Black by Design

by Pauline Black

  ‘I thought you would have liked this hot weather,’ she snorted. Lots of people said exactly the same words to me every time the sun came out, as if I never got uncomfortably hot like everybody else.

  In the end, she relented, but not before barking at my retreating back: ‘Don’t touch anything.’

  How well she knew me! I liked to snoop. I had reached the conclusion that grown-ups were always hiding something; they always had some little secret about themselves that with just a bit of delving into their private nooks and crannies would usually elicit an illicit treasure trove. My home piracy was generally a strategically coordinated affair, requiring stealth, a steady nerve, colourful imagination, abundant opportunity and, above all else, a healthy disregard for the victims.

  Once alone in the sitting room and having satisfied myself that the ladies were deep in conversation, I decided that the bookcase looked an interesting place to begin. Usually adults liked to hide their more fascinating reading material behind the boring stuff like cookery books and the Bible. I had often found copies of Reveille and Tit-Bits in some of our other relatives’ bookcases. These cheap paper magazines always had photos of pneumatic, scantily clad young women, usually artfully posed, on their front covers. My two youngest brothers also hid such stuff under their beds, so I was familiar with the genre. I always wondered why the women in these cover photos didn’t have wobbly bits and hairy underarms and legs like the bathing-suit-clad ladies who sunbathed on the beach at Clacton.

  As I noiselessly slid the glass frontage aside, I noticed that the Bible was sticking too far forward for its relative size. Carefully removing it, I delved into the shadowy interior. I immediately hit paydirt. I withdrew a large, slightly shabby and obviously well-thumbed book. A damp, mushroom smell clung to it.

  The cover image scorched my eyes. A huge, well-muscled, half-naked black man proudly stood with his sinewy ebony arms on his hips. The lower half of his body was clad in loose, white cotton trousers, but his eyes were downcast, despite the arrogance of his stance. Beside him stood a young, white, fiery red-headed woman in a yellow and white silk Victorian crinoline dress, her soft, white hand possessively hooked into the crook of his arm. Her blue eyes upturned towards him, stared with an absolute purpose. There was no doubt that she was in control.

  Above the picture was a banner headline in red: MANDINGO, and some blurb about the contents being ‘terrifying and horrifying’, ‘a wonderful novel of life on a slave-breeding farm’. Underneath it said that millions and millions of copies had been sold.

  So why hadn’t I heard about it? From the look of the cover, I suspected that I wouldn’t find it in the local library. I traced the word ‘unabridged’ with my right index finger, wondering what it meant, before my hand strayed towards the picture of the bare-chested man. Suddenly my palm felt clammy and stuck to the shiny front cover. As I flicked through the book, I noticed that there were faint lipstick smudges on the tops of some of the pages, where my aunt’s finger had probably brushed against her lips before licking its tip to facilitate turning over each leaf.

  My mother was fond of calling my Aunt Rose a ‘lady of leisure’. Mostly out of jealousy I think, because my aunt’s husband, Leonard, had a good, white-collar, number-crunching job at the Electricity Board. He and his wife enjoyed ballroom dancing, holidaying abroad and bridge nights. My aunt changed the flowers on the altar at the local church twice a week and went to WI meetings. Now I knew how she spent her leisure time.

  On an initial, cursory inspection it seemed that the book was full of ‘rude’ bits – the only way, at that age, I had to describe people kissing each other. As I read on, a frightening story emerged about how white people in America bought black people at auctions and forced them to work on their cotton plantations in a place called Alabama. If they didn’t work they were whipped. Was this true? Could the home of my much-loved zany (I loved that word, so American) TV shows like I Love Lucy and Mr Ed really have been a place where black people were owned, bought and sold like animals, just a hundred years before? I avidly read for an hour and a half on that hot afternoon, completely undisturbed. While my mother and Aunt Rose broiled in the back yard, I learned that the black man on the front cover was a slave who loved his white master’s wife. This upset everybody and the black man was horribly punished. It happened in 1830. Unable to separate fact from fiction in those days, I decided that perhaps history was interesting after all.

