by Hannah Lowe
In my first days in America I thought of my father – the only person I knew who’d uprooted himself from one life to another – leaving Jamaica, his arrival in England. Had he felt what I felt now? I wondered. Disorientation, a sense of unreality, a longing for familiarity, any anchor of home.
A few weeks after I’d left, an airmail envelope arrived in the post. Inside was a long letter from my mother, telling me all the things she wished she’d said before I left, how she was suddenly lost for words as we drove away, how proud she was of me. It was uncharacteristically emotional.
And you know Dad’s proud of you too, she wrote. I know he can be a pain, but don’t forget he’s twenty years older than me and so pleased to see you both having chances and making the most of them. Things he never had a hope in hell of achieving. Think of where he came from – he regards your achievements as his, and in a way, they are.
I folded the letter neatly and slipped it into my desk drawer.
♣
In the end, Santa Cruz itself was a rollercoaster of hedonism, facilitated by a crowd of gregarious new friends who, like me, were off the leash, unbound to partake in a range of iniquitous pleasures I don’t think my parents would have been proud to see – whiskey and pear cider were my tipples at the local Irish bar, the only one in town that accepted my fake ID. My downtown room-mate funded his studies through drug-dealing, but was a pinnacle of abstinence himself. Such level-headed acumen was not my forte. I had a credit card that bore the brunt of my indulgences. I’d worry about the debt when I got home.
There were men I fell for. I always fell so hard. First Bill, ten years older, a college administrator. He was as lonely as I was, fresh from Boston with a broken heart. Then Peter, an art student who styled himself on Motown and made me mix tapes of Marvin Gaye and Al Green. He wanted to come to England the following year. It took me weeks to find the heart to tell him no. Then Richie, then Jake, then Saul from Costa Rica, a barman who played guitar and smoked cocaine. I wanted him the most.
My mother came to see me at Easter.
‘You’ve put on weight,’ she said, and she was right. I was drinking too much, not exercising, eating junk food. But she looked well, like a different woman. She’d given up smoking since I’d left, and lost two stone. We spent a weekend at Yosemite, a few days in San Francisco, a week in Santa Cruz. But away from home, my mother became shy – too reticent to ask directions or buy tickets or talk to strangers. I had to do it all. This wasn’t her territory, and it was strange to see her lack of confidence. Two weeks was a long time to chaperone. I wanted to get back to my friends.
I was young and high-living, I told myself, pursuing no-strings decadence. It was a year removed from real life. But when I look back, the good memories aren’t really good, not wholly good, more like a happy photograph where something bad lurks just outside the frame. I was learning that life was precarious, its foundations unstable. Somewhere in my consciousness, my father’s cancer skulked. I hadn’t forgotten the thin smile of his scar.
♦
Somehow I still managed to get top marks at Santa Cruz, proving that, for a time, the old ideal of work hard, play hard can be achieved, that a person can be two things at once. We had far more lectures than at Brighton, and a surprisingly radical course catalogue to choose from. I took yoga for a semester, the marks from which, albeit a tiny percentage, went towards my overall degree. Aside from this frivolity, I studied modules in Chicano writing, black American playwriting, ethnic memoir. Where the material conditions of black experience in America might still be unequal, the study of black culture and expression was sophisticated – way ahead of the UK. I was building a foundation in the study of black literature in its broadest sense, linked back to the interests I had developed in Brighton – how politics and literature aligned, how writing could resist oppression through testimony, dismantle stereotypes, challenge the status quo. It didn’t occur to me then that these interests might be personal, linked to my family history, my father’s life story. I couldn’t see the picture that broadly then.
I made it back from America in the nick of time. When classes finished I wasted two months partying, not eating enough, not sleeping enough, somewhere between adventurer and girl on self-destruct.
♠
I saw my father before he saw me at the airport, taking in his wild hair, his shoulders slumped as he stood searching the crowd in an echo of the day he’d dropped me off.
