An old photograph (see p. 240) suggests that “blacking-up” was already part of the Sheerness Benevolent Society’s carnival efforts at the time of the Anglo-Zulu Wars of the late nineteenth century. Latter-day participants, however, have claimed that the “Sheppey Zulus” actually made their first appearance on Carnival day in 1929, when sailors from the surveying ship HMS Steadfast, then being refitted in the dockyard between bouts of service in the Red Sea, blackened themselves before invading the town beach to inaugurate the annual tradition of kidnapping prominent townsmen and obliging them to choose between donating a ransom for charity and being tossed into the cooking pot. “All Sheerness Carnivals include an invasion of Zulus, who act as collectors throughout the day”, wrote the East Kent Gazette on 30 August 1957: “this year the much boot-blackened young men came from the local dockyard school and they were so realistic that they frightened some of the children! And what a commotion there was when they encountered a contingent of ‘prehistoric’ campers dressed in sacks”. Traditionally, those deplorable mascots were played by stevedores from the dockyard. In the year of the closure, however, the “Zulus” who “created disturbances all along the procession route” had been mustered from among the chalet-dwellers at Warner’s Holiday Camp. They set to work alongside five elephants, enlisted from a travelling circus, which “trod carefully through the streets in a line, holding tails with trunks”,42 a vast replica of the wooden horse of Troy dragged through the town by a group of “slaves”, and no fewer than five Beauty Queens who were rewarded with a tribal “Durbar” by the “Zulus” at the end of the day.
By the Seventies, the “Zulus” were already having some difficulty with the organisers of the carnival. They liked to launch their attack from the sea, but were irritated that the carnival committee refused to consider the state of the tides when choosing the day for the event. They feared that “the danger factor” had been glossed over in the interests of providing the public with “thrills”. Indeed, they horrified members of the Round Table by suggesting that the battle might be more safely staged on a shallow inland water — little more than a pond, really — beside the miniature railway at Barton Point, along the road from Johnson’s house.43
We hardly have to guess how this annual performance looked to the East German writer who had devoted so much of his unfinished masterpiece to revealing and understanding the consequences of racism in New York City. As a “guest” in England, Johnson was reluctant to pass judgement on the life and customs of his Sheerness neighbours, but he did record one sighting of this passing remnant of dockyard culture. On 6 August 1978, he used a moment on a Lufthansa flight to write a letter providing Helen Wolff, with a characteristically “non-committal” account of the carnival he had seen from his house the day before:44
As of yesterday, my annual ordeal is behind me — I mean the Summer Carnival parade, where the local beauty queens float by down the High Street, Broadway, and Marine Parade, lolling mostly in bedroom decor on flatbed trucks, together with the holders of the same office from the nearby towns of Maidstone, Faversham, and Dover. They are punctuated by advertisements: floats from car companies, motorcycle clubs, or the British Royal Mail; musically adorned with troops of dancing girls in uniform; and ringed by dancing “Zulus”, dockworkers smeared black with shoe polish, throwing lemons or bananas into the enthusiastic rows of townspeople. Every year I watch this performance with grave displeasure, because everyone in it is enjoying life; my favourite vehicle is the last one, the street-cleaning machine, neatly gobbling up all the streamers and confetti.45
The Incomers’ Town
The Admiralty may long since have abandoned Sheerness but the sea had continued to provide islanders with opportunities to reflect on the difference between “flotsam”, “jetsam” and sheer criminality. Some of these lessons were provided by objects washed up : a mail bag found in the sea off Scrapsgate in 1963 and sent to Scotland Yard on the suspicion that it might have been tossed into the Thames after the Great Train Robbery,46 or, as it was in Johnson’s time, two trunks full of “herbal cannabis” which had been tossed overboard by crew members on board a banana boat approaching the port from Jamaica but were unexpectedly brought to the surface when they got caught up in the propellers of the Olau Line’s Sheerness-Flushing ferry.47
