Small Island

by Andrea Levy

  ‘You could tell them yourself, if you want,’ I said. I opened the door wide for him.

  ‘No, no, that won’t be necessary,’ he told me. ‘I’ll leave that to you. But I just thought it might help relations around here if all our coloured brethren understood how to behave.’

  Ten

  Hortense

  At least the fool man, Gilbert, had had the decency to place himself on to the armchair to sleep for the night. In this rundown room there was no private corner for me to change into my nightclothes. ‘Use the bathroom,’ the man said. But I had no wish to climb that mountain of stairs in my stocking feet with only a nightdress to keep out the cold and eyes that might pry. ‘Tell you what, I will turn my back so you can undress,’ he said. ‘I will not peek.’ But twice I caught his greedy eye perusing me. This man could not be trusted and I told him so. ‘Cha,’ he said. He took up a scarf to place it over his eyes. And all the while he is sucking on his teeth so fierce I feared he might swallow them. ‘Happy now?’ he asked me.

  My toe immediately fell into the hole in the sheet as I got into the bed. But it was not the fault of my foot that the sheet was so flimsy it ripped in two as easy as paper. ‘Cha, that is the only good sheet I have.’ I shielded my ears from the cussing that flew from the man’s mouth as he began to undress.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘but would you be so kind as to please turn off the light?’

  ‘Wait,’ he told me, ‘I just get undress.’

  Any man of breeding would have realised that that was why a woman such as I might require the light to be off. I did not wish him to stand before me in his nakedness as puffed as a peacock, as he did that night in Jamaica. ‘That is why I should like the light extinguished,’ I had to inform the fool.

  And he laughed. ‘So you can’t trust yourself to keep your eye away from me?’ But I paid him no mind. Even with no light in the room, the street-lamp glowed luminous through the window. Any poor Jamaican would have been proud to have so much electric light reach their night-time eyes. I could feel the man standing by the bed when he had finished changing. Jiggling up himself and skipping with the cold. I decided then that if one of his fingers so much as brushed the cover on the bed I would scream so loud that ears back home in HalfwayTree would hear me. It was hard to tell who groaned more – the silly man as he wrestled blankets around him or the tumbledown armchair as he restlessly fidgeted for comfort.

  At first I thought the scratching was Gilbert – he was rough enough for such bad behaviour. But then I heard a pitter-patter running above my head across the ceiling. ‘You hear that?’ I asked him.

  The wretched man was asleep. He wake up saying, ‘What, what?’

  ‘Can you hear that scratching?’

  It was matter-of-factness that said, ‘It’s just the rats.’

  ‘Rats!’

  ‘Well, mice . . .’

  ‘You bring me to a house with rats?’

  ‘No, they are mice. And every house in London has mice. They bombed out too, you know.’

  But this scratching was coming so loud. ‘You sure it is mice?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ the man told me, ‘you see mice in England like to wear boots.’

  I could feel him smiling to himself at this silly joke. ‘You must get rid of them.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  ‘Now, Gilbert.’

  ‘How you expect me get rid of rats now?’

  ‘You say it was mice.’

  ‘Mice, rats, it’s still the middle of the night. What you wan’ me do?’

  ‘You must tell the landlady.’

  ‘Cha, you wan’ me go wake her to tell her something she already know. Come, Hortense, please, go to sleep, it is only noise they are making.’

  I tried to sleep but the mice had decided to push a piano across the floor of the room above. I could see them in my mind’s eye as clear as if I was watching their furry figures labouring in their boots.

  ‘Gilbert?’ I said quietly.

  ‘Oh, cha,’ he yelled. He took up his shoe and threw it at the ceiling. I heard the vermin scatter just before the shoe landed, ‘Ouch’, on top of Gilbert. Buffoon!

  ‘What goes up must come down,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh, in the name of God, please, go to sleep, Hortense,’ he begged. ‘I promise it will all be different in the morning.’