‘Hello, Han!’ he called as I walked over.
‘Hello, Dad,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Thought you’d like a lift,’ he said. ‘Good flight?’ We both knew a kiss or hug might fit this occasion better but awkward platitudes would suffice. I let him take my suitcase.
It had been my twenty-first birthday the day before, and to mark both that and my last day in America, a friend had driven me to a piercing parlour where a heavily tattooed man had driven a metal spike through the thick middle cartilage of my ear, fixing a stainless-steel ring in place. On the plane, I’d slept against it, but hadn’t noticed it had bled until I looked in the car’s wing mirror to see a thread of dried blood snaking down my neck and chest. It fitted the surreal drive home, the slate sky, the London streets looking particularly grey, my father full of gloomy prophesies.
‘Tony Blair will send Britain to the dogs,’ he declared on the motorway. ‘Everyone thinks he’s great, but mark my words, he’s bad news.’
I’d stayed up watching the elections a few months before, all the British students glued to the television screen as ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ played, and after eighteen years of Tory government, the newly elected Prime Minister walked onto stage to tell the nation a new dawn had broken.
‘But why do I care?’ my father continued. ‘I’m not long for the world. I doubt I’ll see next year.’ We crossed Tower Bridge, drove down the Romford Road, past the side streets where his old gambling haunts lay. He lit a cigarette, and I said nothing – no half-hearted reassurances, no expression of the irritation I felt. I was determined to be the cheerful returnee, pleased to see everyone – I forced myself to overlook the shadows on the picture.
By the time we reached Ilford, America already felt like a garish, edgy dream, and home a depressing reality. My father took up his place in his armchair, staring out of the window. I went up to my room. My mother had gifted my bed with sunny new sheets and pillow cases. I buried my face in them and cried.
♥
My last year of university was quieter. I rented a damp flat on the seafront, freezing cold through winter, but I loved the bracing sea wind, the trudge along the seafront where the burnt wreck of the West Pier stood in the water, starlings swooping around its charred frame.
I saw Adam now and again. He lived nearby, and I’d pop round for dinner, sitting with him in his room, listening to records like we used to. He was always so kind to me, not like the men I’d known abroad. His clear eyes looked at me and saw someone to be enthusiastic about. It always took me by surprise. ‘Shall we get back together?’ he asked one day. Even now I wonder how it would have been to say yes to someone so kind, how simple more time with him might have been.
But I said no. I wanted to be alone. America had left me with a hangover of sorts. I’d seen too much of the world, been too intrepid. I was more anxious, more prone to bouts of sadness that lasted for days. I wouldn’t have called it depression back then, but there was a seeping melancholy I found hard to shake. I lost interest in clubs and parties, slept a lot in my small room, and, strangely, started to go back to Ashgrove Road, often for weeks at a time. I found my parents’ presence comforting – even my father’s dejection was something solid to rely on. I played Scott Joplin on the piano and wrote my dissertation at the computer in the front room, my mother bringing cups of tea, my father cooking dinner, the three of us passing the evening watching TV.
My graduation was a long, formal affair in a seafront hotel. Afterwards, we gathered in the bar to celebrate. In th
e photographs my mother looks well and my father looks happy. I remembered my mother’s letter, her words about his pride in me. I was older now – why not let him feel my achievements as his own? It didn’t seem to matter now. He pulled a packet from his jacket pocket, a small parcel in white tissue paper that he held out to me. I unwrapped it to find a thin gold bracelet set with diamonds, a thread-like clasp, much more delicate than anything I owned. ‘George at the club had some rings and bracelets,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d like this one.’ He looked hopeful.
It might have been off the back of a lorry but I was touched. My mother always bought our birthday gifts, our Christmas gifts. It was the first thing he’d ever given me himself. ‘Thanks, Dad,’ I said, allowing him to do it up for me. ‘It’s lovely.’
