Reluctant Neighbors

by Braithwaite, E. R. ;

  “Officers?” Finding it hard to digest.

  “Yes, some of us were officers.”

  “Funny thing, but I’d never thought of the British Air Force as integrated.”

  Come to think of it, neither had I. Because at that time the word “integrated” had no special social or political significance. One joined and served. Same billets. Same training. Same uniforms. Same risks. Same enemy.

  The conductor hurried through the compartment announcing the next stop. Pointlessly, I thought, because all the passengers seemed comfortably settled for the whole journey to New York. The train slowed, then stopped. I tried peering through the window, but the accumulated grime on the panes defeated me. I leaned back, thinking again about my neighbor’s question. Was the R.A.F. integrated?

  Memory selecting and etching into sharp focus that first day at the Aircrew Receiving Centre, students and youthful nonstudents milling around in the macadam courtyard of the once-stately residence in St. John’s Wood. All nervous as hell but vainly hiding it behind the little we knew. Students arrogantly silent except for an occasional quip deliberately directed over the heads of the ­nonstudents. They, in turn, loudly airing their Air Training Corps knowledge of airplane silhouettes, map reading, Morse signaling and life. Accents crisscrossing. Welsh. Irish. Scots. Midland. Northern. Cockney. A small group seated in a corner over a noisy card game.

  “Raise you half a crown.”

  “Your half-crown and up a half a crown.”

  “Cheeky bugger. I think you’re bluffing.”

  “Try me. That’s five bob to see.”

  The sudden shrill sergeant’s voice marshaling us into casual order, then sending us off alphabetically to take our medicals. The agony of standing naked in line in a dim, drafty corridor. Clothing in a neat bundle held protectively in front; none of us comfortable in this exposure. Anything to mask our disquiet. The loudmouth claiming he knew all about it. His brother had done it a year ago and told him everything.

  “They check you for everything, see. They even have this gadget for looking down your earhole. And the M.O. puts this rubber thing on his finger and sticks it up your bum and reams it around to see if you have anything wrong up there. V.D. or anything. Then they give you shots. Two. My brother said they have these two huge syringes full of stuff. Two for each bloke. They jab them into you, one in each backside.”

  “What for?”

  “Oh, just in case you’ve got something which they don’t spot right away. My brother said some blokes can’t stand but one. With the second they keel over. Out cold.”

  The ribald jokes whispered to and fro.

  “ … so this Jewish bloke goes in to the M.O., unbuttons his fly and lays it on the M.O.’s table.

  ‘Please, sir, will you look at this?’ he says, and the M.O. looks at it and tells him it looks okay and what’s the problem and the bloke insists that the M.O. examine it thoroughly. So the M.O. puts on some rubber gloves and really gives it the old once-over and then he says to the bloke, ‘I don’t see anything wrong with it. What’s the problem?’ And the bloke laughs and says, ‘Oh, no problem. Isn’t it a beaut?’”

  A snigger or two then a voice from farther down the line, “Last time I heard that the bloke was a blackie.” Self-conscious laughter near by. Me not caring.

  Too much had happened to me too quickly. On first coming to England the word “blackie” had easily set me off. It had suggested the Englishman’s contempt for my color. I’d never heard it in my native country. Black. Colored. White. Indian. Those were the familiar words. Perhaps the order was White … Colored … Black … Indian. Funny about that. The White was always first. Top man on the totem pole with everyone else looking up his arse. Some of the blacks wanting so desperately to be white. Setting so much store by what they called their “fair” complexion. The pale skin moving them, they thought, nearer to the white. Thinking of it now, the white men must have had themselves a wonderful time, choosing the black women they wanted, laying on them the staff of acceptance. The fair-skinned blacks or coloreds becoming heir, in time, to the better job, the status, the position, preferred to their darker peers.

  Then the other side of it. The black scholars going off to the English universities and returning, inevitably, with their English brides, contributing their bit to the colored thing. Was it leveling up or down? Then the stories filtering into my consciousness. The colored students hopping off to England and being suddenly shocked into the realization that, in the eyes of the British, they were black, English fathers, mothers or grandparents notwithstanding.