  Before

  Eleven

  Gilbert

  My mirror spoke to me. It said: ‘Man, women gonna fall at your feet.’ In my uniform of blue – from the left, from the right, from behind – I looked like a god. And this uniform did not even fit me so well. But what is a little bagging on the waist and tightness under the arm when you are a gallant member of the British Royal Air Force? Put several thousand Jamaican men in uniform, coop them up while, Grand Old Duke of York style, you march them up to the top of the hill and then back down again, and they will think of nothing but women. When they are up they will imagine them and when they are down they will dream of them. But not this group I travelled with to America. Not Hubert, not Fulton, not Lenval, not James, not even me. Because every last one of us was too preoccupied with food. The only flesh we conjured was the sort you chewed and swallowed.

  This was war. There was hardship I was prepared for – bullet, bomb and casual death – but not for the torture of missing cow-foot stew, not for the persecution of living without curried shrimp or pepper-pot soup. I was not ready, I was not trained to eat food that was prepared in a pan of boiling water, the sole purpose of which was to rid it of taste and texture. How the English built empires when their armies marched on nothing but mush should be one of the wonders of the world. I thought it would be combat that would make me regret having volunteered, not boiled-up potatoes, boiled-up vegetables – grey and limp on the plate like they had been eaten once before. Why the English come to cook everything by this method? Lucky they kept that boiling business as their national secret and did not insist that the people of their colonies stop frying and spicing up their food.

  I was brought up in a family with ten children. At that dining-table at home one lax moment and half my dinner could be gone to my neighbour. I learned to eat quickly while defending my plate with a protective arm. But with this English food I sat back, chewed slowly and willed my compatriots to thieve. I had not yet seen a war zone but if the enemy had been frying up some fish and dumpling, who knows which way I would point my gun?

  Now, I am telling you this so you might better understand what a lustless and ravenous Jamaican experienced when he arrived, guest of the American government, at the military camp in Virginia. The silver tray had compartments so the food did not get messed up. Into each compartment was placed bacon, eggs (two proper eggs!), sausages, fried tomato, fried potatoes, toast, a banana and an orange. The cereal with milk was in a little bowl to itself. My arm was round that plate of food before I had even sat down. Only when I was assured that the rumour of second, third or fourth helpings was not the reverie of a deranged mind did I relax. I swear many tears were wept over that breakfast. Paradise, we all decided, America is Paradise. A bath with six inches of water that rivalled the Caribbean sea in my affection and more meals of equal, no, greater satisfaction than the first, had the word Paradise popping from our mouths like the cork from champagne.

  ‘Okay, boys, now listen up here,’ was how he began, this officer from the US military. Perched informal on the edge of a desk he was relaxed, the only white man in this room full of volunteer servicemen from the Caribbean.

  ‘Pay attention, you lot,’ our British NCO, Corporal Baxter, had warned us while we waited for this American officer. ‘He’s got something he has to say and you’re guests here, so you listen to him politely. All right.’

  This American officer’s head was angular – a square jaw is not unusual especially on an officer, but a square skull! Lenval whispered, ‘Him mummy still cross eye from giving birth,’ and my smile made this officer pin two penetrating blue eyes on me and me alone.


  ‘You are now the guest of Uncle Sam.’

  Resting easy – some of the boys even smoking – our bellies full, looking forward to a few days in the land of the free, some of us, as Jamaicans are prone to do, concurred verbally: ‘Yes, sir – umm umm.’

  This momentarily took the officer by surprise, his back stiffening before carrying on. ‘While you are here, all facilities pertinent to your rank will be open to you.’ He stopped here, waiting for a reaction more animated than just the nodding and grinning he received. ‘You will be able to use the movie theatre, the playing fields, all mess facilities, et cetera, et cetera.’

  ‘Where is this et cetera?’ the small island boys whispered to each other.

  ‘While on the camp you will be under the command of your own NCOs and following British military law.’

  Who cared about law as long as the British were not cooking the food?

  ‘But . . .’ I was not the only one waiting for this first catch ‘. . . you will be, for the duration of your stay, confined to the camp.’

