My Name Is Why

by Lemn Sissay

  She looked at me as if I had wounded her. ‘You don’t love us? You don’t want to be with us?’

  All of this happened the day after they had made this call to the social worker.

  WOODFIELDS

  CHAPTER 14

  Night can’t drive out night

  Only the light above

  Fear can’t drive out fear

  Only love

  3 January 1980: a month after the ten-year anniversary of the ‘Notice Hereby Given’ sent to an address in Ethiopia by Wigan Social Services.

  My mum wouldn’t hug me as I left, so I hugged her. Norman Mills, my new social worker, waited at the gate. He ushered me gently into the car. I looked back but they were already turning to go indoors, mindful of the neighbours. The car filled with a quiet loss. Mum told me they would never visit me because it was my choice to leave them because I didn’t love them.

  We passed the butcher’s and the chemist’s and Wigan Road and passed the Flower Park and the main park and then we drove close to my first girlfriend’s place – whenever I am that side of town I always hope I’ll see Diane. We drove past the junior school, past Byrchall High School, and then unfamiliar territory unfolded before me. The East Lancashire Road: one dual carriageway, with a single destination.

  This was the beginning of the end of open arms and warm hugs. This was the beginning of empty Christmas time and hollow birthdays. This was the beginning of not being touched. I’m twelve. And it is my fault. This is what I have chosen. The journey took about forty-five minutes, or forty-five seconds. Or forty-five years.

  I said to Norman Mills in the car, ‘I know this is my fault and I will ask God for forgiveness.’

  He kept his eyes on the road but his hands gripped tighter on the wheel. He tapped the indicator and pulled quietly into a layby and turned the engine off. ‘None, none of this is your fault. None of it.’ I had no idea what he meant. He must have been mad. It was my fault. If it wasn’t my fault why could I never return home?

  The roads started to shrink. We travelled through Lowton, through Leigh onto Orchard Lane by the pond crowned with bullrushes. ‘It’s called Lucky Hollow,’ said Norman, but I was looking at the mansions set far from the road on the other side. Orchard Lane was broken up and potholed. The car growled and Norman and I jolted from side to side. I put my hands on the dashboard and looked up at the giant trees as we turned into the driveway of Woodfields Children’s Home. Chrysanthemum bushes clambered on either side beneath sycamores and beech trees. I saw a dirty-faced boy through the bushes staring at the car then darting away. This was The Other World. This was the outside world that Mum had said I desperately wanted. I didn’t.

  We carried on around the front of the building to a fan of steps sweeping up to the door facing a huge garden. It was 3 January. Most of the children were away with their families. All was silent.

  The smell hit me first. It was the smell of Winnick. I stood in the hallway, with my back against the wall. Norman Mills disappeared with a man into an office. I listened to muffled noises from the giant house. This was an adventure for the Famous Five.

  My twelve-year-old self stood still between two doors in the hall. One led to what looked like a playroom. I sneaked a look. Sniffed once. Sniffed twice. Further down the hall to my left, a thin corridor made its way to a kitchen and the dining room and the back door and the cellar door beneath the stairs. To the right were the front door and the tiled porch. Two feet in front of me lay the clenched fists of the grand staircase’s bannisters, bigger than I’d ever seen. My heart wanted to jump out of my chest and run away back to the Greenwoods so that I could tell them all about it.

  I didn’t lean on the wall. My arms were by my side. My shoulders back. I stood like I’d been taught a good boy should stand. Hands out of pockets. Best behaviour. I looked left. I looked right. To make a good impression I would shake hands and say, ‘How do you do?’ I practised, ‘How do you do? How do you do? How do you do?’

  I’d practised it at home with my foster dad in the front room. The posh room. Then I’d go to church and do just as I was taught. I looked left and right again. And then I smiled a big ‘hello’ smile. Nobody there. Just a practice. It felt good so I did it again.

