by Lemn Sissay
‘I bet it’s those kids,’ Mum said.
Our mantelpiece was inhabited imperiously by Wedgwood figurines: maidens with long necks and flapping ducks on their way to market. There was a disparaging tone towards the next-door neighbours because they didn’t go to church. They couldn’t afford Wedgwood. And they spent their money on bingo – gambling is the Devil’s work, after all. The grass grew wildly in their garden and their children were scruffier. But I liked them. I liked my neighbours and I liked their children. I liked everybody. Why wouldn’t I?
Mum had short black hair and dark eyes. She had stern teeth with a slight overhang. She was the louder personality. When she and Dad argued, she’d smash plates, throw ladles. I’d sit on the stairs listening to the chaotic cacophony, the clatter that underlay the stress of relationships and parenthood. She was volcanic and volatile. I never ever imagined that the arguments might have been about me.
She smelled like mums smell; there must be a smell a child is attuned to from being a baby, a cross between baby powder and witch hazel. I don’t believe that an adopted baby gets any less love from their parents than a child naturally born to them. For ages, until the end came, no matter how volatile the day had been, I would pray that she’d open the bedroom door before I slept. I’d pray that she’d sit on the edge of my bed and sing me to sleep as she did when I was younger: ‘You are my sunshine, my only sun-shine, you make me happy when skies are grey . . .’ I believed her.
Her smile seemed like it was fighting back sadness or tears. Dad was broody, tall, witty and silent. In contrast to Mum’s agitated discordance, Dad did dad things quietly. He read the paper and occasionally let it all out on the squash court. One of the social workers wrote that he was ‘basically shy and at ease talking about academic matters but more difficult when talking of personal matters’.
The front room was his library. It was the quiet room, which doubled up as a posh room for visitors. The bay window looked out to the laburnum tree, which at night threw grue-some shadows back at us.
Cornerstone books for me back then were the Bible and books on the books of the Bible, the Famous Five series, Secret Seven, of course, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. C.S. Lewis was a rock star in our house. All of the books stacked along the bookshelf in the front room waited for our hungry eyes. I don’t remember other novels or poetry – except T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which was my favourite, and I memorised it.
Mum and Dad said I was like Macavity. It felt affectionate then, but later I realised something wasn’t right. Macavity was dark, quick and a thief. Macavity was such a contrast to my blond blue-eyed brother Chris. His affectionate nickname was Bunty.
11 December 1974
I was a questioner. In the Baptist Church, our church, we were taught to question why. The answer was often ‘Because we are sinners’. At school I was subject to all kinds of questions about my race, which I couldn’t answer. I brought all these questions home.
‘She left you . . . she didn’t want you . . . if I find her I will scratch her eyes out . . . how could she . . . ?’ My mum’s love was elevated by how much she hated my birth mother for leaving me. That’s all I knew. All I knew was that my birth mother, the woman who had my face and my blood, was from Africa and Africa was where poor people were.
April 1974
I’m seven.
CHAPTER 4
Raise me with sunrise
Bathe me in light
Wash all the shadows
That fell from the night
I developed a sense that there was something wrong with me around the time I began attending junior school. R.L. Hughes Infants was my first school. It was straight up at the top of Osborne Road. We’d normally walk with Mum when she could take us but later I reached the age when I could walk on my own with my brother.
I liked the exact curvature of the earth of the school grounds. The green, green grass went on for ever. And the football field and running track. The neat 1960s buildings. I preferred it to home; there was less static in the air.
Mr Graves was the headmaster. He entered the hall each morning and stood near the monkey bars with his arms behind his back. They said he was an officer in the army. The music teacher sat in front of the piano. Mr Graves gave a solemn nod. And the pianist would begin with the prelude while peering over her glasses and then we would sing the song we also sang occasionally at church:
All things bright and beautiful,
all creatures great and small.
All things wise and wonderful,
the Lord God made them all.
I looked at my headteacher in awe.
I hadn’t realised at any point that none of what I have told you so far is true. I wasn’t a happy child. I was a deceitful one. I was causing problems for everyone. It must be true. These are the words of Mr Graves from the social worker’s report of January 1976.
I loved life. I was nine. My brother Christopher was eight. I loved school. I loved him. I showed my love for him by punching him. We had the same rivalry most brothers have. We fought with unbridled determination, the way brothers do. We wrestled. We sweated until one of us, invariably Christopher, would burst into tears. Catherine and David had no children when they took me. Christopher was their first-born but I was their first. I was the eldest. I loved my town. I loved my family. I loved the sibling rivalry. I loved the Market, the Flower Park, the Big Park, the books. The church. My friends.
The headteacher suggesting to the social worker that I be moved for the sake of Christopher couldn’t have happened in isolation – ‘Norman’s successes were too many’. How could a child’s successes be too many? The social worker said, ‘Norman doesn’t like Christopher beating him.’ Of course he doesn’t. He’s my brother. Something was at play. Something I didn’t understand. ‘Norman’s behaviour had been inappropriately rewarded. He is never going to learn to cope with disapproval if approval is all he is being exposed to.’ This inclines me to think my foster parents must have spoken to the headteacher prior to his speaking with the social worker, as there is no counter-narrative in the files.