  My imagination whispered that this story was similar to what might have happened between my ‘real’ father and mother. They had made a baby, just like the white lady in this story. According to the book, this baby was called a mulatto. I put the book back where I found it. I felt inexplicably afraid.

  When we got home I looked up the word ‘mulatto’ in a dictionary. It said it was the offspring of a female horse and a male donkey. I imagined my ‘real’ mother munching a carrot in a field somewhere in Dagenham and my ‘real’ father hee-hawing somewhere in Nigeria. I was so upset that I had to take the next day off school.

  Later, when I heard the way that Mrs Hawthorne had said the word ‘mulatto’, I reappraised it. She made it sound like it was a good thing to be. It was devoid of animal connotations on her lips. I tested the word on my mother.

  ‘Where did you hear that?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘Mrs Hawthorne told me that’s what I was.’

  ‘Oh, did she. Trust her to put those kind of ideas in your head.’

  What ideas, I wondered?

  The Hawthornes moved nearer to London that autumn. I never saw any of them again. Mrs Hawthorne’s paintings may have been lost to the art world, but I know I owe her a profound debt for helping me find the first glimpse of my black heritage on that sunny afternoon in 1962.

  When I was in my twenties, after my Aunt Rose suddenly died, I discovered that she was not really an aunt after all, but just a friend of the family. After her funeral, I eavesdropped on some juicy gossip about the adventurous sexually charged past she had led in a tiny village in Suffolk during the post-war years. Apparently she was rather partial to many of the American GIs, who were stationed at the nearby airbase. A former neighbour, who’d come all the way to Romford from Suffolk for the burial, saucily said to his male friend: ‘She’d blow any of them Yanks for a pair of silk stockings and a packet of fags after the war, even them darkeys.’

  I couldn’t help smiling amid the sad faces.

  At birth my mother was unfairly named after a clinging, parasitic plant, instead of a flower. Ivy James was born in 1911 in Cotleigh Road, Romford. She had been a sickly child and spent part of her childhood in a convalescent home near Clacton-on-Sea. Her formal schooling had stopped when she was twelve and she had then got a job as a ladies’ maid to a doctor’s family in the posh area of Romford, known as Gidea Park.

  Her duties entailed taking care of two young girls. Often she would stand in Rise Park dreamily staring through the wire mesh perimeter fence into the huge back garden of an imposing house. She talked fondly about her days in service. Her favourite story was about how she used to take the children to and from school in a pony and trap. If the pony defecated en route then she was expected to step down from the trap and collect the steaming pile in a bucket for her employer’s rose garden. A small shovel was stored on the side of the vehicle for this express purpose. One day the pony almost ran off down the road with the children in tow while she was engaged in her odious task. I think she nearly lost her job over that particular escapade.

  She loved children, particularly babies. One day when I was about eight, a young blonde woman knocked on our front door holding what at first looked like a bundle of old clothes, but on closer inspection turned out to be a baby. Her name was Joy. My mother invited her in and immediately took hold of the baby and cooed and clucked over him. Joy told her that the baby’s name was Sylvan and he was nearly a year old. I got the impression that my parents had been expecting her. My dad perked up no end when he first set eyes on her, particu
larly after she told him that she had once been part of the Tiller Girls dance troupe. Like most red-blooded males of the time, my dad was no stranger to their high kicking, scantily clad routine at the start of Sunday Night at the London Palladium, a schlocky ’60s variety TV programme. Joy’s statuesque body jiggled harmoniously with her Monroesque good looks, as she walked around our living room on her impossibly long legs. It was obvious that she had been aptly named. The upshot of her visit was that the household gained baby Sylvan in exchange for Joy paying my mother thirty shillings a week.

  Every fortnight she visited her son for two hours on a Saturday afternoon. Sylvan’s father accompanied her only once, when his son was nearly eighteen months old. He was not formally introduced by Joy and remained nameless throughout the short visit. I was entranced by the colour of Sylvan’s father’s skin. It was blue-black and shone like a mirror. His tombstone-white teeth seemed almost perfect compared with my mother’s yellowing National Health dentures. I was told not to stare and to get on with my piano practice, but my concentration was shot. Mandingo was in the house and sitting on our sofa!

