‘I’m sorry, darling, but she’s not coming,’ Nanny says and her voice has a finality to it that keeps my mouth shut. ‘We’ll have to let Wendy know, love. Go and get your shoes on, darling.’
Aunty Wendy doesn’t have a phone. The only way to relay news to her is to nip round to her house, a two-minute trot away. It’s dark and the trees look like black skeletons. But it’s still so hot that the tarmac warms my heels where they poke over the scrunched backs of my plimsolls. As I run someone says ‘Oi, oi’ and I see a big boy called Wayne standing in front of me, blocking my path.
He pokes out his elbows, pretends to be scratching inside his armpits, his huge mouth forms into an O and he goes, ‘Ooo-oo-oo! Look at this fuckin’ little chimp runnin’! Where you off to in such a hurry then, you little nig-nog?’
‘Nowhere,’ I reply.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
I run and don’t stop running until I reach Aunty Wendy’s front door, which opens before I can even ring the doorbell.
‘Aunty Wendy!’
‘All right, love? Don’t you look smart! What you all worked up about then? Your mother been already, has she?’
‘She hasn’t turned up again. My mother! She’s not coming!’
‘What? Again?’ says Aunty Wendy. ‘It’s a bloody disgrace. Ought to be ashamed of herself! You coming in then, love?’
The Kid Factory
FOR A WHILE, I am the only coloured girl in the town, but I’m not the only coloured child the town has ever seen.
Since the 1960s there’s been a little stream of African babies and toddlers being dropped off at the homes of white strangers in West Sussex. Both Nanny and Aunty Wendy have had many private foster babies – almost all of them African and most of them Nigerian.
Those of us not advertised in Nursery World are advertised on postcards in shop windows. Anyone can send off for us and we begin popping up in white homes throughout the country, especially in Hampshire, Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, Essex and Sussex.
Few questions are asked of birth parent or foster-parent. Social Services are supposed to be notified, but often aren’t. When alerted, social workers do have to call round periodically to check the coloured foster-kids are being fed, clothed and sent to school – but the foster-parents don’t have to be registered, trained or checked by the police.
Later, in the 1980s, our numbers in West Sussex will mushroom as more and more local white families catch on to the trend. A boy at my secondary school will brag, ‘We just got one of your lot. Got a bigger knob than a grown man, he has. Made him flop it out for my gran because she wouldn’t believe us till she saw it.’
Private fostering is supposed to be strictly temporary. The birth parents are often recent immigrants from West Africa. Typically they are full-time students by day, struggling to make ends meet by working one or even two night jobs, striving to create a secure home for their children. Once their studies are completed and their financial situation begins to ease, most of them take their babies back.
My case is a little different. My mother is not, as far as we can tell, a student. She doesn’t appear to be hard up and in fact she says she is from a well-heeled and titled Igbo family in Nigeria. According to her, my father is a civil engineer from a privileged Krio family in Sierra Leone. Yet at nine days old I am despatched to my first foster home, in the West Country, where my mother fails to visit me for the next two months.
By the time I reach Nanny, aged ten weeks, I am a withdrawn, watchful baby with a mysterious past. Nanny tells anyone who asks that she thinks I am a Biafran.
Throughout my infancy, I have a number of aliases. When I arrive in Fernmere, my mother introduces me as Anita-Precious Achaba. Three months later, my mother has changed my name to Precious-Anita Eze. Later I find that – according to my birth certificate – my name is actually Precious Anita Williams.
Back in the days when I’m called Anita-Precious Achaba, my mother visits once every three weeks, usually arriving with the man named Rupert, who sometimes refers to himself as my father.
When I’m eight months old, my mother appears in Fernmere with a new man and says she’s taking me ‘home’ to Nigeria. Nanny cries and pleas with my mother to let me stay but, ignoring her, my mother sweeps upstairs to pack up my toys and clothes.
Nanny’s family is used to this sort of thing happening. Her grown-up son, Dave, who’s married and has his own kids, tolerates Nanny’s private-fostering but certainly doesn’t encourage it.
Nanny grieves for me and, several months later, begins scanning Nursery World magazine for a new foster child. And there I am, advertised once again in the magazine’s back pages.
Shortly after my return to Nanny, West Sussex Social Services despatch a social worker with cheddar-coloured hair to see what we’re all up to. In her report the social worker observes:
July 1972: Visited and was introduced to this coloured child, Precious, by Mrs Taylor. The child has so far not cried and is no trouble at all. A most attractive child.
Mrs Taylor has fostered children for a number of years. Now that she has an invalid husband to look after, she seems to derive pleasure and light relief by caring for small children, particularly Nigerian children.
A couple of years later, I am reclaimed by my mother once more. Again this reunion doesn’t last long and my mother decides to return me to foster care. This time she does not advertise me in Nursery World but instead rings Nanny up and says, ‘I’m bringing her back tomorrow. I am leaving her with you now until she is old enough for boarding school.’
Nanny greets us at the door weeping tears of joy. ‘God has sent my little darling back to me,’ she says.
But Nanny, having thought that my mother really had taken me for good the last time, had replaced me with a little girl from Ghana. This new girl, Effua, sleeps in my bedroom under my silky pink eiderdown. She drinks her Ribena out of my special cup with the built-in curly straw.
I watch in disbelief as this tiny stranger with the charcoal skin and close-cropped hair sits in Nanny’s lap and follows Nanny around and eats Wagon Wheel after Wagon Wheel, just like I used to. She even has the nerve to constantly talk to and pester my beloved Gramps.
Effua and I won’t play together nicely, the way Nanny wants us to. We either ignore one another or we scratch, pinch and scream. Nanny doesn’t know what to do. At her age, she can’t cope with two little girls, especially as she has an invalid husband to look after. One of us little coloured girls will have to go. I feel so threatened by Effua, so afraid Effua will become Nanny and Gramps’s new little angel, that I run around the house screaming, and then I begin kicking at furniture, and at people.
