by Hannah Lowe
♥
I hated Pinners from the moment I started there – the uniform code with its pedantic requirements for hair accessories to be only brown, box pleat skirts to be two inches below the knee at least, girls’ shoes to be chosen from a selection available at Wards of Upminster, the ancient department store which stocked the school’s uniform. On the third floor, my mother bought me a pair of ugly buckled sandals called ‘Clarissa’. ‘They’re not too bad,’ she said, and I agreed, in so far as they were styled more attractively than the lace-up ‘Veronica’s or ‘Lucy’s I’d tried on, which made my big feet look like lumps of wood.
I only wanted to go to Pinners because my cousins did. At eleven years old, I didn’t care about the school’s long tradition of academic excellence, its national reputation for sport. And although the school booklet said I should be proud to wear the Pinners coat of arms embossed on the breast pocket of my blazer, I didn’t really give a hoot. I hated that the teachers wore academic gowns and mortar boards as though they were Oxford scholars, marching briskly down the wood-panelled corridors, sweeping dramatically into classrooms, expecting us to stop whatever we were doing and stand up to show them our respect, until they told us we could sit down again. I hated that I was meant to care about the history and reputation of the school, that I was meant to feel myself esteemed in some way, privileged to be there, that I should consider myself somehow above the other children who had not been selected by Pinners, like Sam perhaps, that I was expected to look down on the pupils of other local schools, with whom we had great rivalry. With this as our unofficial ethos, was it any surprise we were hated by the pupils of nearby schools? I didn’t blame them.
♣
I made my first friend in Claudia Dean, the only black girl in my class. Her parents were Jamaican but had divorced. She lived with her mother and her white stepfather. I still have a photograph of her and me sat at the dinner table in my house. She has short cropped hair and wears a lime green blouse with a gold brooch at the neck. We are pulling faces at the camera. ‘She’s a lovely girl, isn’t she? Nice mum too,’ my mother said when Claudia went home. Our mothers had stood at the doorway discussing the school and work. Her mother was a social worker.
Claudia was a really nice girl. Gossipy and excitable. She sort of fizzed. But she had trouble at home, not getting on with her stepfather, and she didn’t like Pinners either, had an irreverence similar to mine. My first report said I was an instigator of low-level classroom disturbance, meaning I talked when I should have been listening, and did stupid things like flick fountain-pen ink across the classroom, once onto the back of a teacher’s shirt. Claudia didn’t do the daft things I did, but she was loud and outspoken, refusing to automatically accept the school’s authority and its endless, pointless rules.
Then one day she had a fight with a boy, a bully from another form. There were rarely fights at Pinners, and never between a boy and a girl. A rumour went through the classrooms at lunchtime. Someone said the boy had lost a tooth. Good old Claudia, I thought, both excited and repelled by the news. I'd never fought, except with Sam. It seemed a serious thing, something from the adult world. She wasn't in class that afternoon. I phoned her that evening but there was no reply. I phoned the next night and she told me that Rhys had called her names, but she didn't say what. I saw her the next day outside the school office. Then she was gone. Her mother phoned my mother and told her they'd decided Claudia would be better off elsewhere, but we should stay in touch. I had a book of hers, a Judy Blume I knew she'd want back. But I didn't phone, not that week or the next, and somehow we never spoke again.
♦
It was around this time my father gave me a book, an unusual occurrence as he rarely showed an interest in what I was reading. The book was as thick as the Bible with a dark purple cover. Its title was Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith. ‘I want you to read this,’ he said seriously. He was wearing his reading glasses. ‘It’s well researched and well argued. Everyone should read it.’
I took the book up to my bedroom, but every time I tried to read the introduction, I’d get lost. The words were too complicated, the subject too dry, like all the books my father chose to read – long biographies of socialist politicians or histories of labour movements. His appetite for politics and current affairs was seemingly insatiable. He read the Guardian every day from cover to cover and always had a stack of books on his bedside table, while I was still reading Enid Blyton and progressing onto Judy Blumes. Still, I appreciated owning The Case Against God. I felt it confirmed my family’s creed, rebelling against Pinners, a school so proud of its Church of England ethos. Now, when other people declared their Christianity or Hinduism, I would announce my atheism, as though it were my faith.