  Mum said it was deceitful. But it wasn’t. I held it as long as I could and it felt good. I got a feeling in my tummy when I did it. Butterflies. Then I asked myself whether I could hold my breath and hold my smile at the same time. I tried until there was no air in me. Then I asked myself if I could hold my breath, hold my smile and think of something really, really sad at the same time but keep smiling. There was nothing sad to think about. Not really. Okay, I said to myself, think of something that’s always there and then imagine it’s not. Got it. Right, 1– 2 – deep breath – 3.

  I smiled, held my breath and then thought, Mum and Dad are never coming back; no one is coming back; you’ve lost everyone. Everyone! It’s your fault. Hold the smile. I held my breath. Held the smile. Your fault. I held my breath. Held the smile. Shoulders back. Your fault. Held the smile. Held my breath. My eyes widened till they were about to pop. I watched the second hand on the clock. Hold hold hold. I was a boy in a hallway, smiling, who looked like he was screaming. With a gasp I sucked in as much air as I could to replace what had left my body.

  This is what I know. The world is split in two. Good and bad. Bad is evil and good is godly. I had been bad in the eyes of good. I took biscuits from the tin then lied about it. I stayed out late and made up reasons for staying out. Lying again. I had fights with my brother. And that is why I was there. I stole biscuits. I stayed out later than I should. I fought with my brother. I made people laugh when they shouldn’t. I was mischievous. I had the Devil inside me. I was ‘amoral’. I was devious. My parents are good and I must have hurt them. But they are not gone. They wouldn’t leave me here. This is like when I went to my grandma’s. This is The Outside World. This must be like a break. It must be.

  A boy appeared from nowhere as my body regained composure. He’d been a gecko on the ceiling all the time. He was shuddering with excitement. ‘So who da-da-da-da-da are you, da-da-da fucking hell.’

  He fired questions at me, none of which I could answer. ‘Whoareyouwhereyoubloodyfrom . . . dadadadaadadadada.’

  His name was Jack. He seemed younger.

  ‘Hello, I’m Norman,’ I said and stuck out my hand for him to shake. ‘How do you do?’

  I know how to hold my knife and fork. I keep my elbows off the table. I say please and thank you. It’s not me being devious. It is what I have been trained to do. Jack stared at my outstretched hand as if I were an alien. He craned his head to the side with a quizzical, bemused and excited look. He raised both hands to the right and left then grabbed and twisted my ears screaming ‘Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrragggh’ and ran off, whooping with laughter.

  I was still reeling when I heard the steps of adults. Norman Mills was with Mr John Harding, a beer-bellied, cigar-smoking Manchester City supporter. He ran Woodfields Children’s Home. Mr John Harding was the boss. He had fifteen staff working for him: cleaners, gardeners, laundresses and residential social workers. In those days children’s homes were employment bureaus for the local community.

  Mr Harding had a harsh Gorton accent. He was barrel-chested and always looked as if you might be hiding something, or as if he might be hiding something.

  He showed me the dining room, and the kitchen was like a more menacing version of Alice in Wonderland. I had drunk a shrinking potion. The cook looked at him and switched on the industrial potato peeler. It filled the kitchen with the rumble of thunder. The steel teapot was twice the size of my head. The cupboards were full of cups. I’d never seen so many in one house.

  The cellar was daunting. The low ceiling was lined with flickering striplights. It smelt of damp stone. ‘It’s where the servants worked and lived in Victorian times,’ he said. There was a room just a little bigger than the table-tennis table that squeezed into it. Then the laundry room with ind
ustrial steam presses for the bed sheets, and a long walkway with benches, and under the benches, rows and rows of shoes.

  There’d be many times in future that I would play table tennis with myself by pushing the table against the wall. Backhand and forehand smash, defend and attack, spin, cut, lob and slice. My body would skip around the table like a sprite on the solid stone floor. I would narrate the game against Christopher, my invisible brother, and I’d let him win.

  Mum and Dad must have told everyone in my family to stay away from me. I hadn’t realised then that none of them would contact me ever again for the rest of my life. My grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins. Mum and Dad must have gone back to the family and said, ‘We cannot contact him. He has left us. He chose to leave us. After everything we gave him.’

