The next morning was a Saturday and we did what we always did on Saturdays, which was clean the house. But from the New Year, the government had passed a new law which Mum and Dad detested as another example of a lazy and corrupt administration. Every Saturday all residents on a street were forced to take part in something called Environmental Sanitation. This was essentially government-mandated chores. We had to collect the rubbish, sweep the streets and even try and fill the massive potholes with compressed garbage. I can tell you that you don’t know what a waste of time really is until you are in an unpaved street with a broom, just sweeping dust. If we had swept until Monday all we would have achieved was to make a big hole in the ground, but in light of what we’d seen at the party the night before, we grumbled more quietly than normal.
Something definitely seemed to be up at home. During the following week, there were a lot of whispered conversations going on between Mum and Dad. We’d come back from school and things would be missing from the house. Slowly, all of Dad’s equipment for work disappeared, then a wardrobe full of clothes would be gone. Normally, I would have rejoiced at the place being decluttered for once, but this time it all looked a bit ominous. Could we be so strapped for money that even the sale of Mum’s sewing machine and her bolts of cloth would make a difference? We didn’t get any explanations and we could see from Dad’s face that we shouldn’t ask.
That Friday night Mum made dinner for us on an outside barbecue. We’d been in Nigeria for almost a year by now and as there is no summer or winter out there, an outside barbecue is a good idea at any time. After we’d finished eating, Dad went to a box in the corner, fished out our passports and threw them on the kitchen table.
‘We’re going on holiday.’ We all looked up when Dad said this. Another unplanned disruption was about to happen to us. I was not enthusiastic, but Stella reacted very differently and actually ran out onto the street. I ran after her.
‘What’s wrong, Stella?’
‘Remember the last time we went on holiday?’ she shouted with a whoop and a cheer. Could it be that we were going home to England? I quietly prayed that it might be, but with Dad you just could never tell. And you could never ask either.
Once more we had to pack up the entire house and we loaded the rusty van to the brim. We still hadn’t been told where we were going and when we reached Lagos airport we just followed Dad, carrying boxes and bags in our hands like a family of displaced ducklings. In the year we had been in Nigeria, West African Airways had shut down and Dad marched us to the British Airways ticket booth. My heart was thudding in my chest as Dad picked up seven one-way tickets to London. Stella nearly dropped the box she was holding she was so happy.
As the plane took off, Albert, Stella and I felt good: we’d arrived on an African carrier to live an African life; now we were going home on British Airways to resume our British lives. But who knew how long this would last? The flight was completely different from the one we’d taken over to Lagos a year before. There were films to watch on this plane. There were stewardesses that served us hot English food. As we looked out of the window all we could see below us were fluffy clouds flying past, looking deceptively solid. I sat in my seat and thought about how only the week before I had been sweeping a dusty Lagosian street and playing ten-ten with Sunday.
I suddenly felt very angry. Although I was happy to be going home, why did it always have to be so last minute and why were we never told anything beforehand? I never got to say goodbye to Sunday or to Mama Bunmi. I didn’t even have their addresses if I wanted to write to them. What about the Oba of Abeokuta? Would I never see him again? Would I never get to meet his son? And Auntie Yomi too? Dad was constantly uprooting us and, as I heard our hand luggage bumping around in the overhead locker, I thought, We are just pieces of luggage to pack up and move about.
Though there was undoubtedly much love and care in my family, talking about our feelings was basically absent from our lives. I have no idea if this is a phenomenon of every large family, but in a way I can understand it. Keeping five kids safe and healthy is a big enough job; worrying about their mental well being too would keep Dr Freud busy for months. Only later on in my life did I begin to appreciate the trials and tribulations my parents must have gone through. I’m sure there was a lot of personal stuff they didn’t or couldn’t share with us and, ultimately, I know that they sacrificed a lot for us.
It’s no surprise that these days some of my friends describe me as being a bit secretive. The thought of opening up and being emotional will never be something that comes naturally. What makes it easier is when I see how some of my closest friends have a completely different relationship with their families. My friend Dustin is so close and open with his parents and siblings that I sometimes feel I’m watching an episode of The Brady Bunch. It’s bewildering to see him argue, discuss and make up with his family all in the space of minutes. I’d rather not get involved in that kind of drama. Some people might disagree, but, in my case, ‘avoiding the issue’ are words to live by.
When we arrived in London the first thing we did was open up our bags and pile on as many clothes as would fit on our bodies. We had brought so much stuff with us that Mum had to take a taxi by herself and we stuffed the cab full of bags and boxes after she got in. Dad took me and the rest of the kids on the Tube. Cordelia and Chris, who were now five and six years old, were excited to take an Underground train as they simply couldn’t remember having used the Tube before. About halfway down the Piccadilly line a large Jamaican woman got on the Underground. She was standing opposite, watching us kids as we sweated, each wearing three T-shirts, three jumpers and our feet swelled with the many pairs of socks we’d pulled on. She was laughing to herself at the sight when a foul smell pervaded the Tube. Someone had farted. She looked at us and smelled the air tilting her head upwards. Then she started moving her mouth. Like she was eating it. And declared in a thick accent, ‘Cha! Somebody bottom dirty!’ We all screeched with laughter.