  Joy had just bought a new record which she popped onto the turntable of our radiogram. I watched enthralled as she and her partner did ‘the twist’, a new dance craze, to Chubby Checker’s eponymously titled song in the middle of our living room. It proved all too much for my mother. Just before the young couple left to catch their train back up to London, she took Joy into the kitchen. I tagged along holding Sylvan, who was bawling his head off because he didn’t like being separated from his mum. I distinctly heard my mother say: ‘Please don’t bring your friend with you again. Goodness knows what the neighbours will think.’

  Joy eventually got tired of my mother’s rudeness and took Sylvan away after a year. My mother bawled her eyes out for days after he left. She had grown to love the gorgeous little boy. I wasn’t sorry to see him go. His skin was a lighter brown than mine, almost white, and visitors constantly remarked about the good fortune of this. I didn’t like how I was unfavourably compared to him and in the end grew to dislike him. In retrospect I was obviously jealous of the poor little fellow. He had a ‘real’ mum and dad, who hadn’t given him away. I wondered whether I would have been given up for adoption if I’d been lighter like Sylvan? These dark thoughts had been troubling me ever since I had found out a secret about myself while riffling through my mother’s personal things.

  My mother objected to how much the local hairdressing salon charged for a perm, so she preferred to have the noxious chemicals, supplied by the Twink home perm company, administered to her thinning tresses by a non-professional, namely her friend from across the road, Lil Batty, who expertly turned her iron-grey hair into poodle curls in exchange for a good gossip over numerous cups of tea and cream cakes. It was a biannual event and usually took about two hours. That meant I was free to have a good snoop in the large chest of drawers in my parents’ bedroom. My absence was rarely missed.

  During one such adventure, I discovered an interesting box full of dark brown, rubbery, bullet-shaped things. There was a white paper label on the front of the box, which instructed my mother ‘to insert one twice a day’. To a young child this was like discovering hidden treasure. What were they, I wondered? Where did she put them? While my tiny mind raced with possibilities – mostly of the ‘can you eat them’ variety – I noticed a sheaf of papers tucked at the very back of the drawer, the contents of which haunted me for the next thirty-three years. Inside was a khaki brown registered envelope from ‘Eileen Magnus’ addressed to my mother; it bore a return Dagenham address on the reverse side. On closer inspection, the other documents turned out to be my adoption certificate and court papers.

  The adoption certificate had the name ‘Belinda Magnus’ written in perfect script. I noticed that this person had my exact birth date. Instinctively, I knew that I was this person. I also thought that Eileen was my real mother.

  Eileen was the same name that had been inscribed on the flyleaf of the book Treasure Island which had been given to one of my brothers as a present. Feverishly, I ran and fetched the book from my toy cupboard and read the inscription, ‘To Kenny, happy birthday 1954, Eileen’. My tiny heart raced as I traced the handwritten words with my finger.

  I have a photo of my dad lying on his back on the grass in the grounds of a large Dr Barnardo’s home in Dagenham. He is wearing a dark ’40’s-style suit, with a white shirt, and a grey trilby hat pulled down over his eyes. He looks just like Humphrey Bogart in a gangster movie. I’m about eighteen months old, wearing a frilly white organza dress, lace-topped, white knitted socks and white kid leather boots. I’m sitting astride his legs, facing him. He is smiling up at me and I am smiling down at him, with that slightly quizzical look that I seem to have in all childhood photos, as if I am wondering whether the love that is on offer is real. One thing is for sure: I really loved my dad in an uncomplicated way. We had an understanding; he thought I was fabulous and I thought he was too.

  My dad and me, 1955, in the grounds of Dagenham’s Dr Barnardo’s Home

  At work, he fixed articulated lorries. He called them ‘arctics’. He often got words wrong, but I loved him all the more for it. He worked for Silcock and Collings, who transported new Ford Motor Company cars on these huge lorries to distribution sites all over England. Sometimes one of these lorries would drive past me on the way to school. I felt so proud that he made these gargantuan beasts well when they got sick. At least that was my understanding of what he did for a job. I used to tell people, when I was very young, that he was an ‘arctic doctor’. They probably thought I was daft.