A few weeks later my mother gave me a letter to give to Mr Harrington, my head of year. ‘What does it say?’ I said suspiciously.
‘Your dad wants you to be exempted from saying the Lord’s Prayer in assembly, which means you’ll have to miss assembly altogether.’ My mother sighed. ‘This is a permission letter.’
Once again, it seemed my father had spoken in regard to my education, but this time it was in my favour. I hated assembly, less because of the Lord’s Prayer than because it was half an hour sat cross-legged on the cold, hard gymnasium floor. My fathered hovered in the doorway, avoiding eye contact with my mother. ‘No more Lord’s Prayer for you, Han!’ he said jollily.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘If you say so.’ This was all very strange. ‘Thanks, Dad.’
♠
If my mother resented my father’s part-time parenting, she rarely said so. In fact, she didn’t say much about his absences, the petty criminality, his dubious living. Hers was a conflicted position. When he did try to assert himself as a father, she supported him. When he didn’t, she tried to fill his shoes. If she begrudged the countless nights he was away from her and us, the solution – that he stay home – meant we’d be poor. It was only years later that she told me how hard it was. I missed out, she said. You children missed out. He knew it too. But what could we do? Of course, it wasn’t just that my father was a part-time parent. He was a part-time husband too.
There was often a tense atmosphere at Ashgrove Road, my father in the proverbial doghouse for reasons unnamed, and occasionally my mother’s frustrations spilled over. There were rows. Not cross words that easily erased themselves after an hour or two, but full-on rages. Once, from my bedroom, I heard the sounds of smashing china and crept downstairs to find my mother launching cups at my father, who was ducked behind the kitchen counter.
‘You useless bastard!’ she shouted.
‘Bet!’ my father implored. A sea of broken china surrounded him. ‘Calm down, will you please? Calm down!’ He raised his head above the counter to meet her eye.
‘Don’t you tell me to calm down!’ She lifted another mug from the draining board and launched it at the wall, too angry to aim properly.
‘You’re bloody mad!’ my father shouted. ‘Do you want to kill me?’
‘Yes!’ she cried. Another crash.
Neither of them noticed me, watching from the hall. I had no idea what they were rowing about. I crept upstairs.
Other times, they were the best of friends. My mother loved gardening, and after Nan died she took over the long back garden behind Ashgrove Road. It was a lovely garden, with a pond and a rockery. An old cherry tree stood at the end of the lawn. Behind it, my mother kept a vegetable plot between the shed and Nan’s old greenhouse with its rickety frame.
My father helped out in the garden. They spent most Sundays out there – wrapped in big coats when it was cold, gloves and wellies on. My father would dig where my mother told him to, load up the compost, go down on his knees to pull up weeds. It was his job to make the autumn bonfires, a task he relished. I stood between them on those cold evenings, marvelling at the flames, the lovely warmth of the fire. My enthusiasm for bonfires ended abruptly when one of my parents – it was never made clear w
hich, though I suspect my father – threw a cardboard box containing Doug, our hibernating tortoise, onto the pyre – an accident so horrendous no one spoke of it afterwards. We found the remnants of his cremation among the ashes the next day.
My mother ordered a new greenhouse when the great storm of 1987 made the old one keel over. Some of the glass panes cracked, others were loose and threatened to fall out. The new one arrived in twenty different cardboard boxes the delivery men propped on our patio. There was a thick manual of assembly instructions.
‘Destructions, more like,’ my mother said. ‘God knows how we’ll put it together.’
She needn’t have worried. My father erected it for her the next day while she was at work. It must have taken him hours. She was amazed
‘Did you do it on your own?’ she said disbelievingly as we all stood in the greenhouse. It was much bigger than the old one, with a small porch and a wooden slatted floor.
‘Yes, just me,’ he said. ‘See what I do for you?’
‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘It’s like a bloody palace!’
‘Oh it wasn’t too hard,’ he said. ‘I knew you’d be pleased.’ He patted her waist as he stepped outside to light his cigarette.