Across the road from the hotel my friends and I stood on the shingle beach and tossed our mortar boards into the air for the camera. When I look at the picture, I see the carefree, cocky young things we were – shouting at the sky, on the verge of our adult lives.
16
1949
The boy was being shaken awake, a hand on his shoulder. ‘Chick, wake up, man!’
‘Eh?’ The boy rolled onto his back, squinting at the light sloping in through the small window, half blocked by the silhouette of the man standing over him. It was Lionel, a Trinidadian he’d met in London, his friend and roommate. ‘What time is it?’
‘Time for me to be asleep, and you to be standing here,’ Lionel said, jigging from foot to foot. ‘Come on, man, it’s freezing out here.’
The boy rolled up slowly from the warmth of the bed they shared in shifts, and Lionel jumped in, pulling the blankets up to his neck. He was taller than the boy and his big feet stuck out from the bed’s end. He wrestled with the blankets until he was covered head to toe. ‘Hmmm, good you keep it so warm for me.’ He said the same thing each morning, his eyes already closed.
The boy dressed in the corner of the room. Vest, shirt, overalls, two pairs of socks, boots, coat, two pairs of gloves, a woollen hat. The black bricks of the room were wet with trickling water, a sound they were both used to now. This was the coal cellar of a crumbling old Victorian house on a run-down street in Paddington. The old lady who owned it lived on the two floors above in rooms the boy had never seen. They could hear her wireless and her slow footsteps through the ceiling, but the door to the cellar was a separate one which she had told them they must use. Stone steps led from their room to a trapdoor into the house, but she had had it bolted down, as though she were scared of the two black men.
Every time the boy knocked on the door to pay her rent, her face froze with fear before she recognised him, taking the envelope quickly from his hand. ‘Everything all right down there?’ she’d say coyly, as though she couldn’t believe they’d pay the rent she’d asked and knew it was an outrage to let that dank cave to them, so cold their bare feet turned numb on the stone floor, no heating, no hot water, only a cold tap and plastic basin, a two-ring hotplate to cook on. She’d told them no women were allowed down there, no friends, no music, no late nights.
‘Yes, Ma’am,’ the boy would reply, silently cursing her. He had tried for two weeks to find a room – sleeping in a Lyon’s Corner House until the manager had asked him to leave, walking the streets, sleeping in the dance hall – before this greedy old lady with her rheumy eyes had opened the door to him. He knew he was lucky to have somewhere. No blacks, no dogs, no Irish. He’d seen the sign in ten windows, and each time his stomach flipped – was it him those signs were meant for? Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined they would be so unwelcome. Sometimes he couldn’t believe this was London, couldn’t believe this was England. But this was London – a grey and broken place after the war – gaps like missing teeth in the streets where houses used to stand, barbed wire cordoning off the bombsites of rubble in the street, paving stones cracked and warped underfoot.
The boy had stayed only a week in Liverpool in a run-down guest house on the dock. There had been no room at the boxers’ lodgings, their landlady had told them that the first day, eyeing the boy suspiciously. In the end, he’d taken the train to King’s Cross, marvelling at London’s vast brick buildings and the thousand chimneys spread on the horizon. He’d heard there was better pay here. All those chimneys must mean work, he thought, staring from the window and at the same time wondering where among those factories and houses a man might roll a dice or deal a hand of cards.
In the winter chill, he rode the bus across the Thames, back towards King’s Cross to his shift at the Somers Town Goods Yard. He worked there for months as a shunter, assembling and breaking up the strings of freight wagons, the first job the Labour Exchange had pulled up for him. Each day he ran along the tracks beside the moving trains, already loaded with fruit or bicycles or sacks of flour, a bar in his hands to turn the brakes, lifting his feet from the ground to ride the air until the wagon came to a halt. Then he’d lock it to another one – click-clack, click-clack – just as the next came into view, running the tracks from the marshalling yard.
