Black by Design

by Pauline Black

  However, due to this new all-consuming preoccupation with running my mini-Black Panther Party from the confines of my bedroom, I began to neglect my studies. I did the barest minimum because quite frankly pure sciences began to bore me. By this time I had been provisionally accepted for a place at Birmingham Medical School to study medicine, but the ‘A’ level grades that I had to achieve were way beyond what I was presently capable of, particularly if I carried on working in such a lacklustre way.

  My favourite haunt was Romford Town library. I went there after school, ostensibly to study and finish homework, but secretly I scoured the well-stocked shelves for information about the emergent radical black politics. I began with Malcolm X’s autobiography and then moved on to the ‘hard stuff’, the Black Power movement.

  I memorized whole swathes of some of the less incendiary thoughts of Malcolm X. Little nuggets of wisdom like: ‘The earth’s most expensive and pernicious evil is racism, the inability of God’s creatures to live as one, especially in the western world,’ and ‘We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us.’

  These words tripped lightly from my tongue when relatives came to call. Such utterances were met with a stony-faced silence, or my mother’s urgent need to rush to the kitchen to make yet more tea for the guests. Accusations of racism go better with tea, ask any PG Tips advertising chimp!

  I don’t know who was responsible for ordering books at Romford Town library in the late ’60s, but I remain eternally grateful to them for providing me with the information that I required at sixteen. Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, Eldridge Cleaver’s disturbing collection of essays, Soul on Ice, books like these were grist to my mill. I had no real idea of the enormity of the struggles that these new heroes of mine were engaged in, or in retrospect their muddle-headedness and in some cases sheer hatred and criminality, but it was exciting, new, underground and, most of all, my discovery.

  If my parents had known that I was reading such stuff, instead of teen magazine fodder like Jackie and Petticoat, they probably would have raided my bedroom and instigated a book-burning. While my peers were out enjoying illicit drinks at The Lamb pub in Romford market, I was in the library reading Eldridge Cleaver’s litanies about how raping white women was a ‘political act and duty’ of all black men – not an idea that can be casually tossed into conversations with other sixteen-year-olds, whose main preoccupations are bad skin and whether to indulge in heavy petting.

  For me to suggest that reading such material as a teenager was conducive to growing into a balanced adult is probably misleading. It wasn’t. If I’m honest, I was growing into a sexually confused, racially intolerant loner who had no outlet for her teenage angst. Perhaps it’s a good job that Internet access didn’t exist in those days, because I might have hooked up with similarly motivated individuals who favoured a more ‘Columbine’ approach to sorting out their problems. Me, I just festered privately in my bedroom.

  The real killer for me was the fact that my girlfriends were dating boys. They went to the cinema, dances and fairs, on the backs of their mopeds, scooters, or in the case of a particularly incorrigible girl nicknamed ‘Haystack’ (due to a perilously high blonde beehive style that she back-combed at every available opportunity), motorbikes. Unfortunately, boys just weren’t interested in me. After all, how could you invite a black girl home, or even admit to going out with a black girl without getting ridicule heaped upon you? It was just not a sane option for a nice Essex boy.

  I had friends. That wasn’t the problem. We discussed the latest music, new books or interesting avant-garde TV programmes like Monty Python, That Was The Week That Was and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. I prided myself for knowing what was going on the world, but none of this was a substitute for being snogged in the sixth-form common room.

  I had known that I would have a dating problem ever since the school’s end-of-term dance in 1968, when I had had my first brush with black men. The Foundations, a multi-racial pop group, had already had a hit with ‘Baby, Now that I Found You’, but had fallen on harder times when their follow-up single bombed. Consequently, they had been booked to do our school dance, probably to reach out to a younger audience again. They must have been pretty desperate to turn up at our school.

  For the first time in my teenage life, I was allowed to go to the school dance. Perhaps I was just adamant about it and my mother didn’t fancy an argument. I went dressed in a short red dress, white tights and red character shoes. The other girls were dressed in much more revealing outfits than mine, but I knew I looked good.

