the dinner that followed the Sugar Ray Robinson celebrations at Madison Square Garden in December 1965. Both sisters' faces light up. The children have now returned from the river and Charmaine turns to them. 'Did you hear that?' They both look blankly at her. 'About your granddad and Muhammad Ali.' The kids have not heard. 'Don't worry,' says Charmaine, 'I'll tell you later.'

  Randolph Turpin's story does not end in 1966 in tragedy. His proud daughters still love and revere the great fighter, and in time the grandchildren will too. For Annette and Charmaine, their father's life can never be reduced to the cliché of the naïve boxer having been ripped off and then committing suicide. To them, Randolph Turpin will always be a happy, loving father who used to be a boxer. Unfortunately their father's situation was such that he had little choice but to carry the accumulated hurt and frustrations of his boxing career into what should have been many happy years of retirement with Gwen and the children. As we wait for the bill, Annette pinpoints the heart of the story as she sees it and as I have grown to understand it. 'He felt betrayed.' This has to be true; Turpin's inner turmoil towards the end cannot have been simply fuelled by anxieties over a lack of money, and anger and frustration at having allowed himself to be used by people. There must have been a deeper, and in the end a far more destructive, hurt that was engendered by knowing that those who were closest to him had actually double-crossed him. He lived with this hurt for many years, carefully keeping it from his immediate family, and the great mystery is how he survived for so long while shouldering this oppressive burden of betrayal. Looking at his children I now know how. After years of turbulence, both private and public, he finally found in his Welsh girl, Gwen, the sustaining love of a loyal and devoted wife, and four daughters whom he adored. He persevered for them, but in the end the mounting debt, the crushing sense of abandonment, and a profound heartache that he was somehow failing the family he loved, proved too much for him. To the end, he was Beattie's most sensitive child. Annette continues. 'But he never hated anyone. In that sense he was just like Mum. He just let people make up their own minds.'

  III

  Northern Lights

  I remember he always used to wear a big black coat, and he was kind of hunched over. But not like life had beaten him down or anything. He just had this big black coat that seemed a bit too heavy for him. In the evenings I'd come out of where I lived on Mexborough Drive and walk down to the main road – Chapeltown Road. I'd be on my way up to my sister's place to look after her twins, and I'd meet him around about Button Hill. Near where the library and the business centre are now. Somewhere between these two. The fact is, Button Hill isn't much of a hill. Or much of a street really, more like a little alley that leads down on to Chapeltown Road. But this is where I'd meet David.

  I was fourteen. Back then, we were taught that you always had to be kind to your elders and betters. We lived a sheltered church life, and so I always acknowledged David and he'd just say, 'Take care, behave yourself.' That's all. 'Take care, behave yourself.' But it happened regularly enough so that we sort of got to know each other. I thought David was something to do with the university. He had that kind of attitude about him. Like he was a very intelligent man. Judging by the way he spoke, he didn't seem to me like he was a vagrant or anything. And underneath that big black coat I think he had on a dark suit. He tended to have his hands in his pockets and he looked cold. His face used to worry me. His face always looked bruised, as if he'd been scratched. It must have been 1968 or 1969, and you know he wasn't standing upright. He was a little hunched over.

  I remember one night when the police were out on the street in numbers. They had come to move David on. I asked a policeman, 'Please, what has he done? He has done nothing. He just stands here.' But there was something about the policeman – about how he looked at me – that frightened me and so I ran off. That night the police arrested a lot of people and put them in Black Marias – you know, the big black vans. That's what we used to call them, Black Marias. The police took a load of people away, including David. They'd only come to get David, but people stood up for him. The people on the street were protecting David and objecting to the police. While t
he police were trying to move David on and telling him, 'You shouldn't be here,' the young people gathered all around him. I mean, he wasn't doing anything, he was just standing by the wall like he always did. I thought he was such a humble man. He was polite. I couldn't see anything that was wrong with him. He just used to stand there with his big black overcoat. But, I don't think he had the same relationship with everybody. He didn't speak to other people, but he spoke to me.

  After the night of the disturbance, I saw him maybe a day or so later. I could see that he had been beaten for his face was all mashed up. He wasn't standing at the bottom of Button Hill, he was walking up Chapeltown Road as if he was in pain. I was fourteen. I never saw David after that. There was no other exchange after the night of the disturbance on the street. When I saw him that final time he was dragging his feet. Something had changed. I didn't know what it was, but I knew that something was different.

  I remember crying when I heard that he'd died. I felt it hard. Like I'd lost a true friend. All we'd done was exchange a few words over a period of months, but I would never dare say anything to anybody about having talked with a man. I was a Christian and I knew that it was taboo for a young girl like me to talk with a man. When I heard that he'd died I wrote a poem about David. All the feelings were locked up inside and I couldn't tell my parents. I remember that I did find a way to tell my sisters, and they understood. But I could never tell Mum that I knew somebody who'd been in trouble with the police. I could never admit anything to her about what was really going on out there on the streets, and so it was like I began to live two lives. I was angry. At the time of David's death everybody was angry. Here was a black man and you tell me, what was he doing in the river? We knew that the police were always trying to move him on, but something else was wrong. What was he doing dead in the river?