Black by Design

by Pauline Black

  Neol Davies and I had found that some wounds are too difficult to heal and had gone our separate ways in 1993. I’d carried on with The Selecter and since Neol’s departure we had released one album, the ironically titled Happy Album. It had met with deafening silence from the music industry.

  Neol Davies and me in Selecter, 1993

  I had co-written the songs for the album with Nick, who was a talented enough bloke, but suffice to say, we did not share the same worldview. He often said in jest, but nonetheless somewhat accusingly: ‘You only write about dead black people.’

  I found that statement slightly offensive coming from a chubby, thirty-something white bloke, who at that time primarily enjoyed acting like an overgrown school bully, but I let it go because in some ways it was valid criticism. Assuming the maxim that you should always write songs with your audience in mind and given the unnerving fact that 75 per cent of our current audience were chubby white blokes, then perhaps I should have let him write the lyrics. But I still felt passionately about the ethos of 2-Tone and I wanted that reflected in my lyrics. It wasn’t my fault that many of the blacks that had helped to shape the history that I wanted to write about had ended up dead.

  I had lost count of how many tours we had done since our reunion in 1991. Each year we covered vast swathes of Europe and North America in uncomfortable vans, because the cheap flight, no-frills aerial bonanzas that we enjoy these days hadn’t yet begun. Musicians came and went. None of the guitarists were as good as Neol Davies. Indeed, some were seriously maladjusted, unimaginative, sad people. Gaps Hendrickson joined up for a couple of years. It was good to share vocal duties again. But after a furiously heated argument with our Indian tour manager, Vin Gadher, in a German service station restaurant, he was politely asked to leave.

  Artistically I felt unfulfilled, but at heart I was a pragmatist about the band. It worked regularly and still seemed to be in demand in most territories, which meant everybody earned money, even if the returns had begun to dwindle of late. So why change a winning formula?

  Left to right: Nick Welsh, me, Perry Melius and Neol Davies at The Mean Fiddler, 1992

  There was even a bunch of ska bands doing big business in the USA, who had developed their own brand of super-charged, horn section-heavy ska that was collectively named ‘Third Wave’. These energetic young bucks reclassified 2-Tone music as ‘Second Wave’, and referred to us as ‘oldsters’. What goes around comes around; this was exactly how we had treated artists like Prince Buster, the Skatalites and Toots & the Maytals when we were young.

  The songs I wrote these days highlighted the downtrodden, the forgotten, the persecuted – those whom people didn’t want to look at. The ska audience remained largely unimpressed with my efforts, preferring gigs to be a beer-soaked, nostalgic knees-up showcasing the old hits. The traditional skinheads had largely disappeared back into the woodwork.

  If I needed a change of routine or gigs were thin on the ground in the winter season, I accepted an acting job. While not on the road, the other members of the band pursued their own ventures, in which I had little interest. They feigned interest in my theatrical projects, but hardly ever came to any opening nights.

  The only time one of them did come to see me in performance was a total disaster. I was acting in a one-woman play, Let Them Call It Jazz, an adaptation of a Jean Rhys short story, at the Drill Hall in London. Nick expressed an interest in attending. I arranged a ticket for a Saturday night performance because I wanted him to see it in front of a full audience.

  During a harrowing scene in which my character lengthily contemplated suicide, he noisily left his seat in the back row, stumbled down some steps to the front of the stage, walked across it and out the door. Not content with ruining the scene, he came back five minutes later, sniffing loudly, and clambered back up to his seat. As he sat down, his jean shorts, which were always under quite a lot of tension due to his expansive girth, ripped at the crotch. Unfortunately, he had ‘gone commando’ that night and part of his testicles fell out. The whole audience attempted to stifle their giggles without success. His antics even woke up Vanessa Redgrave, who had been snoozing in the back row. Needless to say, I soldiered on.