  Whenever I got a call to leave the table-tennis table in the middle of a game against my invisible brother I’d say, ‘I’ll play you later, Chris. Okay?’

  All my personal belongings were to go in the locker by the bed. I asked when my clothes and toys would be arriving. They were in the trunk back at home, the one with my name on it, the one Granddad Munro made. But nothing was coming here from there. Not even a Bible. I had nothing to put in the locker by my bed in the dormitory.

  Over the next few weeks the children’s home filled up with teenagers. Most children in care have someone they can call family. I had no one.

  CHAPTER 15

  Meet me by the morning

  On the corner of night

  Where mist rises

  And hope’s in sight

  Peter Libbey was my first friend. He was half Chinese, half English. He was a year older than me, and his sister, Michelle, was a year older than him. ‘Libbey’ took one look at me, and with a big open smile he pronounced in a broad Leigh accent, ‘Right. Chalky White. That’s you. Chalky.’ And from then on ‘Chalky White’ – that stereotypically lazy, drug-taking West Indian character created by a popular white TV comedian at the time – was my nickname. Every boy wants a nickname. I loved it!

  Libbey introduced me to the new world. He wasn’t necessarily the hardest guy or the angriest guy in the home, but he was the funniest. And he was a rugby player. Rugby was the number one sport in Leigh. We’d often go to Kirkhall Lane to watch the game. Libbey was highly intelligent, like the Artful Dodger. He was a survivor and a grafter. He worked hard to make people like him. By calling me ‘Chalky – my mate’, he was shoring up against what he knew would be a tirade of unbridled racism. He was getting me to stand up to the inevitable. If I couldn’t take a joke I would be in for a rough ride. Libbey was giving out a message to everyone not to mess with Chalky ’cause he’s Libbey’s mate and he’s all right. I’ll never be able to thank him enough for what lay beneath this christening. Eventually I came to hate the nickname but I can see now what Libbey was doing. And I appreciate it.

  He showed me all the creaks in the upstairs landing. He taught me how to walk across it at night without a sound. His sister, was in the girls’ bedrooms and they’d sit up all night chatting. There were three huge boys’ dormitories on one side of the landing and the same for the girls on the other. Between four and seven of us per bedroom. I hardly slept for the first month. The sheets were stiff and forbidding. The blankets were scratchy. The base was just slats of hard wood. The mattresses were thin. The first thing the staff taught me was how to make hospital corners. These were checked by the staff every morning and if they were not done right the sheets were ripped off the bed.

  Any one of us could disappear at any minute. We pressed our faces to the windows whenever a car arrived. Who’s next? Who’s disappearing next? We were the children of the film La Cité des Enfants Perdus (The City of Lost Children). Within a week I got the picture. The children’s home was a holding pen.

  It was a matter of days before I saw the first explosion. It happened in the dining room. There were about twenty of us in Woodfields. A tall, quiet boy called Red stood up, He flipped the dining table onto its back and kicked his chair against the wall. Mr Harding burst into the room, grabbed him and wrestled him to the floor. Red fought back but it was impossible to fight against Mr Harding’s trained technique. A report would be written about Red. There would be consequences. He would disappear. We knew. We all knew that this place wasn’t interested in our trauma. The institution wanted us to shuffle through the days and nights, fulfilling the rotas and jobs with no trouble, and then disappear. I had to pretend that I was okay and hope that my smile would last.

  Norman Mills, my social worker, didn’t understand that my foster parents had no intention of taking me back. I didn’t understand it either. I couldn’t imagine that I’d never be able to return. My social worker had no idea they had indoctrinated me into believing that I had evil inside me and that the evil had chosen to leave them. So I fought the ‘evil’ without knowing what it was and ran away – to them – to say please help me. I had no one else to run away to.

  A foster child will expose the cracks in the familial veneer. Insomuch as the foster child is a cipher to the dysfunction of a family and also a seer. But the responsibility is too great for a child and so he finds himself manipulated and blamed for what he exposes by the simple virtue of innocence. The wrath this innocence incurs is deep and dark.