♥
‘Your homework is to write an essay about someone in your family,’ Mr Apricot said, chalking instructions onto the board, ‘and link it with an important event or events in history.’ His yellow moustache was so thick you couldn’t see his mouth. It moved when he spoke. ‘Go home and talk to your mums and dads – you might be surprised.’ The bell rang and the chairs scraped back. We pushed each other out into the corridor.
I didn’t go home and talk to my parents but I did write an essay about my father. I must have known enough to write about his Anglocentric education in the colonial system, which taught him little about the struggles of his own island, but plenty about the lineages of English royalty – he could name in order every single king and queen since William the Conqueror, and all the countries in the Commonwealth. I wrote about his reverence for the institutions of England and how he’d taught himself to speak English ‘like a gentleman’. I wrote about his schooling in colonial Jamaica where he’d learned poems by heart to recite for competitions – always English poetry about places and things he had never seen, like ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ or ‘Daffodils’ by Wordsworth. Sometimes he would recite ‘If’, an ironic choice, given Kipling’s ambiguous association with the British Empire. He would stand at the dining-room table, delivering the lines in his best English accent. I wrote about the ship he took from Kingston to Liverpool, believing that England would welcome him, only to be shocked by the hostility and prejudice he encountered, not only in finding a place to live, but also by people shouting racist insults at him in the street.
When I got the essay back, Mr Apricot had circled ‘Anglocentric’ in red pen with a question mark and a comment: ‘Not a proper word.’ I stuffed the essay in my bag. Even then I knew there was a heavy irony here – that my dusty, English History teacher pacing to and fro before the blackboard in this dusty, English school would have no need to know a word that just confirmed his position and privilege in the centre.
♣
There was no doubt that Upminster was a whiter place than Ilford, but the racial demographic of Pinners was disproportionate – there were only one or two black faces in each year, and with Claudia gone, there were none in our year. Of course, I looked white, so anyone might wonder why it mattered to me. Was it that I didn’t feel white? At Cotton Lane, everyone knew my father was black and I was surrounded by people who had origins all over the world. But at Pinners, something told me I’d be better off keeping my background to myself.
The schools were only eleven miles apart but Upminster is further into Essex than Ilford, at the end of the A124 – halfway to Grays and Thurrock. Most of the pupils at Pinners came from Upminster or round about – Hornchurch, Cranham, Emerson Park, relatively well-off neighbourhoods, but still within a stone’s throw of poorer places such as Harold Hill and parts of Romford. That whole area of Essex, from Ilford heading east, was sometimes called the Essex Corridor. The term white flight was applied here, meaning the migration of the white working classes out of the East End and into Essex, along that corridor, seeking to escape the influx of migrants into London. Lots of the children at Pinners came from such a background, had parents or even grandparents who’d moved out from Aldgate, Bow or Stepney Green. Others had families who’d been in Essex for years and years. But whatever the case, the diversity I’d known before had disappeared, and in its place I found a casual but pervasive racism.
The curriculum at Cotton Lane had been multicultural, responding to the shifts of ethnicities in the area the school served, the high proportion of children whose parents came from India or Pakistan or a country in Africa. The teachers liked the pupils to talk about their backgrounds and we learned about different cultures. I don’t think it occurred to me that I was English or white in any self-conscious way, or if it did, it didn’t matter. I saw myself as part of a big mix of children and I loved to learn about the way other people lived.
We did projects on the plight of Native Americans and read Jamaican folk stories and poetry. In maths we learned how the number 0 came from India and how the abacus came from China and Egypt. Later, this type of education was nicknamed the ‘Sari, Samosa and Steel Band’ approach, seen as tokenism, inadequate to address the real inequality between cultures and races. But perhaps what went on at Cotton Lane was a start. There was something in the spirit of that school that was really positive – a tolerance, a notion that difference was good, a disdain of racism and prejudice. At six or seven, the worst thing we could accuse each other of was being a racist, or a rachist or racialist as most of us mispronounced. ‘You’re a rachist! I’m telling Miss!’ We couldn’t always say it right, but we knew what it meant and we knew it was wrong.