  Oh there was much sucking of teeth and moaning, ‘Cha . . . cha . . . cha . . .’ snapping round the room like firecrackers. There was no eyebrow left unknitted.

  The officer had to put up his hand to settle the room. ‘The reason . . .’

  ‘Cha . . . cha . . . cha . . .’

  ‘Your attention, please. The reason for this decision, which your own NCOs can go into in more detail – but the reason for this decision is to minimise the risk of contracting disease. The British military authorities are quite clear that any serviceman contracting a disease while here will not be allowed to travel any further and will be returned to his country of origin forthwith.’

  This did not settle us. With stomachs full, our thoughts had all returned to women. Although I did not want to be turned round having come so far, this war business was getting me down. No one knew how long we would be immured on this camp without seeing a curvaceous bosom, a rounded hip, a shapely leg. How long without female company? A week, a month? No American girl was to see me in uniform – oh, boy, this was serious. The room hummed – this officer had put his finger in and stirred up the nest.

  ‘I know, I know, you’re all disappointed. But while you are at this military establishment,’ his voice was rising, ‘and guests of the Government of the United States of America you will have the run of this camp. Everyone here has been ordered to see that your stay with us is the best welcome Uncle Sam could give to the negroes of an ally.’ He was shouting now. ‘You will mix with white service personnel. Have you boys any idea how lucky you are? You will not be treated as negroes!’

  Perhaps my cousin Elwood was right. ‘Man, this is a white man’s war. Why you wanna lose your life for a white man? For Jamaica, yes. To have your own country, yes. That is worth a fight. To see black skin in the governor’s house doing more than just serving at the table and sweeping the floor. A black man at Tate and Lyle doing more than just cutting cane. That is worth a fight. I join you then, man. But you think winning this war going to change anything for me and you?’

  Anthropoid – I looked to the dictionary to find the meaning of this word used by Hitler and his friends to describe Jews and coloured men. I got a punch in the head when the implication jumped from the page and struck me: ‘resembling a human but primitive, like an ape’. Two whacks I got. For I am a black man whose father was born a Jew.

  My father said one thing to his nine children over and over – so often that we mouthed the words as they came from his lips. ‘Remember,’ he’d say, ‘you could have been Jewish.’ This to him was the worst curse that could befall anyone. He was, with his black curling hair and pale olive skin, ‘a circumcised member of the Jewish faith’. He would tell us this when the words he spoke still made sense – which was about four rums into his drunkenness. Six rums down he was tearful about his bar mitzvah. Eight, and we heard tales of his ancestors trading salt. It was towards the bottom of the bottle, slurring and gesticulating crazily, that he would berate his estranged Jewish mother, father, the Torah, the synagogue and the silly hats. ‘Thank Jesus Christ that I saw the light,’ he’d cry. It was during the First World War, in the fields near Ypres, my father first saw this light. He met Jesus on the battlefield. He insisted on the truth of this. Jesus shared a tin of fish with him and lent him some writing paper and no one can tell him otherwise. ‘I became a Christian because of that friendship with Jesus Christ,’ he would exclaim, just before passing out.

  No more Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, Rosh Hashana, and Passover for him. Finally banished from his family, this gold-cross-wearing Jew was cast out from his community in Mandeville. So many backs were turned on him that my father claimed a bitter talent: ‘I can know if a man is a Jew from his rear.’

  My mother, Louise, took him in, pleased to be parading round this nearly white husband. As a salesman my father supplied shops in the north of the islands with furniture. As a husband he supplied my mother with children – first two sons, my brother Lester and me, then seven girls. Seven sisters!

  A fervent convert, my father took Christianity very seriously. He would march his family every Sunday to the Anglican church. Why he never drove his car? ‘You must never work on the Sabbath,’ he would say.

  After the service we children would be lined up with Mummy whispering, ‘No cuss words, no blasphemy, no patois.’ We all observed as our father skipped round the white people who worshipped there. Taking their reluctant hands and shaking them. Laughing too hearty at jokes that were barely funny. Patting backs just before they turned round from him. Fawning to these white people who stood haughty and aloof in his presence.

