by Hannah Lowe
♠
Nan died just after I began school. Cotton Lane Primary. Days of tapping the xylophone and cake-baking – soft pink and yellow sponges I took home wrapped in foil. Gymnastics, painting, Christmas mobiles made from wire coat hangers and tinsel, angels cut from silver cardboard. I can’t remember learning to read or write or do sums, only the classroom’s corner library of bright picture books, the sugar-paper walls, the neat click of the abacus on the teacher’s desk.
The children in my class are locked in time, back in that classroom with their paintbrushes and potato printers, sat in their little chairs, or lined up at the wall ready to be led to the school hall or playground. I don’t know any of them now or where they are, what happened to them. My best friend was Mina, a Pakistani girl who wore pink plastic clips in her hair and had tiny, furry wrists. She was so light. I used to swing her on the field, round and round, her head thrown back laughing. There were lots of Pakistani children, children from India and Bangladesh, Sikh boys with topknots, girls who wore saris beneath their winter parkas. I was fascinated by the children who spoke different languages, walking home with their mothers or fathers, chatting in Gujarati or Urdu. Nirpal Singh gave me Punjabi lessons as we sat on the bench in the playground watching the others kick a tennis ball around. He taught me how to count from one to ten and every swear word he could think of. There were black children too, whose parents came from Africa or the Caribbean, like my father: Marvin Pearl, who told me he loved me in the stock cupboard, who saved me his biscuit at milk-time and tried to hold my hand.
My mother had a new job teaching at my school and that was the reason I was there. I had swapped schools, making it easier for her to bring me with her in the morning. We walked the mile from our house. Sam had stayed at the school where she had taught before, because he’d been there for years and could walk there by himself. We didn’t get on, or rather he didn’t get on with me. Like lots of little sisters, I worshipped my brother and wanted to endear myself to him. Despite, or perhaps because of this, he found me intensely annoying, an annoyance which most often expressed itself as a Chinese burn to my wrist or a quick jab in the ribs. His temper was changeable, from a relaxed coolness to sudden black anger. I put him on a pedestal but I was scared of him. I was glad he wasn’t at my new school.
My mother’s income provided stability, but even if it hadn’t, she would have wanted to work. She loved teaching, she loved the children at Cotton Lane and all the challenges that went with teaching children who couldn’t speak English well, or refugee children who were often traumatised.
She ran a gardening club for the worst behaved in the school – local children, more often than not – my little delinquents, she called them. I’d watch from my classroom as she led them across the asphalt to the school’s small garden, where they would plant raspberries and runner beans and fight over whose shoots were whose or where the boundaries of each child’s patch lay. There were biters and spitters and scratchers in her wayward cohort. She spent much of the time keeping the peace.
Her work was consuming. The hours were long, and most mornings she left my father a note with a list of instructions for when he woke: Defrost chicken. Pick up dry-cleaning. Book dentist. It suited her to have him at home taking care of the domestic tasks, and he didn’t seem to mind. Just as my mum was a liberal thinker, my dad was open-minded about gender roles. He always cooked dinner. He tidied up and hung the washing out. He liked to experiment with making puddings and cakes – his ‘colonial fusions’, he called them. Traditional English puddings with a Jamaican twist – coconut sponge, ginger roly poly.
At the end of the school day, my father usually picked me up because my mother had to stay for meetings or to plan lessons. I’d come through the gates to find him waiting, occasionally on foot but usually parked up with the radio on, a cigarette in the hand on the steering wheel. ‘Hello, Han!’ he always chimed as I appeared at the school gate or by the side of his car with my satchel and lunch box. ‘Hello, Han!’, as though he hadn’t seen me in years and what a surprise it was for us to bump into each other. All my life he greeted me this way, whether I’d been upstairs in my bedroom for an hour or, years later, flying back from a year living in California to find him, unexpectedly, waiting for me at the airport arrival gates. He was in his seventies by then, and dying, stood looking out for me in his old mustard cardigan, his hair gone wild and cartoonish. We never hugged or touched. ‘Hello, Han!’ he said, reaching out his thin arms to help me with my suitcase.