  The band came on and did a short set, then retired to the dressing room/classroom for a twenty-minute break before concluding their performance with another short set. I had never heard a live band before. It was a totally new experience. The guys were all tall and sported mini Afros. The rest of the kids seemed to know their songs and I wondered why I didn’t; they were homegrown talent after all. Perhaps I spent far too long checking out black American talent, when it appeared that I could find the same thing closer to home. I knew there were lots of black folk in London but the spectre of Janet Sparks still loomed large in my mind and I wasn’t yet ready to take on that particular shibboleth.

  I danced down at the front with a couple of my girl friends. The boys were grouped round the sides of the dance floor looking greasy and sweaty in various garbs. There were three main groups: the hippie fraternity sported flowery shirts and flared trousers; the greaser fraternity wore black leather jackets and jeans with turn-ups; and then there was a small skinhead contingent dressed in three-button tonic suits, sporting black or brown loafers on their feet. Each of the skinhead boys had girlfriends with characteristic feather-cut hairstyles, heavy make-up, tonic skirt suits, white socks worn over black fishnet stockings and black penny loafers. The hippie lot thought they were cool, the greasers hoped they were cool, but the skinheads knew they were cool.

  The skinheads at our school mainly came from Dagenham. They loved to listen to ska, reggae and bluebeat. Pupils who made it into the fifth form and beyond were allowed access to two common rooms which occupied old converted stables on the other side of the road to the main school buildings. Outside the windows was a small lake divided into two smaller pools by a dilapidated wooden bridge. Mature horse chestnut and willow trees grew around the water’s edge.

  When revising for exams we would congregate outside the common room, watching the school tennis team play or just idling away the lunchtime by staring at the clouds and playing transistor radios. Every now and again the skinhead lot would commandeer the red Dansette record player in the common room and start playing songs that had a choppy rhythm and indecipherable lyrics. This made a welcome change from the usual fodder that the hippie fraternity liked to play. I lost count of the number of times I was forced to listen to the sickly sweet ‘California Girls’ or ‘Sloop John B’.

  The first ska record I heard was ‘Long Shot (Kick de Bucket)’ by the Pioneers. The melody chugged its way out of the open windows and floated on the breeze across to the lakeside where I was sitting with some of my hippie friends. The rhythm instantly felt natural, as though I’d been listening to this kind of music all my life. I got up and went up the rickety wooden staircase to the common room and saw about five girls in loafers, short white socks, skirts hiked up a good two inches above their knees and all with a strange haircut, short on top with carefully combed longer pieces falling on either side of their heads, doing the sexiest dance I had ever seen. One of them, Janice, caught me staring and asked me to join in. Reluctantly I did, but soon found the rhythm easy to move to. It was new and exciting all at the same time.

  I asked them what this music was called which, when you stop to think about it, is really ironic – a bunch of white skinhead girls turned the only black kid in school on to ska music, but that’s how it was. Then the skinhead boys turned up and looked at me in a strange way, but didn’t say anything. I felt uncomfortable with th
em around, so I slipped away and in future listened to the music from afar, but I was always secretly proud when they wrested the Dansette from the hippie contingent in the school. The world became a much brighter place.

  The skinheads liked The Foundations even though they didn’t play ska. By the end of the band’s first set that night, they were applauding and cheering wildly. I had gravitated nearer the front just to watch the skinhead girls dancing. They looked so smart and elegant compared with the hippie girls, who flailed their arms around to the beat and had a ubiquitous ‘lost in the cosmos’ look in their eyes. The DJ started playing pop chart records in the interval, while everybody stocked up on soft drinks being served at the back of the hall.

  Suddenly three tall black guys appeared out of the door that led to the backstage area. They made a beeline for me and surrounded me. I could smell their sweat mixed with a sweeter smell, which I later found out was a mixture of Dixie Peach hair pomade and Palmer’s Cocoa Butter Cream. One of them started talking to me from his lofty height in a language that I didn’t understand. Patois was lost on me. The whole experience was surreal and slightly intimidating. The irony was that I had spent the whole evening wishing that some boy, any boy, would ask me to dance and now that I was the sole interest of the band, I was too scared to speak or move.

