Foreigners

by Caryl Phillips

  And after twenty-eight days of darkness they released you, David. No longer a stowaway. No longer a prisoner. You had endured your punishment and you were free in your new city, and surrounded by strange white faces. It was nearly winter. You were cold, but you were determined, and you found yourself a place to sleep. Beyond Woodhouse Moor and behind the university. 209 Belle Vue Road, a tall three-storey terraced brick house, handsome in its proportions, easily divisible into living units. A room in a house. A room in an overcrowded house full of working men, but none of them African. Lonely David, all by yourself. And at night when you lay on your single mattress and listened to the sound of doors banging and voices being raised, and lovers calling out to each other with passionate indifference, you understood that you were in a new country. You curled your small shivering body tightly into a ball in an attempt to trap some heat and survive the night. And in the morning you took the bus to the central bus station, and then walked over Crown Point Bridge to the far bank of the River Aire and past the factory that made engines for trains that would soon be dispatched to India and other far-flung corners of the empire. You followed the hundreds of workers who flowed down Black Bull Street and in the direction of the bleak factories that choked the lanes and alleyways between Hunslet Road and the River Aire, and you walked briskly towards your job at West Yorkshire Foundries. You generally had to have some sort of skill to find employment in Hunslet, particularly if you worked at West Yorkshire Foundries for this was a place that made mouldings, but only for top-of-the-line cars. Smart cars, like Triumph. However, in this factory there was some low-skilled work, and they employed you, David. And then, at the end of the day, you would hear the hooter and walk out on to the windswept streets where you crossed paths with those flooding in to do the night shift. Up above your head, you could see the chimneys which continued to pump out soot and smoke into the grey sky. Aside from the one row of back-to-back houses on Sayer Road (whose occupants were always the last to arrive at work for they would not roll out of bed until they heard the hooter) you passed nothing but factories on your walk back to and over Crown Point Bridge. Row upon row of factories. Once you reached the bus station you'd wait for the bus that would take you home. To 209 Belle Vue Road and your room in a house full of foreigners with their strange food, and their strange music. The English you were already used to, for they were a part of your world in Nigeria, but many nations lived in this noisy house. If it was not a night when you had to attend college you might walk up the hill and then across Woodhouse Moor towards Chapeltown and the pubs that would accept you; pubs in which you might reasonably expect to find those in whose company you might pass some time. And once there, in a pub, you would stand with your half of beer (because you were not much of a drinker) and listen to the talk and the laughter until the man behind the bar rang the bell ('Time, ladies and gentlemen, please'). Because everybody was grateful to the man for not running a pub that operated a colour bar all drinks would be drunk quickly and then, as a group, everybody would leave the pub and you would turn to the right by yourself and begin the long trek back across Woodhouse Moor, which often involved enduring the hostility of young louts who idled on benches, or beneath trees, smoking cigarettes and eager to embrace trouble. But you ignored them and pressed calmly on your way, although sometimes you were forced to flee in your suit and collar and tie, but being young and fit you were able to fly away from your enemies and go home to 209 Belle Vue Road and pass quickly up the stairs to your room. And then you disappeared, David. And then you just disappeared.

  I first saw him in the Cambridge pub on North Street. He was part of a group of coloureds who were drinking. Mainly Africans, I think. I noticed him because he was so smartly dressed. This must have been about 1950 or 1951. The Cambridge didn't have a colour bar, unlike most of the other pubs in Leeds. Most of them had big signs in the window that read 'No Coloureds, No Dogs, No Gypsies', that sort of thing. Either that, or they'd have a quota which meant they'd only let a certain number in so as not to 'spoil' the English atmosphere. Nightclubs nearly always had a quota, apart from the Mecca Ballroom in town where anybody could go and dance. But in most cases pubs just preferred to have an outright bar on coloureds. The Cambridge on North Street was different, and they didn't give anybody any hassle. That's where I first saw him. The pubs closed at 10:30 p.m. in those days, and when we all came out of the pub everybody turned to the left. David was the only one who turned to the right and he began to walk off by himself. I asked one of the others where he was going to, and they said that he lived over by the university so I assumed that he must have been a student. In those days there were two groups of Africans in Leeds. The first group were the students, and most of them lived around the university area. The second group were the working Africans and they mainly centred around the Chapeltown area. In fact, some of the workers also studied at night. During the day they might be employed in some form of engineering, but at nights they would study. But, you know, as time went by a lot of them stopped studying and they just concentrated on making money. But there were always the two groups, the workers and the students. The two groups would often converse together in the pubs without any problems, but when we all left the pub they would go their separate ways. On this particular night, the first night that I met him, the working group turned left towards Spencer Place, which was the neighbourhood that they all lived in. David turned right.