♥
‘Is that your dad?’ Solomon Kallakuri asked me one morning as we hung our coats on the pegs in the cloakroom. We were six. Solomon was my new friend since we’d been paired on a school trip to the farm, ordered to walk round hand in hand. He wasn’t white but he wasn’t black either, or Pakistani, and I still don’t know where his tanned skin came from, or his surname. He had a cheeky face with big, thick eyebrows that joined in the middle. ‘Yes,’ I said, but I didn’t say anything more, knowing only that I couldn’t lie, though I’d have liked to. We went into the classroom. Later, washing our paintbrushes at the sink, Solomon had more to say:
‘Your dad looks really old,’ he said. ‘How old is he?’
My dad was really old, I knew that. ‘I think he’s sixty.’
His eyebrow went up. ‘That’s well old! That’s older than my grandad.’
This wasn’t the first time I’d had this conversation. ‘My mum’s not that old,’ I offered, as though it might compensate for the outrage of my dad’s years.
‘And he’s black.’ He turned off the tap. ‘It’s weird that he’s your dad.’ He was dabbing his brushes on the rainbow-blurred kitchen roll at the side of the sink.
♣
‘Mum, am I half-caste?’ She was washing up, lost in thought. ‘Mum!’ I spoke louder. I had just returned from a sleepover at Anna Faulkner’s house, where her dad had expressed surprise after he’d seen my father dropping me off. ‘I didn’t know you were a half-caste,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘You look English, doesn’t she, Pam?’ Pam was Anna’s mother, a nervous woman with fluttery hands who looked even more flustered at her husband’s remarks. I said nothing, carefully carving the steamed kidneys we were having for dinner. They were disgusting but I forced them down out of politeness. Anna’s dad also whispered I was ‘very pretty’ the moment Anna and her mother left the room to fix the pudding. I’d found this more disquieting and decided not to mention it. ‘Am I half-caste, Mum? Yes or no?’
‘No, love. That’s not a nice term. You’re not half anything.’
‘But am I half Jamaican?’
‘Well, your dad is from Jamaica. But his dad was Chinese, and his mum was black, which makes you part white, part Chinese and part Jamaican.’ Right. My mother had it sorted. Jamaican was synonymous with black, then, I assumed, and since my father was from Jamaica, and looked like a black man, that part made sense. But the Chinese aspect always threw me a little, since my father didn’t look like other Chinese people I knew, like Eileen Ng in my class at school with her shiny flat hair. And my father never mentioned anything about China or his Chinese father. As far as I knew, he couldn’t speak Chinese. China showed itself in the ornate chopsticks we kept alongside the knives and forks in the cutlery drawer and the small bowls painted with red and gold dragons he sometimes ate Chinese food from. And he liked to drink jasmine tea from little porcelain cups. I did too. Steaming cups of aromatic tea. The twig-like leaves sunk to the bottom and looked like tiny bird’s nests.
But Jamaica, Jamaica. I knew the sound of the word long before I had any clear idea where Jamaica was, who lived there, or why my father had come all the way from that island in the sun to Ilford, Essex. Jamaica showed itself in the sing-song lilt he would sometimes put on to make us laugh. He was rarely jovial, but occasionally after dinner he might lean his head back and break into an old calypso song about a woman selling herbs and weeds at the village market:
She had the man piaba, woman piaba, Tan
tan, Fallback and Lemon Grass,
Minnie Root, Gully Root, Grannie Back Bone,
Bitter Tally, Lime Leaf and Toro, Coolie Bitters, Caralia Bush,
Flat o’ the Earth and Iron Weed, Sweet Broom, Fowl Tongue, Wild Daisy, Sweet Sage …
I loved the names of these weeds, imagining what they looked like and what magic they held, but my father loved the final line the most, as though he sang the whole song through just to reach a climax we never found as funny as he did:
The only one she didn’t have … was the wicked ganja weed!
He would hold his stomach and fall around laughing.