  Coming back, not cured of their illusions, but considerably chastened. Caught flat-footed in the fallow middle ground during the rise and thrust of political unrest, the blacks emerging as the real power factor, literate, aggressive and determined. Joining with the “other blacks,” the Indians, to forge an effective front against the colonial power.

  Even though it was then a colony, British Guiana, we the people were proud. Numerously black. Proudly black. In spite of the privileges he enjoyed, the white man was no more than a man. Governing us. Yes. In control. Yes. But we did not fear him. When dreaming my ambitious dreams I never saw him or thought of him as an obstacle or barrier to their fulfillment. In all the days and years of growing up from childhood, nobody, not a single one, had ever told me that the white man would prevent or interfere with what I wanted to do, or be. To be sure, I’d never ask any of them to help me. All I wanted was to be left alone to make my own way. Hell, if I needed anything or anyone, there were the members of my family and my friends. Black like me.

  At University in England the situation was dramatically reversed. I was alone. Missing family and friends but determined to drown that loneliness in study. Determined to succeed. Seeing the whites, the English, in a new light. White porters at the college. White waiters in the dining halls. White waitresses in the coffeehouses. Garbage collectors. Policemen. Roadsweepers. Ditch­diggers. Chauffeurs. Shop assistants. Barmen. Servants. In far off British Guiana they were served. In their offices. In their homes. Everywhere. I’d grown up seeing them served. Demanding service. The blacks serving.

  In England they did not loom large as masters. Merely people. Rich or poor. High or low. Just people. I had no particular feelings about them. Perhaps the time of my arrival in England was of some significance. War with Germany had just been declared. All around were the hasty preparations for defense, national and personal. B.B.C. news bulletins were high-priority listening as one eagerly and fearfully followed the German rake’s progress. War was in the air, the basic topic of conversation. “England expects.”

  Not me. I was a student and I studied. Came the news of German troop movements and the new word “blitzkrieg.” Everywhere the sight of sandbagged buildings and the mounds of earth as families dug themselves protective shelters.

  Everywhere the sight of workmen digging. For communal shelters. Individual families hastily throwing up little earthworks around sunken Anderson shelters. Everyone burrowing for safety. News of massive evacuation of children and the aged from the major cities to the comparative safety of the suburbs and countryside. The call for fire wardens and air-raid wardens. Notices of rationing. Coupons for food. Coupons for clothing. Gradually feeling the unease, the threat from over there. Collecting my gas mask and with it the fear of death approaching unseen, unheard.

  News of the first bombs. The unfamiliar, fearful sounds of air raids. Reports of raids on London. Birmingham. Southampton. Far enough away from Cambridge. Up to London one Saturday. The chaos at Liverpool Street Station. People frantic to escape the city. Caught in the excitement and fear. Suddenly hearing the air-raid sirens, my stomach curdling at the penetrating sound. Caught in a blinding rush, following others. Whistles blowing, arms pointing. Hurrying down half-darkened stairs into a damp basement room. No idea where I was. No sound of whatever was happening above ground. Everyone talking. N
o names. Calling each other “mate.” Myself included. Much later led out into the sunlight and the swirling dust of near-by wrecked buildings. Police and firemen everywhere. Other men with armbands directing us, urging us along, away from the bomb damage.

  Someone beside me inviting me to come along for a “cuppa.” Following to a coffeehouse in Aldgate, the rough language hard to understand but warming, comforting. My dark blue blazer with the college crest attracting some little attention. Someone saying, “Guess you’ll soon be in it, eh, mate?” between sips of the hot, brown char. Making it seem quite natural that I was a part of the whole, similarly threatened, similarly vulnerable, similarly needed.

  Back at college thinking about it. Hearing the talk of fellows who’d “joined up.” Three from the rugby team, including the fullback, so what’s to be done about replacements. Then two of the younger lecturers. Into the air force. News on the radio of dogfights over London between German aircraft and our own Hurricane pilots. Our own. I was using the term. Even thinking it. Others talking of the University Air Squadron. Joining. Not a word about it in the letters to my mother. Certain that by the time I knew anything about flying the war would be over. Finally writing to tell her. Making it seem like something everyone had to do, without exception.