151 Blue Town High Street.
As for human incomers, the Johnsons will have deduced from their weekly reading that they were by no means the only migrants living in the town that the Victorian founder of the Sheerness Guardian had described as an outward-looking “colony of emigrants”. They had arrived too late to pick up the trace of Irvine Boaden, a “Maori tribesman” who was said to be living at 49 Marine Parade in 1960. He had come to England in 1947, and served with the Royal Artillery at the Sheerness garrison. (When asked why he had chosen to settle in the town, he declared “Because when I was demobbed from the army, I liked it so much here that I decided to stay”.)48 The Cypriot barber, John Abramides, had learned his trade in Limassol and then opened a shop at Sheerness, also in 1947. He had obdurately refused to move from his premises as the council’s “slum clearance” went ahead in the Sixties, thereby saving the only historical house that still stands at the Eastern end of Blue Town High Street. Abramides had insisted, as Johnson might have read in 1975, that the 130-year-old building was still “as solid as a rock”.49
Josef Pyka was a much-decorated Polish naval officer whose ship had left his country to join the Allies the day before the Nazi invasion in September 1939. Having served with various ships and detachments of the Polish Navy in the west, he was honourably discharged in 1948 and went to work also as a barber in Victory Street: “I love the people”, he said of Sheerness, “and they are kind to me”. He had stayed long enough to see Nazism in Poland replaced by Soviet communism, and had no illusions about returning: “I love England. I feel here I have a right on earth. I feel I am an individual and not part of a vast organization”.50 There was nothing more to be said about Alexandro Pacitto, an Italian who, in 1975, turned up in court charged with attacking a policeman with a bread knife.51 Johnson’s paper also introduced his household to Gokyo Nikolevich, who worked as Russian tutor at Sheppey School. Having been betrayed, captured and sentenced to death as an anti-communist partisan in Yugoslavia during the Second World War, he had later escaped to Italy, and ended up in Charing Cross Hospital, London, where he met the woman who became his wife, later moving with her to Minster on the island he now praised as “his freedom”.52
The incomers who came to the town during the age of the naval dockyard may have done so for associated economic, military or political reasons, but those who had landed here since 1960 had followed more individual currents to this island of last resort. Johnson will have learned from his paper that he shared the town with a much travelled “diplomatic correspondent” and former editor of Illustrated magazine named Arthur George Bilainkin. Respectfully described as a “Sheppey historian” by the Sheerness Times Guardian (and long-since dismissed as a “crank” by the philosopher Bertrand Russell53), Bilainkin was by the Seventies living in a rented flat in a no longer naval terrace within the former dockyard. His unusual choice of residence may have been connected to the protracted and, from his side, vicious custody battle he had fought and finally lost (with costs) in the Fifties against his former wife, a doctor whom he had accused of “sadistically injecting” their ten-year-old daughter with drugs.54
Bilainkin used his retreat on the island to look back over his life as a roving diplomatic journalist and editor. On 18 March 1977, the Sheerness Times Guardian reported that this former admirer of the semi-detatched communist President Tito — he had once recommended that voluntary work brigades, such as those he had seen after the war in Yugoslavia, should be used to clean up British railway stations prior to the Festival of Britain of 195155 — would be speaking about the oil crisis of 1974 at the Athenaeum Club in London. His argument, so readers were informed, was that King Feisal, whom he claimed to have k
nown personally, had only wanted the British to support a resolution obliging Israel to leave Arab lands in Egypt, Syria and Jordan. He suspected that the oil crisis was somehow due to the malevolence of an old enemy: “I fear old Germans have taken over, and are rushing us into World War III, with little bankrupt, bragging Britain, as Mrs Thatcher gaily put it, gaily obedient”.
In August 1977, the Sheerness Times Guardian returned to hear about Bilainkin’s friendship with the Cypriot leader Archbishop Makarios, describing the letters and Christmas cards he had received and circulated as souvenirs among Cypriot exiles now living on Sheppey, and remembering how Makarios had handled the protracted negotiations leading up to the independence of Cyprus: he had eventually made concessions (“for the sake of peace and avoiding more sorrow”) to a British Foreign Secretary, Mr Selwyn Lloyd, who assumed there would be “an imperishable British Empire to go on ruling for decades or centuries” and kept demanding “slabs” of the island for military bases.56 By July 1980, the rogue male historian sequestered in the former dockyard was writing to the Kingston Gleaner, in Jamaica, explaining that he was preparing a further volume of memoirs and would be grateful for news of certain people (names provided) he had known when he was news editor for that paper in 1924–5. Readers could write to him at 12 Regency Close in the former dockyard at Sheerness.57 Perhaps some did, but Bilainkin died the following year and his book never appeared.