  I fled into the night. Janet Sparks cast a long shadow over the evening. The real world of black folk and the Pantheresque fantasy world that I had built for myself were at war with each other in my mind. There was no ‘Wonderful World’, only a scary world into which I didn’t fit. It would be many years before I resolved the contradiction.

  FOUR

  A LOST GLOVE

  Coventry city: some people are born here, some get sent here and some choose to come here. I chose Coventry, or at least I think I did, but perhaps it chose me.

  Initially, I came here to further my studies. I liked the idea that Coventry was in the middle of England. I wanted to be in the middle of things. I was tired of being an outsider, so I thought that if I placed myself at the centre geographically, then the rest, whatever that was, would follow. Also, Coventry was only one hundred miles away from Romford, so it was near enough to go home in an emergency, but not so close that I would have to endure a visit from my parents every week.

  The real clincher was when my dad got really animated and excited about my suggestion that perhaps I should consider studying at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry. For a man who was normally short on talk, some might even say monosyllabic most of the time, a misty look came into his eye as he repeated the names of car manufacturers with the solemn gravity of a Latin Mass: Armstrong Siddeley, Lanchester, Rolls-Royce, Daimler, Standard, Triumph, Jaguar, Alvis, Lea Austin, Ford, Vauxhall. I had never heard him say so much in one go. There was even a branch of Silcock and Collings, the company he worked for in Dagenham, at the motorway end of the Foleshill Road in Coventry. So serendipity had a lot to do with my decision to fetch up in Coventry.

  1972 student days at Lanchester Poly, with an Afro and fur coat

  But if I’m being brutally honest, the fact that I ended up there to further my studies was a necessary compromise rather than part of some well thought-out master plan. As expected, given my minimal revision, my ‘A’ level grades were not good enough to take up the place I had been offered at Birmingham Medical School. It was my own fault. Once upon a time, I had avidly read about the world’s first woman doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, fervently wishing to follow in her footsteps. Now I wanted to know all about the Black Power Movement’s intelligent left-wing pin-up girl, Angela Davis. As my mother had predicted: ‘No good will come of it.’

  I had been left with two options: stay on at school for an extra year and re-take the exams to get better grades, or use what I had and settle for a polytechnic instead. Not wanting to remain one hour longer in Romford than I had to, I opted for my second choice.

  I entered my comparatively woeful results into the UCCA clearing-house system and was invited for an interview at Lanchester Polytechnic with the head of the Science faculty. My mother insisted on accompanying me to Coventry. She wore her beaver-lamb fur coat, which she thought made her look posh, but in the sweltering heat of an early September heatwave, made her look not only sweaty but decidedly crazy. As usual, we made an incongruous couple.

  There was a Lyons coffee house in Broadgate, near the old Coventry cathedral ruins, which captivated my mother. ‘You can have your dinner here every day, dear. I feel much better about you coming here, now I know that there is a Lyons just around the corner.’

  You have to remember that ‘dinner’ meant ‘lunch’ to my mother and she had no idea that the polytechnic had two lunchtime refectories and three coffee bars. My mother liked the safety of a good brand name.

  The Poly’s proximity to Coventry Cathedral was also a big plus for her. In her opinion, any college next to such ‘Godliness’ must be a good thing. She wouldn’t have been so enthusiastic if she’d known that two years previously John Lennon and Yoko Ono had planted two acorns in the Cathedral gardens. The acorns were planted in easterly and westerly positions, symbolizing the meeting of the couple and the union of their two cultures. They followed the planting by sending acorns to world leaders in the hope that they would plant oak trees in their gardens. It was supposed to promote world peace. Unfortunately, such promotion worked neither on the world leaders nor on my mother, who considered John Lennon the anti-Christ for having the temerity to say that he thought the Beatles were more famous than Jesus.