  Now hearing all this bull around me made hardly a dent on my consciousness. The thought of two huge, liquid-heavy syringes blotting out everything else as the line slowly shortened towards the inevitable lighted doorway. The fellow immediately ahead of me already a lighter shade of pale. Funny, I could see that he was scared. His tight jaws and the bloodless area around his mouth, making his lips seem made-up. Gray-red. I had the edge. None of them could guess anything about me. No eye-rolling, shivering bullshit. Just quietly calm inside my black skin. They couldn’t know that the thought of the huge syringes waiting inside had already filled my bladder near to bursting. Somebody said they took a urine sample. Sample! I could give them a week’s supply.

  Inside there was no sign of a syringe. Not yet. Two medical orderlies doing the preparatory work. Checking our height and weight. Looking at our feet. Through a doorway into another room. The M.O. small with bifocals. Fat like Billy Bunter. His gloves cold on the skin. Blood pressure. Eyes. Ears. Genitals. Have you ever had V.D.? No. Any skin disease? No. Then the rubber-finger bit up the bum. Painful as hell. Fear tightening the sphincter. The bugger seemed to like to feel around up there. Into an anteroom with two huge, metal wash basins, grasping the tiny vial for the urine sample. Filling it but impossible to stop the flow. Opening both taps and giving the amber flow company down the drain. Cold water from both taps. Into another room for inoculation. That bloody liar outside. Small syringes. Bend over and an orderly threw the needles into you like he was practicing for a dartboard contest. One in each backside. Hardly hurt at all. Dressing hurriedly, fingers now quite numb from the heatless rooms. Back to the corridor, all faces bravely smiling. Nothing to it.

  Marching everywhere, the sergeant’s voice a persistent metronome. “Lef’ Right. Lef’ Right. You, over there, pick ’em up.” Marched to a long wooden shack for a meal. Single file to receive the slopped helpings. Meat really long dead. Potatoes mashed into a grayish glue. Everything creamed over with an indescribable gravy. Revolting, yet it all went down. That and the rubbery brown pudding. I was too hungry to taste it. Too hungry to care.

  Finally marched off to be formally inducted into the air force. Issued uniforms and the special white cotton flash to be worn on the front of the forage cap, a sign to all and sundry that we were the chosen, the successors to those dauntless ones who had written their own fleeting epitaphs thousands of feet above the lowly earth.

  This was it. Months ago I’d joined the University Air Squadron. To learn to fly. That was all. Now here I was, an aircrew cadet in the Royal Air Force, and the progression seemed completely natural.

  Sent to a subsidiary airport in Sussex to await posting to aircrew training. Marching everywhere. Waked each morning long before the autumn sun dared raise its head into view. Physical Training on an open drill ground, the cold penetrating deeper than the M.O.’s finger. Teamed up with cockney Jerry Loader and Irishman Bobby Grice. Lectures and films on V.D. The unspoken threat hanging over our heads. Pick up a leak and you’re out of aircrew. News of the tragedy at St. John’s Wood. A cadet had been associating with two local girls. After posting to his training unit he’d discovered he’d caught gonorrhea. End of the road for his flying ambitions. The following night he’d visited them and killed them both. Butchered them with a knife.

  Daily classes. Theory of flight. The combustion engine. Meteorology. Maths. Triangle of velocities. Elementary radio transmission and reception. Morse code. Simple stuff. When do we get on to flying, we all wondered. Rifle drill. Rifle range. Pistol range. Map reading. Cross-country running. Football. Rugby. Cricket. Athletics. Church parades. Everything done impatiently. The test on the flight simulator. Holding the joy stick lightly, following the signals in the earphone. Every day filled with movement.

  Finally the examinations. Then the results. And the postings to the training units. Cranwell for me. Luckier ones overseas. Canada. The U.S.A. Everyone excited at the thought of the wings. Everyone sure of making it. Hell, if you flunked the P.N.B. (Pilot-Navigator-Bomb Aimer) you’d still be in aircrew. Say our good-byes. The last night drinking too much beer, singing the bawdy songs at the top of our voices. Full of the idea of courage. The real thing would come later. Jerry knew all the words.