All I can tell you is what my parents told me: my mum was a nurse, my dad a teacher. And my brother and sister were my brother and sister. This was our town. But I couldn’t help giving my brother a Chinese burn ’cause that’s what brothers do. Isn’t it?
CHAPTER 5
Smouldering embers
In the sky above
Anger is an expression
In search of love
Eight years old. For the record, I did steal biscuits but not two whole packs. This exaggeration would come back to haunt me. What I did was this: I stole biscuits from the biscuit tin and then rearranged them in the tin in a stacked ‘roof-column system’ to hide the fact I had stolen them. Genius.
One holiday in Scotland at my granddad’s home the family left me in the cottage, as punishment for lying about stealing some cake. Sarah, Christopher, David and Catherine walked down the hill to Lochinver. I thought I had been locked in my room but the door was open. I sobbed my way downstairs. The rich smell of silver birchwood from the embers of the fire filled the front room. Wiping tears from my face, I saw on the table a half-cut ginger cake. The tears evaporated, replaced by butterflies in my stomach. Maybe I can have a piece, I thought. If I cut it in exactly the same way as it was already cut then no one will notice I’ve taken a slice. Genius. And so I did. Macavity was much cleverer than that. The cake tasted so good that I figured one more slice wouldn’t do any harm at all. There were no witnesses, but then there was only one suspect. It tasted so good. So I did it again. To this day I don’t know why I got into this habit of stealing biscuits and bits of cake. But I did. They told me I was devious.
The problem was that my first instinct was to say, I didn’t take the cake. I hadn’t considered that the reason they had left me in the cottage in the first place was as a punishment for stealing cake. Still, I denied that I had stolen the cake. Ma
cavity would have had more guile and more style. Soon enough, after another hour in the bedroom, I realised that I had to admit to taking the cake. What I didn’t realise was the significance of my transgression. The lies worried them more than the theft.
This habit of stealing cake was the crack in the dam. There was something bad in me. Something I didn’t understand. ‘Don’t look at me with those big brown eyes’ was the strange refrain my mum would shout at me. I didn’t understand what she saw. If I argued that I didn’t know what she saw, then would I be lying? How could I see what she and my foster father saw?
Back at home, the front room was where I was punished. Same place we ‘entertained’ visitors, same place the books were, same place the social worker would sit. The leather sofa was polished to perfection and smelled of Pledge. Stealing cake and lying about it was an indication that the Devil was working inside me. The front room was where I was caned.
I loved the normal stuff. The middle room, where we mostly lived and watched The Clangers and Crackerjack! on the TV. The files tell a different story, though, a story narrated by my foster parents and filtered by the social worker. Within three years it will be reported that I threatened to kill the entire family, except for baby Helen.
CHAPTER 6
As the pastor dragged the ‘forgiven’
From the watery grave
They’d say ‘Jesus Christ’
And he’d shout ‘You are saved’
It was run by the Elders. Bryn Baptist Church, a mile from our home and a mile from Grandma and Granddad Munro’s. Occasionally, Granddad Munro played the organ when the regular organist was away. He was always slightly out of sync. Mum and Dad avoided looking at each other. My Granddad, with his missing teeth, flat cap and a twinkle in his eye, was the best granddad in the world.
Church was full of horrific stories: burned bodies and dead babies strewn in passageways, weeping and wailing mothers, a story of a woman who was turned into a pillar of salt, prostitutes and beggars, lepers and mass baby killings, people drowned in the huge flood and Jesus stabbed with huge nails, hung on a wooden cross, with a crown of thorns and blood pouring down His face. Poisonings, stabbings, burnings, child murders and rape.
‘Repent. Repent for your sins.’
The temperature rose with the pastor’s words. Girders of green, blue and red light fell upon the rapt congregation from the stained glass.
Mum threw up her arms. ‘Praise Him.’
So I threw up mine. Was I saved by Jesus? Shadows swooped over me as clouds swiped the light away. And then it was back again. The congregation flew to the sky. Chris, my brother, was looking at me, lips pressed together in a mean line, his eyes slanting.
‘You stink,’ I mouthed back at him.
‘Praise God, praise God,’ I sang out with the congregation.
I spent twelve years kneeling and praying. It’s what we did. It’s all I knew.
And it was the powerful rhetoric and lyricism of the church that took me to poetry. All stories in the Bible and in church had to be interpreted; everything was symbolic and analogous. Peter had lied and then repented. We should repent for our lies. The woman turned to salt for looking back. We should not look back. Jesus died so that we could live.
I wonder now at the literalness of it all. The cross on the front room wall was made of seashells and had a likeness of Jesus hanging on it. Dad decided to take Jesus (and the glue) off the cross because ‘He is risen’, although the glue was harder to pick off.
There is barely any mention of religion in my files. It wasn’t discussed with the social worker. In my parents’ eyes he was a heathen.
We seek the attention of the world from the moment we are born. An extrovert is just an introvert trying to prove they are not.