  My parents rarely enquired about my educational path. They were happy to let me organize my studies. It was tacitly understood between the three of us that if you were black, then working in a hospital was an obvious choice; it was one of the few places where a black skin was no barrier. I had been steered in this direction from an early age. Nobody had expected that I would make it on to a degree course. So anything above nurse status was considered a result. Even the fact that I had lost my place at medical school didn’t upset them as much as it did me. As long as they could say that I was at college they were happy.

  A week later an official letter arrived at home offering me a place on the Combined Science B.Sc. course. I immediately accepted. My mother would have preferred it if I had gone to a college nearer home because then they wouldn’t have to fund my living expenses. Unfortunately, my dad couldn’t afford the rent for me to stay in the hall of residence, so she organized an affordable place from the list supplied by the Polytechnic’s accommodations officer. As I suspected, she picked a room in an elderly couple’s house, the Woodbridges. Her choice was a total disaster. It was worse than being at home.

  The Woodbridges lived three miles out of town, on the Binley Woods Estate. The designated room was poky, with laminate furniture, a saggy single bed, purple shag pile carpet and cardboard-like walls, not a winner when the other inhabitants snored like hooting ships on a foggy night.

  Mrs Woodbridge, a rumpled bed of a woman, provided me with a greasy-spoon breakfast and a mountainous evening meal, invariably consisting of soggy chips and overcooked, gelatinous cabbage served on a small table covered in knick-knacks in a corner of the living room. Meanwhile, Mr Woodbridge, a short, ruddy-faced Welshman, sat on the sofa belching and farting his way through the six o’clock evening news. She watched me eat until I cleared my plate, occasionally engaging me in small talk about her grown-up children and grandchildren, in which I was not the least bit interested.

  After dinner, I was expected to sit with them, usually in silence, and watch ‘soaps’ such as Coronation Street and Crossroads until they went to bed at 9 p.m. At which time, I would retire to my room and cry. It was awful.

  On Saturday afternoons Mr Woodbridge donned his blue and white Coventry City scarf, sat in his favourite brown and orange upholstered armchair immediately opposite the television and checked the football results, his pools coupon in one hand, pint of beer in the other and usually much cursing on his lips. He drank his way
through a couple of crates of beer most weekends, which were conveniently delivered to his door by the ‘pop man’ on Friday evening. As he guzzled his way through his ‘pop’, all I thought about was how to get some ‘pot’.

  I had discovered that most of the interesting students at college were smoking marijuana, living in fascinatingly decorated student houses, their walls adorned with posters and photos of their Indian holiday exploits. I’d only ever been to Llandudno and didn’t think that qualified as a foreign country.

  What to do? Stay out all night and see what happened. The first time I did this, my mother was on the train to Coventry the following morning. The Woodbridges had taken it upon themselves to phone my parents just before midnight on the day of the felony and inform them of what they suspected, namely that I was having sex and smoking dope. This was thoroughly perceptive of them and correct on both counts, although not necessarily in that order.

  ‘You’ll end up like Janet Sparks,’ she said as soon as she stepped off the train at Coventry station. ‘After all we’ve done for you, this is how you repay us.’

  She had brought an overnight bag, so I knew our struggle would be a fight to the death, particularly if I wanted her to leave on the evening train.

  I let her blow herself out with her list of recriminations, before adamantly saying: ‘Either let me move out of the Woodbridges’ house or I will do it anyway. I refuse to spend a moment longer with them.’

  People usually know when I mean business and my mother was no exception. In the few short weeks that I had been in Coventry, I had changed. The young people I mixed with showed no prejudice. Indeed I began to realize that being black was a positive advantage if those around you thought that Jimi Hendrix was the second coming. I had no shortage of male admirers either; sex with a black girl was permissible while away from home, even mandatory for the real thrill-seekers eager to slough off the provinciality of their upbringing. Thus I had developed a self-confidence that made it less easy for my mother to dictate what I should do. We returned to the Woodbridges’ where my mother and Mrs Woodbridge clucked like eggless hens in the kitchen while I packed my bags, dragged them downstairs into a waiting taxi and in a rather ill-mannered way took leave of the house, while my mother attempted to smooth things over with: ‘I’ll write and let you know how things are getting on.’