Meanwhile, Johnson only had to listen, or look to the side, when his taxi or train was approaching the Kingsferry Bridge to cross the Swale, to discover that, thanks to another unpredictable incomer, steel bashing on the island was by no means confined to cutting up cars in Sheerness Steel’s factory. It was here, on a patch of open marshland overlooking the Swale, that a mixed-race Trinidadian named Michael Contant, whose family’s activities were regularly reported in the Sheerness Times Guardian, could be found bashing on oil drums, which he had cajoled out of scrapyards or found washed up on the shore during his own walks along the seafront. “There is a long preparation needed”, so he tells a reporter in one of Johnson’s saved copies of the Sheerness Times Guardian, “before a drum is made musical”.58 So that was where islanders got used to hearing him as he went about the noisy business of making and tuning chromatic steel pans before carrying them back home to Delamark Road in Sheerness, where he would tell his wife Carol about the birds and other creatures that had come to investigate his unfamiliar sounds.
Had Johnson dedicated one of his apocryphal “Island Stories” to this other exceptional migrant, he would have discovered that “Mike” Contant was already known as “the world’s finest first pan man” when he came to Britain as a tuner with a large steel band formed by the white Trinidadian Curtis Pierre. A “college boy” band, the Dixieland Steel Orchestra had received a lot of mockery as a posh and probably also pale-skinned entrant into the field by 1960 when it triumphed in all categories at the Trinidad Music Festival and then embarked on the European tour that brought its members to London — they were advertised as “the second steelband to visit England” — in 1961. Audiences at venues such as Porchester Hall in west London are said to have gone wild for the music: the band received “a lot of fame”, as Pierre has remembered, “but not a lot of fortune”.59 Some of the musicians had gone back to Trinidad when it proved impractical to sustain such a large company abroad. Pierre himself persisted, playing at the Savoy Ballroom and elsewhere with a smaller steel band. In 1962, however, he found himself in the dock at the Old Bailey on a firearms charge (the cricketer Learie Constantine and other members of the Trinidadian establishment stepped forward as character witnesses, and the jury accepted his claim that, while playing with his band in Düsseldorf, he had bought what he’d believed to be a starting pistol in order to scare off menacing German Teddy Boys).60 Acquitted of the main charge but humiliated by a subsidiary conviction, Pierre had returned to Trinidad shortly afterwards.
Michael however, stayed on, eventually meeting his classically-trained wife Carol, who’d come to London from a well-placed family (her father was an accountant) in British Guiana in 1962 to study violin, viola and piano at the Royal Academy of Music. She had envisaged going home to work as a music teacher. The colony, however, had been hit by a wave of rioting and political disturbance connected to the rise of the more or less pro-communist People’s Progressive Party in the run-up to the island’s first independent election in 1964, so she decided against returning to the now-independent Guyana. Having met at a dance, the Contants married and Mike formed the Golden Tones Steel Band, with which he and Carol proceeded to tour in Europe. They lived for a time in Newcastle-upon-Tyne where they had been invited to teach the members of a mixed Caribbean and white English band. The next opportunity came up in Spain, where they met two wealthy Americans who planned to develop a holiday village in the Canary Islands, and invited them to come over to form a resident band. Two years later, when the unrealised project finally fell apart, they found themselves broke and unemployed in Lanzarote with two small children and a third on the way.
Another hard-pressed family, then, hearing the call of Sheppey. In the summer of 1966, the Contants fell back on their own last chance: a chalet in Leysdown, a place that Carole now remembers as “all a bit beer and chips”,61 which they had bought for next to nothing in a fit of cautious enthusiasm when still living in west London. They stayed there while Mike looked for work and more permanent housing on the island. The council offered no assistance at all and problems had piled up impossibly by the end of October, when the chalet park turfed everyone out for the required winter closure. Carol was admitted to hospital to deliver their third child, Jeanette. Mike was sleeping in a car outside, and the two older children were taken into care. Home for a while was a single miserable room in a run-down house in Sheerness, but the family was reunited when they managed to buy a house at 7 Delamark Road, not far from the High Street between Broadway and the beach. The street was “kind of rough” — sufficiently so, as Carol remembers, to be nicknamed “Brixton Road” by some in the town.