  My foster parents said they were my parents for ever. They taught me to say ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’. They trained me. They said they were mine for ever because my birth mother didn’t want me. They were my mum and dad. The reason I am writing this book is so that they can get a clear idea of what happened. They stole the memory of me from me. The only sense I received from them was the sense that I should disappear.

  The second of May 1980 was nineteen days before my birthday.

  21 May 1980

  My first birthday in the children’s home. No one called.

  CHAPTER 16

  I work in rain said the storm

  Thunder broke his heart

  I woke in light said dawn

  And spun the sun in the dark

  I quickly learned my place with rotas and bells and wake-up time and supper time and shoe-shine time and teatime and hospital corners and kitchen duties. My life became a set of systems and my existence was defined by how well I performed them. No love. When I cheekily challenged the staff about why they chose this as their career they would say, ‘I do this job because I love children.’ In all my time in the children’s home they never said, ‘I’m in this job because I love you.’ I was becoming invisible. I had been in Woodfields for eleven months.

  12 December 1980

  When the giant triangle rang out for dinner the house sprang to life. Kids raced downstairs from the bedrooms, upstairs from the cellar, swooped down the bannister, dived inside from the garden, through the back door, through the front door, through the cellar windows, off the roof and through the fire escape, off the trees, every which way to the dining room. Someone crashed into the back of me, deliberately, in the hallway. It was Danny – arms too long, legs too long, bad skin, bad teeth. I turned around, indignant. He looked at me as if to say, What?

  Two hours after dinner was suppertime. Hot chocolate and a biscuit. There were two suppers for different ages. After supper we watched TV in our pyjamas and then to bed and lights out.

  Christmas Eve, 1980

  My social worker sees what the Greenwoods are doing to me, and the superficiality. If they kept their hands by their sides they hoped that I would realise that I was hugging them but they were not hugging me. I wasn’t going to ask my social worker if I could visit them for Christmas. I wanted them to ask me not to be alone on Christmas Day. So I did what they wanted. I stayed away. As impossible as it was to understand I grasped the idea that I wasn’t welcome. I was not welcome.

  Children from homes all over the North West were taken to Blackpool in a convoy of black cabs and Rotary coaches to see Lancashire legends and national heroes Cannon and Ball that summer. Lenny Henry was their special guest star. Mid-perf
ormance Lenny did a bit of what’s called ‘crowd surfing’. With his open and smiling face he said, ‘I need one of you on stage.’ He theatrically cast his eye from left to right with his hand shielding the light as if for a better look. A Mexican wave of hands flew into the air: me me me me me! But all the children in our group screamed at Lenny and pointed at me: him him him him him!

  Memories in care are slippery because there’s no one to recall them with as the years pass. In a few months I would be in a different home with a different set of people who had no idea of this moment. How could it matter if no one recalls it? Given that staff don’t take photographs it was impossible to take something away as a memory. This is how you become invisible. It isn’t the lack of photographs that erodes the memory. It is the underlying unkindnesses, which make you feel as though you don’t matter enough. This is how to quietly deplete the sense of self-worth deep inside a child’s psyche. This is how a child becomes hidden in plain sight. Family is just a set of memories disputed, resolved or recalled between one group of people over a lifetime, isn’t it? And if there is no one to care enough to dispute, resolve or recall the memory, then did it happen? I had to check with Wikipedia to see if Lenny Henry ever even played Blackpool. It’s there. It’s right there in Wikipedia.

  ‘You! What’s your name?’ Lenny Henry was talking to me. I couldn’t reply because the others were shouting ‘Norman. Noooorman’.

  ‘Right then, Norman, come up here then,’ he said, and so I got out of my seat, walked down the aisle and up the steps. Up until that point I was nervous, but on the stage I was unafraid. I was home. The stage lights only made me shine. Look at this man. He’s black like me. And he’s a star. My first time on a professional stage was with Lenny Henry. And I can’t remember any more than that.