  The Booma Boys

  The Nigerian warriors came home from the Burma war filled by the same impatience with the past that flung their English comrades into Clement Attlee's grim embrace. Among them was a residue of restless souls whose misconduct in Lagos won them the name of 'Burma Boys'. When the late forties raced into Nigeria (as they never did to war-sodden, static, 'welfare' England), this name became 'Booma,' and the 'Boys' really boys: for a new generation of goodbad lads sprung out of the Lagos pavements, who were too young to have fought overseas but old enough to demand that the future happen quickly now. Many of these vivid scamps, innocent as rogues under twenty-three can be, were suddenly gripped by a deep urge to know the world; and as swallows do, they took off from Africa for England with nothing but a compelling instinct as their baggage, stowing away, signing on and deserting, sometimes cajoling minimal fares from rightly reluctant families. Their landfall was in the big English dock cities, and they loped ashore blithely confident that the world loved them and owed them a treasure.

  Colin MacInnes, 1960

  My second memory of meeting David was at a dance at the Jubilee Hall in Chapeltown. Today the place is some kind of a media centre, but it was originally built in the thirties as a Jewish social centre back when the Chapeltown area was rather grand and somewhat Jewish. The Jubilee Hall would allow us to rent rooms for dances and here, as in the pubs, the African students mixed with the African workers. With the West Indians there were actually more workers than students, but it was the other way around with the Africans. However, I do seem to remember that quite a few of the Trinidadians were doing medicine, dentistry, law, and accounting and so on. The second time I saw David was at the Jubilee Hall dance and I noticed him because he was smarter than most in his dress sense. David always wore cool suits, always a collar and tie, and when he began to dance he danced as though he had music in his soul. In fact, when David walked he did so as though he was walking to music. There was a great rhythm to his steps. The kind of music they played at Jubilee Hall dances was Hi Life and Steel Pan, and David was in his element. I noticed him that first time because he turned the wrong way. I noticed him the second time because he was such a great dancer.

  I never saw David standing alone by himself either in the pub or at a dance. Aside from his living arrangements, which meant that he lived a little way off from all the others, he appeared to me to be fully integrated into the African group. In fact, sometimes the university held dances and I saw him there, and again I noticed his skill at dancing. This would have been around 1951. He was very bouncy, and very young a
nd slim. David wasn't really a political type and he never joined in with any of that. I tried to talk to him about the racial situation, especially as I had just formed the Chapeltown Commonwealth Citizens Committee. This was a difficult time for a white woman to be seen with a group of coloured men. I would be at risk, but the greater risk would be to them. People would often say things to me – nasty things – and naturally the men would want to defend me, although I'd try to encourage them to say nothing. But it wasn't easy. The Labour Party wouldn't officially support us in our work with the coloured immigrants; some individuals within the Labour Party, yes, but not the Labour Party as a whole. We – the members of the Chapeltown Commonwealth Citizens Committee – leafleted places and tried to make them take down their discriminating signs. We postered offices and pubs, and we also went to estate agents and tried to convince them that property prices actually went up when coloureds moved in. We told them that initially some whites might want to move out, but we reminded them that the housing demand from coloureds was such that the prices would inevitably rise back up. We also tried hard to get coloureds registered to vote, and we were forever dealing with the nuisance of the police. David was interested in what we were doing, but he didn't take part. He would always ask how we thought we were going to change things, and I would try to convince him that it was worth collecting evidence of systematic racism and challenge it head-on. However, David preferred to talk about what he was doing then, which was working in engineering across at a foundry in Hunslet.