  Meanwhile my long-suffering husband had put up with my peripatetic lifestyle for longer than he could possibly have expected. We did our best to maintain a home life and, despite sometimes lengthy separations, largely succeeded. But after Terry took early retirement from his job due to ill health in 1991 he preferred me to stay closer to home. We were not a gregarious couple. Our friends could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The neighbours said hello, sometimes commenting on an article about me in the local or national press, or they might have chanced on one of the radio programmes that I intermittently fetched up on, but they rarely invited us into their homes for parties or barbecues.

  Perhaps they were uncomfortable with us because we didn’t have children. Parents liked to talk about their offspring when the usual topics of conversation about jobs, petrol prices and mortgage repayments had been exhausted. It was difficult to make our pet dog sound that interesting.

  The notion of family didn’t mean very much to either of us. We always knew that we didn’t want children, even from the early days of our relationship. We were both illegitimate, and each of us happily regarded being a bastard as a badge of honour. But lately I noticed that my badge had lost its shine. I was getting older and if I was ever going to find out my origins, then I had better do so soon. Or perhaps it was just a fact of life that everybody asked the rather dumb question: ‘Who am I?’ at some point during their sojourn on this blue planet. Almost as much of a cliché as that other three-word favourite, ‘I love you’. Perhaps both those phrases might benefit from a question mark after them, I mused as the train pulled into Coventry station.

  Publicity still from Let Them Call It Jazz, 1991

  Terry was dutifully waiting to pick me up in the car. It didn’t feel right to launch into the somewhat bizarre story of my day, so I just told him that the party had been cancelled at the last minute. He admired the new jacket and I absent-mindedly listened to his exploits.

  We had arrived home from a ten-day holiday in Egypt only a few days earlier, so after dinner Terry spent the evening catching up with correspondence and bill paying. He complained that he felt more tired after a supposedly relaxing holiday than before he went. He always said this after every holiday. Vacations were not his forte. I knew that, but I sadistically persisted in arranging them.

  We rarely argued these days, except on holiday when it was the glue that held us together. It made holidays exhausting. We could row about anything: where to eat, what to do, where to go, how to get there, what to drink, you name it, we could argue about it, whereas at home, none of those things even merited much more than a momentary discussion.

  However, this latest holiday had disappointed me on a much more profound level. It had been my first trip to the African continent. A mixed-race friend had told me many years earlier that there was an old myth that said when a black person who had been estranged from their homeland took their first steps on African soil, they would hear a bell sound deep in their soul. A particularly fanciful notion, I had thought at the time. I often suspected that he had seen too many episodes of Roots for his own good, but the idea must have stuck in my mind, because as I had taken my first step onto the hot tarmac at Cairo airport I had readied myself for a Big Ben moment. Nothing happened! I experienced instant disappointment, which persisted for the rest of the trip, which no amount of pyramids, sphinxes or Valleys of Kings and Queens could eradicate. Africa had not welcomed my sorry black arse home, even though Nigerian blood, courtesy of my father, ran through my veins.

  Had today’s epiphany been influenced by my less-than-fulfilling African experience? Maybe the obnoxious behaviour of the woman in Selfridges had only been the spark that lit the fuse that had been laid in Egypt. If I wanted to find my father and explore my African heritage, then I would have to f
ind my mother first.

  I was tired after such a harrowing day and decided to go to bed early. I hoped that some much-needed sleep would ‘knit up my ravelled sleeve of care’. That night I had a dream. I was alone in a small rowing boat, seemingly adrift in the fog. All around I could hear the giant tuba honks of large ships, some sounding perilously close. But I didn’t feel afraid, because in the distance I could hear the sound of a huge bell. I steered towards it, knowing that even though I was in dangerous uncharted waters, the bell would keep me safe.

  I awoke to a bright sunny day. It was 7:30 a.m. In those first bleary moments of wakefulness, Terry’s snoring momentarily merged with the ships’ giant tuba honks in my dream. A swift poke in the ribs with my right elbow dispatched the offending snorer a little further across the bed, allowing the dog to wriggle into the gap between us, his favourite place in the early morning.

  I lay in bed for a while thinking about the dream. Perhaps it was prophetic? All sorts of whimsical interpretations crowded my waking thoughts. Perhaps Africa was calling me home after all? Who knew? One thing I did know, today I was going to start searching for my mother.