It was hard work and dangerous. He’d seen another Jamaican fellow knocked to the ground unconscious by a wagon he couldn’t stop. They’d carried him off on a stretcher and the boy hadn’t seen him since. He hadn’t asked the other three men he worked with if they knew anything; knew they’d answer with only grunts or silence.
Harry was the worst. He said nothing to the boy’s face, but he’d stand with the other men at break, jibing at the black fellows in the yard. Beside the milk and fish depots was an enormous shed where crate upon crate of bananas ripened, waiting to be sold at the market next door.
‘Oi, Abdul!’ Harry would call at a black chap walking past, pointing at the banana shed. ‘Your lunch is in there!’
‘With the rest of the monkeys!’ another would call as they stood in their dirty clothes, laughing into their mugs of tea. They had nothing better to do.
Each month there were more Caribbean men at the yard, but still only a handful in the huge workforce. The boy knew them all. In this cold country, he was always grateful to see a black face. Sometimes he saw a black man on the other side of the street and called out to him, crossing over just to ask him where he came from and pass the time of day.
Of the white men, only Keith was different, and then only if the other two were gone. He was just nineteen and lived in Bow with his mother and grandparents. His father was missing in service. Some evenings it was just Keith and the boy on shift. They sat together at the side of the tracks with a flask of tea, the yard suddenly quiet for a moment between the clatter of trains. There was something beautiful about Somers Town, the boy thought – all that brick and metal, the hatching of tracks snaking off into the distance under a wide grey sky. They’d learned about the industries of Britain in his island classroom, but the boy had never understood what it might really mean – the smell of oil, the clunk of steel on steel, the vast size and scale of it all. Even a farm as big as Cranthorn’s was nothing compared to this.
‘So, d’you have trains in Jamaica?’ Keith asked the boy. ‘What about schools? What about the police? D’you have policemen in Jamaica?’ Keith’s curiosity about Jamaica was seemingly endless, and the boy would always fill him in.
‘Of course we have schools,’ he said, wondering how Keith, like the Americans he’d known, had never heard the word Jamaica until the boy’s first day, as though it were planet Mars or the moon. ‘And we have shops, and dance halls and cinemas, the same as you.’
Sometimes the boy would pull a pack of cards from his pocket, rubbing his hands for warmth before he held the deck out to Keith. ‘Cut them anywhere,’ he told him. Keith split the deck, revealing an ace of spades. ‘That’s your card,’ the boy continued, lifting the deck to Keith’s face. ‘Now blow on it for good luck.’ Keith took a deep breath, blew, keeping his eyes open as the ace disappeared, replaced by the four of hearts.
‘Bloody ’ell, Chick. How d’you do it? What, you got it up yer sleeve or som
ething?’
The boy laughed.
‘You’re like my uncle,’ Keith said. ‘He’s always got a pack of cards in hand. Plays poker and all sorts in the back of the Nag’s Head.’
‘What’s that?’ the boy said.
‘Pub round the back of ours,’ Keith said. ‘A right den of iniquity, my nan says.’ He stood up. ‘She won’t set foot in there, and she’d kill me if she knew I did. The police are always raiding it.’ He chuckled. ‘Come on, we should get back on the job, I suppose.’
♣
After work, the boy’s body hurt from head to toe. His hands ached from gripping the steel bars, his feet hurt from running. He caught the bus back over the river, glad for the smoky warmth of the top deck, the heat from other bodies, although sometimes the whole deck would fill, with only the seat next to him empty. The boy knew why.
How strange this country is, he thought. Some days he moved in a surreal daze through the city, made stranger because he knew the grand statues and landmarks, the red buses and phone boxes, so well – images from his school books and newspapers back home. But now they were disjointed from his imagination by the reality of England – the constant noise, the yellow lights, the dirt and the grime. And the people were nothing like the rich white men and women in Jamaica. Most of the English were poor. He had never expected that. And old. So many young men were lost or hurt in the war – grey old women cleaned the streets and old men took bus fares.
