Foreigners

by Caryl Phillips

  The growth of the woollen industry, and the development of cloth manufacturing, meant that despite occasional visitations from the bubonic plague Leeds continued to expand. By the early seventeenth century, buildings now lined both sides of the River Aire and the town's leading citizens were vociferously complaining of overcrowding. In fact, according to contemporary reports, Leeds Parish Church could no longer accommodate the hordes of people who 'resorted thither every Sabbath'. This expansion was somewhat checked by the Civil War, during which Leeds was idly batted forward and backward by the Royalist and Parliamentary armies; growth was also interrupted by a particularly violent mid-century outbreak of bubonic plague that swept away a fifth of the town's population. However, by 1660, with the monarchy restored, and a new charter granted to the town, which included permission to appoint a lord mayor, things were once again looking buoyant for Leeds.

  In 1700 the population was 7,000, with another 3,000 in outlying townships. In the same year, the opening of the Aire-Calder Navigation Canal allowed cloth to be transported by barge out of Leeds and directly to the port of Hull, and thereafter to London or to the large markets of Europe. As Leeds began to develop a direct relationship to the world, her sense of her own importance deepened accordingly. Around 1720, Daniel Defoe visited Leeds and described it as 'a large, wealthy and populous town, it stands on the North Bank of the River Aire, or rather on both sides of the river, for there is a large suburb on the South Side of the River, and the whole is joined by a stately and prodigiously strong Stone Bridge . . . [T]he High-Street, beginning from the Bridge and running up North . . . is a large, broad, fair and well-built street . . . the town of Leeds is very large, and . . . there are an abundance of wealthy merchants in it.' At the time of Defoe's visit the banks of the River Aire were already full of warehouses and mills, and the main street of Briggate held a twice-weekly market where everything from the town's famous cloth to pigs or fruits, vegetables or shoes, might be bought.

  The Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century transformed Agrarian England into Industrial England, and even greater wealth began to be accumulated by the upper classes of society. These social changes saw the poorest of Leeds' citizens became poorer, while the richest became increasingly accustomed to, and smugly proud of, their material assets. In 1760, John Colliar, a schoolmaster from the neighbouring county of Lancashire, compared Leeds to 'a cunning but wealthy, thriving farmer. Its merchants hunt worldly wealth, as eager as dogs pursue the hare; they have in general the pride and haughtiness of Spanish dons . . . the strong desire they have for yellow dirt (gold), transforms them into galley-slaves, and their servants are doubly so; the first being fastened with golden, but the latter with iron chains.' With a link to Hull in the east already established, work began on the construction of a canal that would link Leeds with Liverpool to the west, and thereby provide opportunities for exporting directly into the new markets of the Americas. Although it took until 1816 to complete, the Leeds-Liverpool Canal placed Leeds at the hub of an extensive water-borne transportation network. With rail transportation having been introduced, and the town's roads being continually improved, Leeds began to develop a reputation for ease of communication, and she was able to move her cloth swiftly both nationally and internationally.

  In the eighteenth century, larger and more impressive cloth halls began to be constructed in Leeds. Public libraries, reading and assembly rooms, concert halls and theatres were also built to cater to the wealthier classes, while the working people continued to live in squalor and entertain themselves with bull-baiting, cockfighting, bareknuckle fist fights, or drinking and variety entertainment. Working-class standards of health declined, and living conditions for the poor deteriorated; inevitably, the disparity between those who had and those who had not grew ever wider. By the end of the eighteenth century this town of 30,000 people, with a further 23,000 in the outlying townships, had already developed the practice of establishing a soup kitchen for the indigent, and handing out blankets to those who could not provide for themselves. Fines levied for drunkenness and other abuses were used to help the needy, and food which was 'sold light in weight' was confiscated and given to the poor. This charity was motivated as much by goodwill as by a general fear of civil insurrection and disease.

  Hundreds of poor left Leeds in the early nineteenth century and migrated to the United States in an attempt to escape ruin, while others turned to crime and prostitution. The Leeds Workhouse was always full, as was the prison. As machines began to replace men with increasing frequency, the poor and unemployed became more vocal and expressive in the manner in which they made known their discontent. After all, the daily reminders of widespread poverty and starvation meant that they had little to lose. Those who did work were always in danger of being injured in the mill, or factory, or mine, and the worst abuses were often visited upon young children who were habitually pressed into service. However, despite the travails of the working people, and the prevalence of vagrants and paupers on the streets, the town was wealthy. The mistreatment of oppressed workers who laboured intensively in dangerous conditions, and the exploitation of child labour in factories and mills, guaranteed that industry would prosper and the wealthy become increasingly affluent. Meanwhile, the area of Mabgate, which was located down by the river beside the parish church, witnessed the greatest concentration of misery, and although social problems of poverty and prostitution were neither confined to Mabgate nor to Leeds, the town was eventually forced to acknowledge that it was confronted with a serious situation.