  While Terry and I chatted about our individual plans for the day over breakfast, I was acutely aware of the fact that I hadn’t told him anything about my latest decision. I usually shared most things, but for now this was out of bounds.

  Terry had searched for his real father once, without success. Would I suffer the same ignominy? Perhaps we were both safer not knowing our origins? That way, our own beginnings were a clean slate, unsullied by the indiscretions and fleeting dalliances of profligate parents. More importantly, it made us the same, united by the damage that had been done to us in our earlier lives. Maybe that delicate balance would be upset if I suddenly turned up with a full set of real parents who might come crashing into our carefully constructed lives with all kinds of preconceptions and needs and wants? Would we, as a couple, be strong enough to stave off such a concerted onslaught?

  We had got used to the fact that the remnants of our respective families largely left us alone. We liked it like that. Or I had done, until recently. Perhaps it was time to embrace the notion of a ‘real family’, instead of the ‘cuckoo’s nest’ in which I’d been reared?

  As I understood it, I began life as a ‘British’ egg, impregnated by a ‘Nigerian’ sperm in 1953. Put like this, one wonders whether the egg and the sperm were flying the national colours at the time. I imagined the tiny sperm with a green bulbous head and white wiggly tail, racing up the birth canal ahead of the pack, vigorously wriggling itself into a red, white and blue egg. Once inside, it spent the next nine months working against the clock, to successfully scramble the yolk into me. I imagined myself as a freshly arrived newborn waving a black and white chequered flag backwards and forwards, signifying the end of this human Grand Prix, with a new mixed race baby. The beginning of the end for white racial purity in post-war Britain!

  In today’s ‘multicultural’ society, the sight of a brown baby swinging on a woman’s hip is almost seen as trendy. In 1953 such obvious evidence of miscegenation was viewed with fear and suspicion but, just as night follows day, it’s impossible to stop people fucking, particularly when the motherland’s gene pool was expanding with such interesting and colourful new arrivals from the colonies.

  Great Britain enjoyed two of the greatest achievements in world history in 1953: the discovery of the structure of DNA by Crick and Watson, who fearlessly charted organic life in the micro-world of biochemistry, and the discovery by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing of what it felt like to majestically stand on top of the macro world. These kinds of triumphs are the mark of a civilised society, but at that time, most rented accommodation in London bore the very uncivilised sign: ‘No Irish, no dogs, no blacks’.

  Please note that even dogs were further up the pecking order than blacks!

  Even in the US blacks had only just won the right to sit at lunch counters in Washington DC by a ruling of the Supreme Court. South of the Mason-Dixon line, such a right was unheard of and even talking about such rights, if you were black, could get you strung high in a tree.

  It was a world where racism was explicit. There was no hidden agenda, no code words to enable white folk to discriminate without being caught out. No, you could come right out and say it, as did most graffiti on redbrick walls: ‘Wogs Out’.

  My birth mother had been only sixteen when she got pregnant, so given the circumstances it was a wonder that I was born at all. I could have ended up being flushed down the toilet after a botched back-street abortion. My guess was that when her pregnancy could no longer be concealed, she was removed from Dagenham’s cockney prying eyes to an unmarried mother’s home (ingenuously called ‘Mother and Baby Homes’ back then). I had read somewhere that young mothers in such places were discouraged from breastfeeding, in case they formed an attachment to their babies.

  I had only one vital clue to my origin: the empty, khaki-coloured, registered envelope that I had found when I was eight years old, bearing my real mother’s name, Eileen Magnus, and an address in Dagenham, Essex.

  After my adoptive mother Ivy died in 1988 in Romford’s general hospital, I rushed back to her house and riffled through the same drawer as I had when a child. Sure enough the envelope was in exactly the same place, wrapped inside the court papers dealing with my adoption. The box of little bullets that had so puzzled my younger self were still there too, except I now knew that they were vaginal pessaries!