  The picture in the newspaper was of a German Jew. He wore a cloth star on a dirty coat. He walked along a street, hunched and humbled, while non-Jews eyed him with an expression of disgust Lester and I knew only too well from those Sunday services. With the fervour of a crusade my brother wanted to fight in this war. But when the British Royal Air Force asked him the question, ‘Are you of pure English descent?’ Lester replied, ‘Come take my blood and see.’ Nobody believed him when, rejected by the RAF, he returned home burdened with the knowledge that the Mother Country only required members of the white races for this fight. ‘Never,’ my father, remembering Ypres, shouted. ‘Never!’ The factories of America claimed my hunched and humbled brother instead.

  My cousin Elwood could not understand, ‘They turn down your brother when him colour no suit them and now that them change their mind you wanna go licky-licky to them. Cha, you should be fighting the British not joining them. Stay. Their back is turn now – we can win.’ There might have been truth in this. But I was ready to fight this master race theory. For my father was a Jew and my brother is a black man. I told Elwood, ‘If this war is not won then you can be certain nothing here will ever change.’

  Now, from what I could understand, this American officer with the angular head was telling us that weWest Indians, being subjects of His Majesty King George VI, had, for the time being, superior black skin. We were allowed to live with white soldiers, while the inferior American negro was not. I was perplexed. No, we were all perplexed. We Jamaicans, knowing our island is one of the largest in the Caribbean, think ourselves sophisticated men of the world. Better than the ‘small islanders’ whose universe only runs a few miles in either direction before it falls into the sea. But even the most feeble-minded small islanders could detect something odd about the situation. While being shown round the camp a smiling face would tell us, ‘You see, your American nigger don’t work. If his belly’s full he won’t work. When he’s hungry again then he’ll do just enough. Same kinda thing happens in the animal kingdom. But you boys being British are different.’ While being shown to our seats in the all-white picture show, handed bars of chocolate and cigarettes to share, men would say, ‘I am loyal to my flag but you would never catch no self-respecting white man going into battle with a nigger.’ At a dance in the mess being persuaded to boogie-woogie and jive –
to let go, man, go! – into our black faces, up against our black skin they said, ‘We do not mix the negro and the white races here because it lowers the efficiency of our fighting units. Your American nigger ain’t really cut out to fight.’

  Apparently our hosts had tried every solution to their nigger problem. ‘Only one that works in this country, and certainly in the military, is segregation.’ This was apparently how everyone liked it – black man as well as white. They had a name for it – no, not master-race theory: Jim Crow!

  I soon realised we were lucky the American military authorities did not let us off the camp in Virginia. We West Indians, thinking ourselves as good as any man, would have wandered unaware, greeting white people who would have swung us from the nearest tree for merely passing the time of day with them. And my brother Lester? How would they know he was a British coloured man with no uniform to distinguish him? By a badge perhaps worn on his coat? But in what shape? The word Paradise had long since stopped popping from my lips. We might have been returning to that British boiling business but I was not the only boy who was pleased to be leaving America behind.

  Frigates, corvettes, warships, troop carriers, destroyers marshalled all along the horizon in Newfoundland. How many ships? Forty, fifty maybe, stretching out for miles like an illusion from an admiral’s imagination. All assembled with one mission: to convoy across the ocean. What a sight! Hubert was struck dumb a full ten minutes. When finally he spoke, his voice quivering, he said, ‘So beautiful and so deadly.’ It was brief, considering the sheer majesty of the moment, but an intelligent comment none the less.

  Once we were under sail, under orders and captive on this ship, Corporal Baxter began with his lectures. This man took satisfaction in telling us ‘colony troops’ everything his twenty-six years as a Londoner had taught him about England. Me, I found it interesting. Did you know that the smog in London can be so thick that it is not possible to recognise your own hand in front of your face? I did not know this. But many of the boys did and yawned wide as crocodiles so Corporal Baxter might realise.