We might fear the worst at this point, and not just thanks to an article entitled “Sheppey Memories are Made of This”, published in the Sheerness Times Guardian on 30 March 1984, in which witnesses looked back on the days when a school teacher called Dickie Farren saw fit to lead his charges into a song called “Rufus Rastus” and the 5.30pm transport to London was known as the “Jews’ Express”. The Contants, however, pressed through all that to become a shining presence on the island. Michael resumed his career as a performer (“Nat-C”), teacher and supplier and tuner of pans. Carol, meanwhile, who was versed in Montessori methods, set up a family band using the set of tuned pans Michael made especially for his children. They rehearsed at home, employing muffled sticks to limit the noise, and enlisting neighbouring children to the cause. As Carol told a journalist, “they learned so quickly that they were soon able to perform publicly”. They played as “Our Tiddlers Steel Band” at the Cinque Ports Mayors’ banquet early in 1975 and, later in the year, relaunched themselves as the Rainbow Steel Band, drawing in other local musicians including the drummer Jim Enright, a veteran of a Sheppey beat group known as the Rebounds — recently feted as a pioneer in a Kentish study entitled The Rise and Fall of the Beat Groups in Sittingbourne62 — who delighted in this unexpected music and remembers playing on a kick-set not just with the Contants and their three children but with other Caribbean performers who joined too: including a dancer named J.J. Johnson (“a Caribbean gentleman and quite a crazy character”, as Carol also remembers), who became known as “the glass walker”, thanks to his trick of walking across broken glass as well as hot coals.
The Contants’ family steel band became an island fixture and the story of their enthusiastically received performances can be read in Johnson’s collection of newspapers. They regularly played at the Little Theatre, recently opened in a redundant chapel Sunday school building in Marine Town’s Meyrick Road, and, on Sundays at a large club for handicapp
ed and disabled people up at Minster Cliffs. “Contant family makes rainbows”63 read the headline when the Contants performed at the Catholic Hall in August 1975: “Their’s was a colourful programme as the name suggests — a variety of songs to steel drum and guitar accompaniment”. Carol played guitar and sang, while Dominique (eleven), Marcos (nine) and Jeanette (eight) played piano, drums and guitars. A couple of neighbours, Estelle Tunbridge (thirteen) and Beryl Macken completed the group. “Rainbow band steals show” — was the verdict after they outshone the adult competition at the Sheppey Entertainment Association’s Christmas Show in December 1975: “This is not really surprising when they are expert enough to play the Warsaw concerto on a pile of tin cans!”64
By the time of their appearance in the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations of March 1977, they were “the band with lots of sunshine… such a bright, colourful and happy group that their gaiety can’t help spilling over to the audience and a full house at the Little Theatre on Wednesday was bathed in their particular ‘sunshine’”. On this occasion, Mike, who usually stayed in the background during Rainbow performances, took a solo spot, producing “sounds so hauntingly beautiful on the ‘ping pong’ pans that his interpretation of ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘Girl of My Dreams’ needs no comment”. When the Rainbow Steel Band delivered their version of Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto, a rousing and unashamedly romantic work written for a British film about the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 and popularised in the Fifties by performers such as Mantovani and Liberace, it was said to sound as if a full orchestra was on stage. The band was hailed as an inspiring model in other ways too: “There are no ‘stars’ among them — each respects the others’ talent and provides the back-up which makes for the most heart-warming and unpretentious acts”. These unexpected local heroes also appear in Johnson’s collected programmes for the Swale Festival, which, in 1978, was pleased to announce that “Sheppey’s own family group of amazing musicians” would once again be playing “Music of the Caribbean” in the Little Theatre. Pictures show these radiant Sheppey musicians beaming from under the frayed fringes of more or less Caribbean straw hats.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 33