  Such an action, so soon after her demise, may sound rather callous, as if I did not care about Ivy’s passing, but the truth is I was moved more than I can say when I saw her lying freshly dead in her hospital bed. Her hand was still warm when I touched it, but she had gone. One small blue eye was still half open in the palsied side of her face, as if she wanted one last glimpse of her daughter. ‘I know what you will do now,’ she seemed to say accusingly.

  And she was right, and although I hurried to the drawer, I wouldn’t act on what I found there immediately; not, in fact, for another eight years. I couldn’t let go of Ivy’s memory that quickly in favour of finding a replacement mother, not after all the years we had spent together. But I’d known I needed the last vestiges of my former self that were still in her possession. I needed them badly, because I knew my four adoptive brothers would soon be riffling through her personal effects, hoping that there might be something worth having. I had to get there before they did, just in case the envelope got thrown out with the rubbish. More importantly, I couldn’t be sure whether I had remembered the name and address correctly, though I should have known that it had been emblazoned on my memory since the first time I saw it.

  Among her possessions I also found two huge scrapbooks containing a wealth of press cuttings about me that she had painstakingly kept over the years. Reviews good or bad were dated and meticulously catalogued in order. When I mentioned this extraordinary find to my brother Tony, he said that she carted these scrapbooks about in a large plastic carrier bag to any weddings, funerals and christenings that she was invited to. She delightedly displayed their contents to those unfortunate enough to be waylaid at such events. I’d had no idea that she had been so proud of me in the last decade of her life. She hadn’t responded particularly favourably when she’d seen the early photos of The Selecter that I showed her. Too many black men, I supposed. Rather tellingly, she had only kept individual photos of myself from that period. The memory of Janet Sparks had stayed with her until the end.

  Eight years later the buff-coloured envelope that I had retrieved the day she died now lay on my kitchen table, still reluctant to offer up any more secrets. It occurred to me that my best plan of action was to compile a list of all the people named Magnus who lived in the Dagenham area and beyond. But how was I going to do this without travelling to Essex? Go to the City Library.

  Coventry Library and I go back a long way. Back in 1979 the building that now housed the local library had been one of the livelie
st city-centre venues. Unfortunately it was named Tiffany’s, possibly suggesting that it was frequented with permed young ladies wearing fur coats, white stilettos and matching handbags, the latter items artfully placed on the floor for the sole purpose of being danced around. Tiffany’s was the only decent-sized dance hall in Coventry apart from the main halls at the Lanchester Poly and Warwick University. Back then the entrance had been via a huge glass tower and it had boasted a revolving stage.

  It is a strange experience to stand in a place that is now carpeted, hushed and filled with swotting students, or the elderly sheltering from the cold, knowing I once bounded around the stage dressed like a rude boy, indulging in mock fights, creating loud music in a tightly packed hall filled to the sweaty rafters with screaming punters.

  I climbed up the four flights of stairs to reception, walked past the issues and returns counter and made my way towards the reference shelves. I was very pleased to discover a well-stocked shelf of regional telephone directories covering the whole of Great Britain. Excitedly, I pulled down the directory for South-East London and thumbed through the pages until I found the entries for the name Magnus. My hands shook, making it difficult to read the words on the page. My eyes nervously skimmed over names and numbers until I found what I was looking for. There were so many entries for the name Magnus, but none magically read E. Magnus. Worse still, it was a reference book, so I couldn’t take it out of the library. I contemplated popping it in my bag and then bringing it back at a later date, but decided that was too risky and knowing my luck, I would get caught. So I just sat there with an A4 pad and laboriously copied out all fifty-three of them, one by one. I considered it fortunate that her surname was not Smith.

  It was lunchtime when I got home. I grabbed a coffee and a cheese sandwich and sat down at the kitchen table where Terry was noisily slurping vegetable soup, eyed by our attentive dog, who always got to lick the bowl when he finished. I put the A4 pad on the table and began writing out a short text for what I might say to any of these anonymous Magnus people when I called them. I wanted to put them at their ease immediately, because an unsolicited nuisance caller could be mistaken for a telesalesperson.