Jamaica also revealed itself on the telephone – long conversations in the hall where he would suddenly switch to a thick Jamaican accent. I stood listening through a crack at the dining-room door. Was he talking to someone actually in Jamaica, I wondered, picturing a payphone below a palm tree on a beach, turquoise sea in the background, and the man who had decided to phone his long-lost friend Ralph standing there shouting into the receiver, ‘Man, long time no see!’ Now I realise it was often his cousin Dolores in Canada. Other times it was London-based West Indians, as he called them (and himself), discussing some business of home or family but more likely a card game, or a dice table someone needed making, or a croupier wanted for an all-night game.
Jamaica named itself most regularly at dinner time. My father loved to cook and he loved to boast about his cooking. ‘I can cook anything,’ he said. ‘I don’t need a recipe! Trust me, I know what I’m doing!’ He did most of the cooking in the week, an arrangement that fitted my parents’ disparate lifestyles – my mother at work all day while he went out gambling after dinner, returning around dawn to sleep through to lunchtime. Before she came home from work he’d already be at the stove, lifting the lid of a pan of rice and peas, stirring chicken, chopping ginger, crushing star anise. He concocted soups and stews of yam and dumpling, back bacon flavoured with pig-snout and pig-tail, or fried johnny cakes of flour and salt to dip in stewed tomato – poor man’s food, he called these – the fare of the field workers from his childhood.
His cooking had legendary status among my mother’s friends, other teachers who came often for dinner. They were solid left-wing women like her who wore floaty clothes and ethnic earrings, who cooed over my father’s culinary inventiveness, his knack of making everything taste good. It was at these times I could see my mother was proud to be married to a Jamaican man. He’d cook lavish dishes – mainly Caribbean food but sometimes Chinese food too – nothing like Chinese takeaway, but salty won ton soup or steamed egg that had the consistency of slime but tasted delicious. Sometimes he returned from the butcher with a whole pork belly, rubbing salt and five-spice into the skin, stringing it across the oven to roast all afternoon. My mother was less pleased with this – the sizzling pork filling the kitchen with smoke, spitting fat onto the oven that someone, i.e. me, will have to scrub off, she said.
She also objected to the sweet sausages of pork and chilli he made every summer and hung in clusters on our washing line to dry and preserve. Nan was dead by this time but if she hadn’t been, she might have dropped down from a heart attack to see those sausages hanging in the garden. They were a deep, dark red, gristly looking with twisted ends and oily skins, swinging in the English breeze. In Jamaica, the hot sun would have dried them out nicely, but here they hung limply for a week between the bed-sheets and tea-towels and might easily be ruined by a sudden downpour. I can still see him pulling the back door open, crying, ‘Oh no, oh no!’ and running down the path through the rain to pull the clothes pegs from the strings and shelter his precious sausages in his shirt. My mother’s objection was never specified, but I suspect she found them a troubling symbol of my father’s exoticism in Ilford and his efforts to save them an embarrassing spectacle in front of the neighbours.
The cooking arrangements in our house were unlike those of my friends, whose fathers didn’t cook and whose mothers, for the most part, served up bland dinners of fish fingers and peas, pizza, chicken nuggets, everything with chips and everything English, except chilli con carne or spaghetti bolognese. We ate English food as well. My mother liked us to eat traditional Sunday lunch together, and on Sunday evenings, when my father was always out playing cards, a tea of egg sandwiches, buttered scones and fruitcake, accompanied by endless cups of strong teapot tea. I hated this ritual. It went hand in hand with the awful dullness of Sundays and the night-before-school feeling. Sam and I would disagree, arguments that often ended in violence, then an hour of tears before The Antiques Roadshow and Last of the Summer Wine, and maybe before that Songs of Praise, because my mother liked the singing. All of this had the effect of making Sundays more English than other days, but it was an Englishness I had little experience of – countryside and church halls and cake sales and boredom – an Englishness I didn't want to know about, not from the television, and definitely not in real life.