At Pinners, that spirit was gone. It was a monocultural school and any efforts to look beyond this were always academic, never real, never lived. I missed the mix of people. I missed the sense that I was part of a world far bigger than Ilford or Upminster. At Cotton Lane I saw outside my own small place, reminded every day that there were other people and far-off places. Perhaps at heart, I missed my friends: Mina, Solomon, Marvin. Even Lucien. They’d all gone to Hope Park, and despite our promises, we hadn’t stayed in touch.
After Claudia had left, I became friends for a time with Frankie, who lived in Harold Wood with her mum Viv and three brothers, and their mum’s boyfriend Carl, who was twenty years younger than her, and wore black varnish and skinny jeans. I liked Viv. She had peroxide blonde hair and wore skin-tight gothic clothes, always joining in when we gave each other makeovers or backcombed our hair. She used to spray us with her perfume, put her feet up while we watched TV, drinking gin and tonics. She drew us into the adult world with advice about men.
‘Let them take you out and treat you nice, girls,’ she’d say in front of Carl, ‘but never get involved.’ I was only eleven, but appreciated her sagacity nonetheless. But after dinner, she might send us to get a bag of sweets or a can of Coke from the Paki shop, a term I knew was wrong, but couldn’t say so because Viv was an adult. And I was outnumbered – Frankie and her brothers said it too. Then Viv would curse the ‘bloody blacks’ who took her parking space in the shopping centre, or held the queue up in the post office, sending packages to ‘Zululand no doubt’.
Another time, when I told Kevin Morris in my class that my family lived in Ilford, he said, ‘Oh, my dad says Ilford’s a right dump – loads of coons and Pakis there, like a bloody jungle!’ Those terms and phrases were used so nonchalantly. For half of the second year, the accusation ‘Jew-boy!’ was in vogue, so if, for example, Mark Parker dropped his lunch money on the floor and bent to pick it up, Tim Sanders might shout out ‘Look he’s picking up his pennies off the floor – what a Jew-boy!’
Looking back, I can’t remember how often
I heard this kind of prejudice or to what degree I’ve let those individual comments stand for the views of the majority. I was sensitive to it. I felt conflicted by it. The norm at the school was white and English, and by anybody's measure, from the outside, I looked normal. But inside, those comments really got to me. They made me feel protective of my father, protective about Soloman and Mina and Marvin. I felt protective about me.
♦
A man called Ray the Pilot was often on the telephone to my father at that time, and the two of them were in cahoots. Ray was from Texas but lived in Durham, near to an airbase from where he flew private jets for wealthy north-easterners. I’d met him once when he’d come to the house in his tan leather jacket and cowboy boots. He was tall and the boots made him taller. He had a suntan and floppy blond hair. He stayed for dinner, directing most of his conversation to my mother, whom he called Betty-Boo. He told stories about women he’d seduced from France to Russia to Thailand. What a pillock, she said when he left. Total sexist pig.
One evening, my dad put down a small suitcase in the hall. He’d polished his shoes for half an hour that afternoon, and now he had them on with his smart belted mac. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked him. I’d never seen him with a suitcase before.
‘Newcastle,’ he said, and winked at me. ‘To see a man about a dog.’ This was one of his favourite phrases. He was always vague about his evening jaunts, the proverbial dog often cited as a reason for his outings.
‘Oh right. If you say so.’ I was generally annoyed with my father these days, for reasons I couldn’t specify, and I wasn’t going to let him think I cared what he was up to.
‘See you, then,’ he said, picking up the suitcase. ‘Tell your mum I’ll be back on Thursday.’ It was Tuesday and my mother was at Keep Fit, bounding around in her new leotard and legwarmers.
‘Hmmm,’ I grunted as he shut the front door.
There would many more trips in the coming months. Newcastle again. Guernsey. Then Paris, then Berlin. No more explanation from him. My mother said he was ‘doing a bit of business’, whatever that might mean. Each time, I’d watch him straightening his coat in the hall mirror, the little suitcase at his feet. Then he was gone, just like that, just like a lodger.