CHAPTER 7
Dawn is a wake for dusk
Light will find what it must
What will be will be and thus
Shadows speak for us
The journey to Winnock became an oft-repeated one thoughout my childhood. Dad always stayed in the car when we got there. He stayed with Sarah because Sarah was too young. Winnick was a sprawling red-brick institution set in manicured greenery. It was the picture of order and quietude covering up the secrets and lies.
Mum, me and Chris walked through the front door to an archway and after Mum signed a register we stepped into the wide tiled corridor of the Asylum. It smelled of vomit, bleach, Savlon and urine. Our footsteps were louder here and followed by a sharp echo. Haunting moans pealed into the air as we stepped onwards. A nurse appeared as if from nowhere and rushed past us. Chris was chewing his lip and getting paler and paler. He’d developed a nervous habit of sucking his upper lip, leaving it dry and chapped.
Our long journey in this other world led to a big public room, like a cove, with lots of winged armchairs with women in them. I scanned the room slowly and I noticed that none of the women were right. They were holding their heads all wrong, they were strange, dribbling creatures. Then Mum spotted one of them and stepped quietly over to her. The woman had an overhang to her mouth, wolf-like, dribbling, hair like a nest, and she was rocking backwards and forwards, a twisted arm held out like a snapped twig. There was a familiar shape to her eyes.
‘This is Aunty,’ Mum said. ‘Say hello to your aunty.’
I pulled myself together. ‘Hello, Aunty,’ I said. I liked her and she liked me. I could see a twinkle in her twisted slow eye as her bent head rocked back and forward and her twisted elbow pushed out a clawed hand towards me and brushed my cheek. She couldn’t speak. But her grunts were enough for me to know.
Chris twitched and managed a mumble. Mum took out a hanky and lovingly wiped drool from Aunty’s mouth and chin. How long did we spend there, watching her rocking back and forth? I knew instinctively not to ask questions as we headed off.
Mum visited her twin regularly, sometimes alone, sometimes with us. My aunty had been like that ‘from birth’ and, as children have a sense for these things, I realised that no one mentioned her: not Grandma, her mum, or my mum, her sister.
My grandmother, Phyllis Munro, never visited her daughter with Mum and us. I wonder, does Catherine believe she took away what her sister needed? What a thought! People can be cruel to themselves. People can be cruel to each other. Was my mum born in shock that she had survived? Did she blame herself? Did her mother blame her? Was Catherine living with a constant sense that she was not good enough because she had taken the air from her sister? She would do everything to prove otherwise. She would foster a black baby and show her mother (who was a foster parent too) that she was good, in spite of what she had done to her sister inside her mother’s womb. I honestly believe that if my mum could have changed places with her sister in the asylum then she would.
Nature may be cruel but at least it is honest. It’s not the doings of the Devil or of God. My aunty hadn’t done anything wrong. Her sister hadn’t done anything wrong. Her mother hadn’t done wrong. This was not a curse for sins. If they could all let themselves see that this is the beauty of nature. My mother’s twin sister was beautiful. She was as beautiful as any catwalk model and her mind was as relevant as Alice Walker’s. It’s not my aunt who has the problem. It’s my grandmother who couldn’t look at her, and whose subsequent hatred of her other daughter – my mother – caused my mother’s inescapable feeling that she didn’t deserve to be alive. No Christmas and no birthday would rid my mother of the feeling that her twin sister had a birthday and a Christmas too.
All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small!
There were two other sisters, Ruth and Sue, and a brother called Alec – my uncles and aunts. I think Sue was the adopted one. Ruth’s portrait hung in my grandmother’s front room above the fireplace. It hurt my mother, but not because she would take anything away from Ruth. It was because my mother felt her picture would never be on the wall because it would remind her mother of her other daughter, the one we visited.
I was born into a
laburnum-tree family with its beauteous bloom and poisonous seeds. I saw Grandma at least once a week, and I loved her. Maybe she did love Catherine Greenwood, the twin who survived. Maybe she loved her so much she couldn’t show it. Because to show it would have made her feel she loved her daughter in the asylum less. Maybe Catherine was her favourite, the one she fought for, the one who survived; she was the first. But Catherine never felt it and consequently found love difficult to give.
Grandma Munro was always cutting her down to size. The disappointment inside Mum deepened and I guess it explained her begrudging discontentment with others. The parent and daughter reinforced each other’s dysfunctional behaviour like rutting stags caught in each other’s antlers. In fact, all they wanted of each other was love. This was the great rift. Catherine was the first daughter and Phyllis was the first mother. And the other daughter was in an asylum. This is how anger is stoked. Bitterness rots the vessel that carries it.
None of this is in the files. Grandma was a registered foster carer with the local council, like her daughter. I never saw any other foster children there. The only time I knew of a foster child being at her house was when I was sent there. Duncan Munro, Granddad, was an outpost, an ex-whisky-drinking, motorbike-riding maverick from Lochinver in the Highlands.
We holidayed there at every opportunity. He owned a picturesque cottage surrounded by hazelnut trees and silver birch that bowed down the hillside to the bay of Lochinver. My memories of those times are idyllic: the smell of wet heather and bracken, the majestic vision of Suilven in all its glory. If God lived anywhere it would be here, I reckoned.