Changing onto the Northern Line we eventually arrived at Tooting Tube station. We emerged onto the street and found our way to the tiny flat that Dad had got for us on Fountain Road. It was a dodgy-looking block and had only three bedrooms for Mum and Dad and the five of us kids, but we didn’t mind the cramped conditions because we felt like we had finally come back home.
Once more the exhaustion of the trip was overridden by the excitement of arriving in a new place and I resolved to do something I’d missed for the whole previous year. I took a pound from Dad and went out to buy junk food. I was still only twelve years old and Woolworth’s Pic ’n’ Mix was calling out to me. Tooting is a hugely Asian area and I was amazed to see so many Indian people out and about after a year of seeing only black faces. I passed temples, mosques and loads of Indian sweet shops. I was so busy staring that I almost ran straight into a little old Indian woman who scowled at me.
‘Don’t you know your shoe is untied?’
I could never understand old people’s paranoia about untied shoes. It’s as if having a lace flying about is as likely to result in a broken neck as having a noose looped around your head while standing on a rickety ladder. I just looked at her and right there on Tooting High Street she got down on her knees and tied up my shoelaces for me, before getting up, smiling at me and tottering off. I have to tell you that after coming from Nigeria where I’d had to spend half my life on my knees or on my belly prostrating to strangers this was a wildly different experience.
In Woolworths a Chinese man served me two Wham! bars almost without looking up and, as I left the shop, one was already in my mouth. I remembered how much Stella liked sausage rolls – another treat long denied us in Africa – so I headed into a bakery on the way back home. I had just enough money to buy a roll from the white woman behind the counter and, as she handed it over, she said with a wink, ‘There you go, lover. They put the bollocks and everything in that.’ I was truly home!
As I walked the rest of the way back to Fountain Ro
ad with the warm sausage roll turning the paper bag see-through with grease in my pocket, I realized that in the space of ten minutes I’d come into contact with three different people from three different races: a trip to the shops in London does more for racial relations than any Benetton advertising campaign can ever hope to achieve. Forget trying to fit in if nobody else bothers with it. I wasn’t a Lagosian or a Londoner. I was just myself, and realizing that, I walked down the street that night with a little bit more effizzy in my step.
8
COMING BACK TO ENGLAND was a real shock to the system. We’d missed a whole school year and were going to enrol in secondary school a year late. We were up to scratch in most of the academic subjects, but we were going to have to unlearn such a lot of habits that we’d picked up in Nigeria. School started two hours later over here; agriculture and RE were out the window. Making your own uniform wouldn’t be seen as a badge of honour in London and we went out to buy cheap polyester uniforms off the peg from Marks and Spencer.
The teachers had been disarmed and we could get away with a lot more, which was good. But we had to deal with another kind of torture when we finally enrolled, because to my horror, Stella and I were separated into different classes. There was a policy back then to separate twins from each other as soon as possible. It’s the kind of wrong-headed nonsense that no one in Nigeria would ever think of bothering with. We only got to see each other at lunch breaks when we’d play ten-ten and go out to buy crisps from the local newsagent.
Thankfully, these days that policy has been reversed. Basically, schools have changed for the better since the eighties, although I saw my nephew recently and he said that kids today aren’t allowed off school grounds at any time during the day. Apparently, people are worried that paedophiles are lurking behind every corner, which is ironic because back then half of our teachers were seriously pervy. I remember we had one teacher who would just wander around the boys’ changing rooms making sure everyone was showering naked. He didn’t even teach PE. And if we forgot our kit? You guessed it! We had to do it in our vest and pants. Even the cross-country run! Although to be fair we lived in South London and if you were a thirteen-year-old boy out on my local high street in just your vest and pants then you’d better be running. This was considered normal back then. It was so ridiculous at my school that the register should have been a list of all the teachers who would qualify as a sex offender today.
So at the age of thirteen I was thrown into a new secondary school without my trusty partner in crime and it was awful. I wasn’t particularly academic and I wasn’t sporty either, much to my teachers’ confusion. When you’re a black kid at an all-white school and you’re not sporty, people start to think you must be adopted. I hated all the different games we had to play and I still can’t swim properly. When we had swimming classes I used to just walk along the bottom. What can I say? The afro and water are like a jockey’s left and right testicle. They’re never going to meet.
Without Stella, I was literally the only black kid in class. And so yes, I started to act out, a lot. I think it was the culture shock of coming from a country where you could get beaten with a two by four for looking at the teacher wrong. When you’re used to seeing that sort of thing, being threatened with detention or writing lines just doesn’t carry so much weight. Suddenly, I could get away with anything and I used to really push my luck. I would always be caught talking in class. I remember one time my English teacher Miss Matthews said, ‘Stephen! Please put your hand up if you want to talk!’ and I said, ‘I didn’t know we had that kind of relationship, miss.’ Yes, a precocious bastard was I. And I used to come up with nicknames for all the kids in the class and the teachers too. Although a joker, I still wasn’t popular at all. In fact there were only three people in class less popular than me: Cindy (who I christened ‘Four-eyes’), Aled (‘Potato Head’) and Gary (‘Smelly Git’). I wonder why no one liked me?