  Tight as a drum

  Never been done

  Queen of all the fairies.

  Oh, what a pity she’s only one titty

  to feed the baby on.

  Poor little fucker he’s only one sucker

  to gnash his teeth upon.

  Cranwell an institution. Established. The training tough. Six in the morning to five in the afternoon. Classes. Drill. Firing range. Games. Unarmed combat. The hard, sectional bed a welcome relief each night. But after the study periods. Theory and more theory. More flight simulators. Feeling strong and fit. On top of everything. Going up. Up. The early boyhood ambitions had not included this, but here I was. Sure, my studies at Cambridge were interrupted. But I’d survive this war. Of that I was sure. Then I’d go back and get that doctorate. Nothing could stop that. It just had to happen. Meanwhile the life was great. Lots of friends. Doing things together. Competing. Ability, intelligence, aptitude the only criteria. Different from the others in color, but not thinking of it. Never feeling handicapped by it. That very color giving me the edge with the girls. Unfair exotic odds, Jerry Loader called it.

  Everything great, except for the Church parades. How I hated them. They always reminded me of my childhood and that mental image which, even now, is conjured into being by the mere word “church.” Myself a small boy, standing beside my mother in the little church in Camp Road, Georgetown, British Guiana. Listening to the hymns sung so enthusiastically by the congregation. The full-throated baritone of the white minister soaring high above the rest. The Reverend Gordon Smith. All clear and detailed in my mind’s eye like a sharply etched television playback. Me struggling to keep singing pace with the grownups, but losing them as my juvenile fancy rode with the words and their literal meaning:

  Whiter than the snow,

  Whiter than the snow,

  Wash me in the blood of the Lamb

  And I shall be whiter than the snow.

  Looking up at my mother’s hands, the smooth tapered fingers spread to support her hymnbook. Rich satiny brown. Looking down at my own. Imagining them covered deep in blood. Sheep’s blood. Shuddering at the remembered sight of two lambs butchered for the wedding feast of a neighbor’s daughter. The frightening thought of being covered in blood. Washed in blood. My ears, my eyes, my mouth, my hair. The rank-smelling stickiness all over me. Then turning white. Not pinky white like the Reverend Gordon Smith. Milky white. Spotty white. Sic
k white. Like the lepers I’d seen often in the street, their faces, arms and legs ravaged white by the disease. Horrible. Rampant imagination churning my stomach to sickness. Pulling insistently at my mother’s dress to be taken outside quickly before everything overflowed. Later, home in bed, warmed by her love and a bowl of tasty broth, trying to explain about the hymn but not making much sense of it. Much of the sharp terror had been flushed out with the sickness. Soothed by her patient attempts to explain the allegory. Obediently accompanying her to church thereafter until, at fourteen or fifteen, I was old enough to say I didn’t like going to church. She was loving enough to let me stay at home with my books.

  Church parades and weekend passes. The lucky cadets had rela­tives­­ or friends within reasonable range. What the hell could I do with a weekend pass? I’d tried it. Stayed in London at a Forces Club near Russell Square. The food no better and the helpings less generous than at the unit. Not much fun wandering about during the day and less in the blackout at night. Alone. Another time tried it with Lofty Pine and Ken Yarborough. Dancing at the Astoria and Lyceum. Then seeing the girls home. Underground to Hampstead and only a quick kiss for all the trouble. Missing the last train and the irritation of that long walk back. Better off back at the camp playing penny poker or sitting in the cinema. Wisecracks sharing the action with the images on the screen. Advising the hero on how to deal with the heroine. “Get your finger in, mate.” Funny as hell, the off-screen dialogue.

  One wet Sunday going by the station bus into Lincoln with Frenchy Pearl and Johnny Conklin. A cathedral town, but dead on a Sunday afternoon. No cinema. Not even a coffee shop. The few people about wearing their off-to-church look. Our metal-tipped boots striking sparks from the cobblestones. The stranger approaching. Gray face, gray suit, gray eyes. Speaking.

  “You young men looking for somewhere to go? Would you like to attend a séance?”