  Victorian Leeds boasted an extraordinary number of alehouses, which exacerbated the atmosphere of misery, and although many temperance societies grew up in the wake of this excessive drinking, neither church nor local government could arrest the decline in the social fabric of the town. These were dark times for Leeds, and not even the air was pure, for the toxic industrial soot blackened the lungs of the high and the low alike. By the middle of the nineteenth century the population, including the townships, had surged to 150,000 and overcrowding was endemic. In 1836 the Leeds police force had been formed and, shortly thereafter, they were armed with cutlasses and heavy batons. It was understood that the police were obliged to defend the rights of the mill owners and prevent the 'mobs' from attacking the mills, and soon after the establishment of the police force their numbers, and powers, were extended in order that they might deal effectively with growing working-class resentment. In 1847 a new borough jail was constructed at Armley to cope with vagrants and other undesirables, and during this period of rapid urban growth, the wealthier citizens quickly learned that they must vigorously monitor the underclasses for these people were not, under any circumstances, to be allowed to gain the upper hand. Aside from wealthy mill owners and industrialists, by 1845 there were over one hundred stockbrokers in Leeds, and the town enjoyed its own stock exchange. There were, in effect, two towns of Leeds, and although Mabgate bore no relationship, social or otherwise, to cosmopolitan Leeds, the underclass also wished to participate in the success story of their town. They too wished to belong, and be a part of this miraculous adventure in growth and development which had witnessed a small river crossing grow to the point where it now stood ready to make a magical transformation into a city. The disenfranchised of Leeds were refusing to go anywhere. They insisted on being heard, and they demanded that they be allowed to participate. They would not disappear. Nobody disappears. People don't just disappear.

  Surname: Oluwale

  Christian Name/s: David

  Unit No: 2726

  Status: Informal

  Address: NFA

  Sex: Male

  Marital Status: Single

  Admitted From: St James's Hospital, Beckett St,

  Leeds 9, Town Hall, Leeds (2)

  D of B: 8.8.30

  Religion: C/E

  Nat. Ins. No: Zk 45 03 60 C

  Admitted: 11.6.53 Section 26

  Status: C(Certified)

  I never saw him and
I never knew him, but it's a big place. Massive. In fact, I never saw no coloured people at all. But then again it's difficult because of the drugs. They affect your memory. The medication, as they like to call it, it can make you scream and then they just look at you and that's when they remind you that you're mad and that you'll not be going anywhere. I would find myself walking up and down corridors, talking to myself, thinking who the hell is this crazy bastard in my head, and then before I knew what was happening the nurses would be all over me, holding me down, forcing more stuff down my throat. They used to talk to me like they were my friends, then suddenly they would turn on me and that would be it. All men, never any women nurses, and they would trick you into thinking that everything was fine and okay, but it wasn't like that. And slowly, you know, I think I began to get the idea of what was going on. You'd see people coming in who looked alright, like you could go up to them and ask them how things were on the outside. Then the next time you'd see them they were zombies and they didn't know you, and that's when you realised that something was seriously wrong. But like I said, I didn't see no coloureds. I didn't see anybody like David Oluwale. I decided I had to get out of High Royds, but it wasn't that easy. I must have been getting better because I saw a doctor one day, and you didn't get to see them that often. But I saw this doctor and he even smiled, and before I knew where I was I found myself in an open ward. I thought to myself, you know, this is your big chance so you better take it. And so I absconded, but they caught me in the next village, or so they said, I don't remember. In Guiseley, I think it was. They brought me back and this time they locked me in a room by myself with only a bucket for a toilet. They let me out in the morning, but kept an eye on me. I went to Occupational Therapy, which everybody called OT, and I learned a bit about printing. The females did sewing and knitting, or they made baskets, but they gave the males different things to do. I used to wish I was back in prison, because you have more freedom in prison. Also, they don't give you medication in there, so you don't twitch as much and there's less nightmares. There's plenty of coloured blokes in prison. I might have seen this Oluwale fellow in there. At night they'd take me from OT back to the room with the bucket, and they'd lock me in. After I'd gone down the drainpipe and absconded the first time I thought, I'm not doing this again. But they weren't going to take any risks now. They watched me like a hawk. I never really did see how big this place was, but it was huge, I knew that. But by now all I wanted was to get out of there. It had been years, and nobody visited anymore, and I was sick of seeing old men picking up tabs from off the floor and shuffling around like they didn't know their name or care anymore. I didn't want to be like them. They were in their seventies some of them, and I didn't want to end up like that. If somebody gave them a sweet they were so grateful they looked like they might cry, but they were the ones who gave me the will to get out. It wasn't the doctors, for I hardly ever saw them. In fact, there was nobody to talk to about how you really felt about things, so you just kept your mouth shut and pretended to behave and hoped that the drugs wouldn't make you any more mad. Eventually it worked for me because one day they didn't take me back to the room and lock me in. They put me in a Nissen hut type of place which was a more open kind of ward, and I slept in there for a while. Maybe a year, I don't know. You never really knew much about time in High Royds. This place was better, but I'd still rather have been in Armley jail, because there you definitely knew about time and you've got your wits about you. But it's hopeless once they put you in the loony bin. It's hopeless trying to hang on to anything. Before you know what's going on they turn you into a bloody zombie and there's nobody to talk to. The nurses have got their jobs to do, but they're more like guards or prison officers. And the guys in OT, they sometimes told you straight out that it would be easier training chimpanzees. Basically, you've lost control of your life, but I was lucky. Luckier than most of them, because I got called into the doctor's office and he told me that I was going to be discharged. I said nothing because I didn't believe him. Then I realised that I didn't want to go because I didn't have any connection with the world anymore. Not since I'd gone down the drainpipe then been dragged back again. I didn't know anybody. I didn't know anything about life out there and it was frightening to me. The thing is, not only had I not seen any coloureds in High Royds, I don't know if I'd ever seen any at this time, apart from when I was in prison. I was more of a country person, not a city type, and we just didn't have any. But he could have been there and nobody would have known as the place was so big. But when they eventually said to him 'You're discharged' he'd have had the same worries as the rest of us. I mean, where are you supposed to go?