And then there was Dustin. He was small for his age and he had bad asthma so he was off sick a lot. I didn’t tease him because he was one of those people that just managed to fade into the background. Like me, he was unpopular, but, whereas I tried to be the centre of attention, he just wanted to be left alone and, using some kind of instinctive camouflage technique, for the most part, he was. He sat at the back of the class like me and he laughed at all my jokes although we weren’t exactly friends.
There was one teacher that really, really hated me. Mr Hackett was his name and he taught maths. He would scream at us until he was literally blue in the face. Plus he had a huge head, way too big for his body, and the reason he really hated me is because I’d given him a nickname that had stuck. With his huge head that regularly turned blue with rage I’d taken to calling him ‘Moon Face’. Dustin particularly liked this nickname I gave him because Mr Hackett was always making fun of Dustin and used to call him ‘Shorty’ and ‘Chicken Legs’. That teacher was a bully, pure and simple.
As is always the case, one day I was right in the middle of the classroom making fun of him when he walked into the room. The whole class was looking at me and laughing their heads off as I chanted, ‘Moon Face! Moon Face!’ There was a big pillar in the middle of the classroom and I was poking my head from one side to the other ‘Now you see him … Whoops! You still do!’ I was having a great time when a deathly hush came over the whole room. I should have clocked something was wrong but I kept on going ‘Now you see him …’ And there he was, right on cue. His big blue moon face screaming at me to sit down. He really let me have it and I was in detention for a week.
From then on, he was a total sadist to me. He’d read out my homework when it was wrong and if he noticed I wasn’t paying attention to him (which was often) he’d make me come up to the blackboard to do a sum that was totally beyond me just to humiliate me. And then there was one day he really pulled a number that I’ll never forget. When I was a kid I was a sweet addict. I’d load up on Coca-Cola and pop Wham! bars like they were crack cocaine. In break I’d be at the vending machines getting my usual fix and one day I’d drank too much pop and was busting for a pee right in the middle of his lesson. I raised my hand and asked him if I could go to the toilet, but he said no. I was getting really desperate and so I asked him again, but he told me I’d have to wait with an evil little gleam in his eye.
There I was, squirming in my seat, absolutely desperate for the loo and, you guessed it, I couldn’t hold it any more. I bolted out of the classroom with ‘Amos! Amos! Get back in your seat!’ ringing in my ears.
I didn’t quite make it. Five minutes later, I returned to class, panic stricken and rather sheepishly holding a poster for the debating society over my trousers.
‘How dare you! Where have you been? You need permission to leave my classroom. Come to the front of the class!’ He pointed at me. ‘I’m going to make things really difficult for you, Amos! You’re a troublemaker. I think that’s another detention for you. And what’s that you’ve got there?’
‘Nothing, sir.’ By this time, I was really sweating, hoping he’d let me just sit down. But he didn’t. Right there at the front of the class, he ripped away the poster and there, exposed for all to see, was a wet patch in the front of my trousers.
‘Sir! Sir! Stephen’s wet himself,’ screamed four-eyed Cindy, and all the kids turned to me and laughed. Today, although I can’t really remember their faces and I can’t really remember their names, I can sure remember their pointing fingers and their horrible laughter. It was the most humiliating day of my life and I ran straight home.
When my mum saw me she was horrified. Less because of what had happened and more because I’d ruined my uniform. The next day she went marching to the headmaster to complain and Mr Hackett and I became firm enemies. A line had been drawn in the sand and I swore I’d get him back one day.
At the back of our classroom on the side nearest the window was a big supply closet that contained the chalk, the board rubbers, the dictionaries and all the usual stuff that a school
needs. It had a lock but the key wasn’t very well guarded since no one was going to steal dog-eared old dictionaries. In fact the classroom monitor, who was just another kid, was normally asked to go and fetch stuff for the different classes, so we all knew that the key was kept in the top drawer of the teacher’s desk. So, one day, a few weeks later, once the whole pant-wetting incident had blown over, Dustin and I decided to teach Mr Hackett a lesson.
Every morning once the roll was called, the attendance sheet sat on the front desk for the rest of the day so that the teachers could check that all the pupils that had come to school were in all the classes. No teacher wanted a kid to play truant, especially not a monster like Mr Hackett who knew that every student in class would have given anything to get out of an hour of his company. So we made up our minds to have a little bit of fun with him and see if we could get the upper hand for once. Mr Hackett already hated Dustin and me the most in class, so what was the worst that could happen if it all went wrong? In Nigeria that’s the kind of question you wouldn’t want to think about but this was a different world.
During break time, I sneaked the key to the supply closet from the teacher’s desk, unlocked the door and pocketed the key. When the bell rang for maths class, Dustin, who was about a foot shorter than everyone else in class, hid under some coats behind my chair at the back of the classroom. Sure enough, Mr Hackett checked the roll and immediately noticed that Dustin was missing.
‘Where is that Dustin? Who’s seen Dustin?’
‘Maybe he’s still out in the playground, sir,’ said suck-up four-eyed Cindy.
I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey Page 8