  *

  It was called West Yorkshire Foundries, not because of the county of West Yorkshire (which actually didn't exist back then), but because the owner was a certain Mr Wallace West. The company began in the Second World War making castings for aircraft, then it eventually got involved in car manufacture. I was the personnel officer and I remember David as a short man who smiled all the time even though he didn't seem to have much to smile about. People in the factory used to call him 'Alliwalli' and he was known for reading educated newspapers. He spoke with a thick West African accent, I remember that, and it was sometimes difficult to understand what he was on about. But I was the one who led him from his formal interview to his department in the foundry itself. We put him in Department 87, which was then run by Percy Chainey, whose employees were required to help out with any department that had a labour shortfall. If no shortfall existed, Department 87 members were expected to sweep and clean the factory in general. Oluwale would have been among the first of hundreds of immigrant workers who eventually passed through the foundry's doors. They used to queue outside the interview room, three or four deep, and the line would often stretch right down the street. We attracted immigrants because the pay was competitive, but the conditions were terrible and safety was non-existent. We always had Lithuanians, Hungarians, and Poles, then Asians and West Indians, but Oluwale was the only West African I remember. In fact, in those days we had multilingual signs in the factory, but I'm not sure it helped anybody. The day used to begin at 7:30 a.m. In fact, the hooter sounded three minutes before work was to start, and that's when the men would assemble in the streets and begin to clock in. They had an hour for lunch and worked right through until 5:30 p.m., but it wasn't easy. In fact, to many it was worse than being down the pit. Mr West liked his employees to wear 'whites', like he'd seen workers wear in India. Well, they might look nice, but they were useless as protective gear. And there were no safety shoes or anything. In the aluminium and iron foundries you'd walk in and it would be completely black except for the light of the molten metal, a white light which was dazzling. Things were pretty bad back then, and even the area around the factory was rough with no grass in sight. The river was black, like oil. You sometimes see fish in it now, but back then the only living things in it were leeches. No, it wasn't a great job with all the heat and the sheer physical graft involved. But when overtime was available hours could easy double from the forty-four-hour basic.

  And so there you were, David, working in the white-hot heat of the foundry, without protective clothing, vulnerable to spills and accident, hard grown men's work that only the strong and the skilled could survive and then, at the end of the day, out again, away from the filthy black river, out on to the windswept streets lined with redbrick factories. 'Hey you, nigger boy. Did you come out of your mam's arse?' A slow journey back in the direction of Belle Vue Road and a room called 'home', and the next morning back to work where the company doctor gave you your lightning-fast check-up. After he tapped your chest and looked quickly into your mouth, he had a suggestion. 'Cheer up, sunshine. Perhaps you should try going to the cinema. That'll make you feel better. Everybody's the same colour in there.'

  I arrived in England from Nigeria as a stowaway in January 1951. Takoradi to Middlesbrough. There was one foot of snow on the ground and all I had were tennis shoes and dungarees, that's all. And a shirt with Sugar Ray Robinson drawn on the back of it. It was winter and I was freezing. I'd never been so cold, and to me it was like living in a freezer. But eventually I made my way to Yorkshire and that's where I met David. The way I see it, Yorkshire people are friendly, hard-working men. Socialists. You get the occasional problem here and there but they're generally okay. There were not many of us coloureds in those days. It was like you could basically count the number of blacks in Britain on one hand back in 1951. The only West Indians we really knew were a few ex-RAF guys with half-caste children, but there were no West Indian or African women there. We didn't mix much with the West Indians to start with; that came later. Eventually I got a job working at William Graves Foundry. We made shipping equipment. Then, around about this time, I met David. David was short and stocky-like. He looked like a jockey. He wasn't really a drinker or smoker, but he loved to dance. However, he was mostly by himself. Always alone. I never went to David's flat because I never knew where he was living. He'd say, 'Goodnight, I'll see you tomorrow', and then he'd be gone. He never invited anybody to his place, but you didn't ask him about it because you knew it would be an argument. The problem with David was he didn't understand the colour-bar situation and he would get very wound up. 'I'm from a British colony and I'm British,' he would say. 'So why do they call me "nigger"?' This was the attitude David couldn't deal with. He wasn't able to think around a situation and do something else. He was always in trouble and in conflict with the police. He wasn't crazy, he just didn't understand the system, that's all. He was a good guy. He'd never fight anybody, never draw a knife, but verbally he could be very abusive, especially against the police. He was always telling them to 'fuck off '. The only time David would cool down was when he was with his mates. On his own he couldn't handle these situations. David needed somebody to sit down and tell him what was happening to him. Some of us nearly went mad in England because the environment was new. We spoke the same language and we thought everything would be okay, but we soon found out. David really was a smart cat who could always think fast if he had to, but he was a loner who wanted to do everything by himself. The guys tried to help him, because we knew the situation, which is why we always walked out in twos or threes or fours. On your own you had to be very careful. However, David was never a troublemaker. He could be very foul-mouthed, but he wasn't a troublemaker. We knew that the police were against us because we could see it, and we had to work around them. But not David. He was determined. He never discussed his ambitions or any idea of going back to Nigeria. But then again, the majority of us didn't want to go back to Africa again.