My mother was also enthusiastic about frozen food. This was the 1980s and a trip to Sainsbury’s Freezer Centre delivered different delights each week. ‘Try these,’ she said, marvelling at the crunchiness of Findus crispy pancakes or Birds Eye potato waffles, or the convenience of Brussels sprouts and chopped carrots you didn’t have to peel. When my father was older, and in fact, when he could no longer eat very much – the doctors took half his stomach, trying to remove all the cancer cells – his enthusiasm for food unsurprisingly diminished, and he resorted to the freezer when he had to cook dinner, serving up anaemic sausages and pale oven chips. By then he was uninterested in the whole ritual of dinner time and if we ate at the table, he would excuse himself halfway through, his plate still full, and sit a way off, thumbing the paper or watching television as though eating was no longer something that he could be wholly concerned with – his stomach had betrayed him.
I think my father must have learned to cook because he had to. He left Jamaica in 1947, sailing to Liverpool on the HMS Ormonde, one of the immigrant boats before the Empire Windrush. Over a hundred young men were on board, hoping for better opportunities in England. My father had lived with his friend Lionel in a damp cellar with one bed they had to share. I see the two of them in the drab light of their digs, frost on the windows, cooking on a single hotplate – simple, inexpensive food. And I remember the one-man meals my father would cook for himself when he was home alone – a tin of sardines steamed over a pan of rice, potato hash cakes, callaloo mashed with nutmeg. He never spoke about this period of his life and much of what I know is gleaned from my mother – how he came to London, found a job as a shunter at King’s Cross, joining and decoupling the heavy steel train carriages. She told me how he hated that work – a whole winter when he bandaged his hands and wore two pairs of gloves to protect his fingers, but how they still cracked and bled from pulling the freezing metal.
There are no letters from this time and few photographs, apart from his old passport and two pictures of his mother, Hermione Harriott. I loved looking at the images of my other grandmother, long dead, the Nan I would never meet. In one, she stares face-on into the camera. She is very light-skinned but her features are African – a broad nose, high cheekbones, wide lips. Her hair is pinned in a chignon and she wears a white lace dress, her best perhaps, as though the taking of the portrait was an important occasion. Her young face has a kind, dignified look. The resemblance between her and my father is strong. The other photograph is from a wedding. Hermione is dressed in an organza frock on the left side of the bride, her niece, but her face is fixed in an angry frown, whereas the other guests are smiling. My father told me that his mother disapproved of the groom, because her niece, in her view, was marrying down. In the strict shade hierarchy of Jamaica, the paler you were the better – the higher in class, the more socially superior – and the groom in the photo, compared to his bride, is much darker.
But surely these intricacies of shade and colour are unpredictable? I used to look for myself in the image of Hermione, but there is little likeness. I a
m white, fair-haired, green-eyed. No one would ever think I was mixed race. I wonder if my father cared that my brother and I looked so white, if he wanted us to look more like him, more easily recognisable as his children. That question – ‘Is that your dad?’ – was a common one throughout my childhood. It came from children at school who, not bound by the laws of polite social interaction, looked at me with that old black man and wondered aloud what their parents would think, but not dare say.
♦
Charlie White was never reticent in his opinions. A scholar of the ‘university of life’, he had a range of hare-brained theories about the world and universe. His views on racial mixing were extraordinary, and more so that he would share them with my family and me. ‘Look, it’s like this,’ he said one day while my father was making us tea. ‘You like dogs. You buy a dog. Let’s say you buy an Alsatian. Great big dog, big ears, slobbering tongue – you know the deal. Let’s say your neighbour’s got a Chihuahua – a little poncy dog, cross-eyed. Now they’re both dogs, right? But they’re different breeds. They’re different species. You’re not gonna mate them. There’s no way you’re gonna mate them. Cos what would you get?’
‘A medium dog?’ I asked. ‘But a weird-looking one.’
‘Precisely!’ He looked pleased, as though I had proved his point. ‘Weird is the key word. It wouldn’t be right, would it? I’m not a racist, but it’s the same thing with humans. We’re from different parts of the world, we’re from different civilisations. Some of us need to be out in the sun so we’ve got black skin. Others live where it’s cold, like this poncing country, so we’re white.’ He prodded himself. ‘Then you’ve got your Indians, your Pakistanis, all different, job done. But we’re not meant to mate, no way. I’ve read a book about it. I’ve thought about it. It’s not about race, it’s the same with dogs – we’re just different breeds, it’s obvious.’