  I look over the low fence of 209 Belle Vue Road. The garden is a riot of overgrown weeds and shrubbery. A blue minivan lies derelict in the yard. Beyond the minivan, at the end of the long narrow garden, stands the three-storey house. There are six neatly spaced windows on the top two floors, three on each. The ground floor boasts a bay window. The curtains are variations of white and green, and they don't match. The curtains that hang in the bay window on the ground floor are white, but their dignity is compromised by the fact that not only do they hang askew, they are also badly twisted. Traditionally, curtains block out all light. They block out the day. The world. But not these curtains. To the side of the front gatepost somebody has hand-painted '209'. Blue string holds the brown gate shut, but much of the fencing to either side of the gate has collapsed. The gate serves little purpose. This was David's home. The place he hoped to return to when the High Royds doctor said, 'You're discharged.' This large three-storey brick house with a crushed Marlboro packet lying discarded by the gate; a place that boasts no television aerial on the roof. Back in the thirties this must have been a highly desirable neighbourhood for the street is broad and the houses suggest grandeur and affluence. But by David's time – by the fifties – this area was full of transients and prostitutes; and little has changed. Today a woman (Miss Dorton-Smith) lives here alone, but she will not answer her door. The door remains closed. I walk around to the side fencing. The labyrinth of jungle hides two more minivans, one red and one white; and the skeleton of a motorbike. The house, the garden, the vehicles, have all been 'let go'. Abandoned.

  The next time I saw David must have been six or seven years after the dance. I was walking down towards the university and he was walking up. I hesitated for a moment because he had changed. He'd put on an awful lot of weight and the bounce had gone. It was just no longer there. And the light had also gone from his eyes. David was a man who was in the habit of making strong eye contact, but I looked at him and saw that the light had definitely gone out. And then he told me that he'd been in hospital, and I thought 'oh shit'. Around this time people were beginning to become conscious that Armley jail wasn't the only place that could brutalise these men. We stood together by Woodhouse Moor and talked for a while, and I just assumed that he still lived at Belle Vue Road where he'd been living before. But it was only later that my husband explained to me that David probably appeared strange because he was so pumped up with drugs. After this meeting by Woodhouse Moor I met him next at a dance at Jubilee Hall where he was a bit more talkative, and I seem to remember he was mixing in quite a lot. And then one of the Ghanaians confirmed everything for me, and he told me that David had been drugged while he was in the mental hospital and that's why he'd been behaving a bit strangely of late. And then after a few months or so, David disappeared again into Armley jail. By this stage I'd already decided that I was going to watch out for him. Armley jail had a fearsome reputation, for the wardens and officers often had fascist pins on the inside of their lapels, and they'd flick them at you if you were visiting a coloured prisoner. But they didn't frighten me. I wouldn't let them.

  When David came out we started seeing a lot more of him, especially around Chapeltown. But the truth was although he still wore a suit and tie he was beginning to look a little unkempt. He had a bit of a wispy beard, not like the straggly one he had towards
the end, but he wasn't really holding it all together as well as he'd done in the past. The Hayfield pub in Chapeltown was now our regular hangout, and he'd sometimes come into the pub, but David was never much of a drinker. I mainly saw him in the street, and he always gave me the impression that he knew where he was going. However, it was only after two or three years that I realised that when David left us after a night in the Hayfield he was, in fact, going to sleep in shop doorways. Things were getting worse for David, and in those days he was always getting himself arrested, but mind you it was never his fault. I would go to the cells and try to get him a solicitor and arrange for bail, but it was clear what was going on. Once I went to court and David was in the dock with a bruised right eye, yet they were convicting him of assaulting a police officer if you can believe it. I mean, you only had to look at the size of the police officer and then look at the size of David to see how ridiculous this was. The other charge that they habitually brought against David was that he had been drunk, but everybody knew that David was not a major drinker, but the situation was hopeless. The police did whatever the police wanted to do, particularly when it came to vagrants, and especially when it came to coloured people. David, being the only coloured vagrant in Leeds, was in a bad situation.