  Before becoming a mechanic, he had been a long-distance lorry driver for Rediffusion television manufacturers. He’d travelled far and wide with that job. Sometimes he was away all week, returning on a Saturday morning, just to disappear down the local pub, the Parkside, for opening time. He would stagger home for the football results in the afternoon after closing time. At 5 p.m. my mother would serve up a large bloater fish done in vinegar for his tea. It came with bread and butter on a tray, so that he could carry on watching television while he ate. Our family didn’t do lunch and dinner; we, like most working-class people at that time, did dinner and tea. That was a major difference between the working and middle classes.

  My dad was working class and proud of it. He was the thirteenth son of an itinerant pig man. His mother had died giving birth to him in June 1912. I’m surprised that she didn’t give up the ghost sooner, considering how many children she had. His father quickly married a formidable countrywoman from Clacton-on-Sea. As the youngest, my dad grew up a softhearted country boy. During their courtship he used to ride a motorbike all the way to Romford from Clacton, just to see my mother for the afternoon, and then go all the way back. That was quite a journey in those days, no bypasses and new roads to get you there quickly. After they married, my mother moved with him to Weeley, near Clacton, but she hated it. She was a town girl and Dad’s stepmother was at great pains to let her know this at all times.

  Later Dad’s father would take up employment as a pig man near Enfield and Barnet in the 1930s. Dad seemed to be very fond of that area and would drive through it at every available opportunity, eschewing motorways and dual carriageways in and around London, just so that he could point out what used to be countryside or allotments and orchards, instead of row upon row of houses. He would have a tear in his voice as he moaned about how built up the area had become.

  He adored cars or indeed any motorised transport, buses, coaches, lorries; they were all grist to his mechanical mind. He knew what was wrong with a car within a few seconds of starting the engine. He liked beer and Vera Lynn, and always voted Labour. I considered his political affiliation very principled of him. Indeed, I never saw him display any prejudice towards people just because of the colour of their skin either. Once I heard him say that he had stood up for a West Indian man he worked with, whose workmates had complained about him to the foreman. My dad refused
to get drawn into the dispute. ‘He does his job well and knows what he’s doing, unlike some of ’em that wants to see him gone for some reason or another,’ was all he would say, when he related this story to my mother.

  She, on the other hand, displayed her prejudice as fear. Her most constant fear was that I would ‘go the way of poor Janet Sparks’.

  Posing on my dad’s Wolseley in 1955 outside our house

  The ‘Janet’ in question was the adopted daughter of my mother’s best friend, Mrs Sparks. Janet had been five years old when she had been removed from Barnardo’s orphanage to become the only child of the Sparks family. My mother had first met Mrs Sparks while shopping in Romford market. They had hit it off immediately because they were both convinced that they were doing their bit for the good of the Commonwealth by adopting two young strays, both of whom had been left behind after their respective fathers had flown the coop.

  While our mothers conversed, Janet and I stood to one side silently staring at each other. She was of West Indian origin, tall and lissom, lightly tanned with glossy, curly brown hair, casually pushed back with a red plastic Alice band, and hanging in tendrils all the way to the small of her back. Janet was the kind of girl who, even if she’d been wearing a sack, would still have looked a million dollars. I envied her on sight. Although she was only fifteen, she already stood about 5’ 9" in her stockinged feet. I was only nine at the time. How I longed to be as grown-up as she was.

  Mrs Sparks invited my mother and me to her house the following week and a firm friendship sprang up between them. We visited often for lunch during school holidays. Then one day we found Mrs Sparks in floods of tears when we visited unexpectedly. Her usually immaculate appearance was dishevelled, as though she’d been crying for days and hadn’t bathed or fixed her hair. Ordinarily, her black-dyed hair would be backcombed and upswept into a gravity-defying bouffant, reminiscent of Elsie Tanner, a much loved character in Britain’s favourite soap of the ’60s Coronation Street. On that particular day, her hair lay like damp horsehair on her heaving shoulders, grey strands creeping through at her temples. ‘I can’t talk today,’ she said curtly. ‘You’ll have to come back another time.’