  And then David just disappeared and that was that. At first nobody thought it was unusual, for we were used to people leaving or just moving on. But after a while I remember asking people, 'Has anybody seen David?' And then I was told, 'Didn't you hear? He's been arrested.' A lot of my own work with the Chapeltown Commonwealth Citizens Committee involved having to deal with the police, who were very much in the habit of picking up people just because they were coloured. The word on the street was that one night, while walking home and minding his own busine
ss, David had been arrested and he had been sent to Armley jail. I thought okay, this is not good, but I suppose we'll see him when he comes out. But we never did. He just disappeared.

  There they stand, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside, the asylums which our forefathers built with such solidity.

  The Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell, Minister of Health, 1961

  You can see it from the road; a large Gothic building and a sprawling estate of outbuildings. Built in 1888, this is a deeply depressing complex. The West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum; a place of grim, Victorian nightmares set in 200 acres of land. Once you turn off the road, and pass the sign that reads 'Treatment Centre', the gloom deepens. Another sign reads 'Welcome to High Royds Hospital'. The asylum. Thereafter, the sheer scale of the place soon becomes apparent. The buildings begin to multiply and it is clear that High Royds Hospital (as it became known in 1963) is the size of a village. In its heyday over 2,000 people could be 'treated' at any one time in the dark stone buildings which huddle together beneath the sinister turrets and towers. Lights are burning in the windows but there is nobody in sight. Imagine. Inside. Dirty rooms with plastic armchairs and filthy carpets. Walls and windows stained with years of nicotine, burn marks on the floor, ashtrays overflowing with crushed fag ends. Inside ex-patients sleep in the corridors for they have nowhere else to go. Some wear daisies in their hair and bluebells for earrings. (My friend, you spent eight years from 1953 to 1961 in this asylum. Doing what? What were they doing to you? Were there any others like you?) The main building resembles a large stately home. Above it there is a clock tower which, somewhat cruelly, serves only to remind you that in this place time no longer matters. Your time has been taken away from you. Farewell time. (What were they doing to you? Were there any others like you?) Inside the front door one tiled corridor leads into another. One wing quickly gives way to another wing. A crazed maze. Neither dignity nor privacy. Eating with spoons. Male and female wander abroad. Through a double door there is a huge ballroom with a mirrorball nestled high in the ceiling. On Monday nights, the cinema. On Friday evenings, between seven and nine, the weekly dance. Male and female mixing. Just after Christmas the Annual Asylum Ball. The social event of the season. On New Year's Eve, the patients' Fancy Dress Ball, where the staff present a music-hall-style pantomime, and the asylum band play on and on. (Did you dance, David? Or did they simply sedate you into submission?) Beyond the immaculate lawns, and through the trees, one can glimpse the small Yorkshire village of Menston. Civilisation. In the grounds a truck trundles into view. The driveway curves around the bend. Deliveries? Of food maybe, or perhaps towels? Or medicine? Or needles? Or straps? Cruelly sedated and now ready for electro-convulsive therapy. One man remembered. 'It was like going to the gas chamber, you walked in and saw this horrendous cap that they put on your head and this bed that they asked you to lie on and the injection, to this day I can taste and smell it, and that was to me horrific.' (Did they sedate you into submission?) The tranquil picture must not be disturbed. Cruelly sedated. Perhaps the screams of the patients are too high-pitched for the human ear? (What, my friend, were you doing here for eight years? Really, were there others like you?)