Nevertheless, Nanny chooses me. I hear her telling the grown-ups she feels an ‘affinity’ to me. I don’t know what the word means but I feel like the most important little girl in the world. Nanny begins making arrangements to get rid of Effua and I am moved back permanently into my pink bedroom.
Effua is sent to live with Aunty Wendy. A new social worker is dispatched to check up on us.
October 1974: I visited Mrs Taylor for the first time, expecting to find Precious Anita and Effua fostered by Mrs Taylor. However, Mrs Taylor and her daughter, Mrs Travis appear to have (to say the least) unorthodox views as to carrying out regulations. Effua had been moved to Mrs Taylor’s daughter, Mrs Travis. We had not in fact been notified of this change. I did feel that it was rather distressing the way these coloured children were passed about from hand to hand like this.
Effua seems to thrive at Aunty Wendy’s and I delight in my life at Nanny’s, savouring the hugs, the gentle words, the unlimited access to Wagon Wheels. An uneasy alliance between Effua and I gradually softens into a friendship. But we continue to delight in getting one another into trouble with the grown-ups.
‘Guess what, Aunty Wendy.’
We are upstairs on the double-decker back from Bognor when I begin to tug at the waistband of Aunty Wendy’s maxi-skirt.
‘What, love?’
‘At the arcade this afternoon, when you weren’t watching,’ I say, ‘Effua said that I was black and that I’ll stay black until the day that I die.’
Effua, sitting next to me, lowers her guilty eyes to the floor.
‘Aren’t you going to tell Effy off for calling me black, Aunty Wendy?’
‘What did you call her that for, love?’ says Aunty Wendy. ‘You know black isn’t a nice word. Christ, girls, how many times do I have to tell you both? You’re not black; you’re little coloured girls.’
Bognor is not far from our town, Fernmere, but unlike Bognor we’ve got no beach, no cinema, no arcade and no Kentucky Fried Chicken – we’ve just got loads of antiques shops and building societies.
Almost everyone in Fernmere is wealthy. But we’re not. Which is why we live on Woodview, the council estate, home to what the rich people call ‘the riff-raff and the gypos’. Some of the posh people are actually afraid to venture ‘up Woodview’ because they think they might not come out alive. Yet to me Woodview is the most magical place in the whole of Fernmere.
The road to Woodview is short and narrow and bursting with greenness. On either side of the road there are blackberry and rose-hip bushes and patches of wild grass dotted with poppies and dandelion clocks. Today the bushes are shadowy and I can’t see the luscious fruit hanging off them; it has grown dark early because it’s pouring down. Rain slams against the pavement, sounding the way a TV does before it’s been tuned to a channel; making me, Wendy and Effy run as if for our lives. Cars skid into and out of the estate, their headlights dimmed and blurred by the sheets of rain.
‘Am I having tea at your house tonight, Aunty Wendy?’ I ask, breathless.
‘Course you are, love,’
‘Yippee!’
We jog past the sign that reads Woodview Way, past the little shop that sells Cornettos and Twix bars and past West Walk, where me and Nanny live. Effua skips ahead, as always, stopping every three or four steps to splash her silly foot in a puddle, turn and giggle for no reason.
The houses we pass are all made of pale peach brick, two storeys high and joined to one another. Everything about them is perfectly square: the windows, the garages, the emerald-green portions of grass on the front lawns.
Well-to-do people, Nanny says, don’t live in little boxes like these: they live in rambling, asymmetrical and sometimes crumbling big houses with names instead of numbers on the door. Nanny grew up in such a house before she lost everything and moved to Woodview. I can think of nothing more frightening than living in a large, meandering old house that might have mice in it, or worse, ghosts.
Aunty Wendy’s back door opens with a squeak and then bangs shut.
Uncle Mick walks into the kitchen and over to the fridge. His corduroy flares hang down at the back and there’s a bunch of keys bigger than my whole hand swinging from his belt loop.
‘Hello, Presh,’ he says, smirking.
Uncle Mick is the only person who still refers to my real name, Precious, and he only calls me it when he’s making fun of me. To everyone else in Fernmere I’m Anita, Neety, Nin. To people outside our family, I’m sometimes ‘that little darkie’.
‘All right, Effy?’ Uncle Mick says and then he quickly turns his attention back to me. ‘What the bloody hell do you think you look like in that get up then?’
I’m wearing a pair of red nylon flares that are too short for me with a matching red shirt with the longest collar you’ve ever seen.
‘Just ignore him, Neet,’ says Aunty Wendy. ‘You look lovely.’
I know he’s only joking. Uncle Mick’s always made it clear that I’m his favourite, which is a big part of why I love him so much. I’d like to call him Dad but I can’t, because everyone at school knows he’s not my dad and they’d make fun of me for being such a loser.
One of the things I adore most about Uncle Mick is his huge collection of dusty LPs. The faces on almost all of the covers – Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, the Jackson 5 – are brown like mine.
I’m deep in thought, wondering if Uncle Mick is really going to buy me the new Jackson 5 album for my birthday.
‘What’s the matter, little girl?’ he says. ‘Need to go home to your Nanny, do you? Afraid Nanny’s worryin’ about you, are ya?’
Nanny will be worrying about me. She’ll be sitting in front of the TV wringing her hands and imagining that all sorts of bad things have happened to me. She hates not having me where she can see me. When I left her this afternoon and she stood in the doorway of our beautiful little house, watching me walk off hand-in-hand with Aunty Wendy, Nanny looked like she wanted to run up the garden path and prise me away from her daughter and take me back inside the house to sit with her all day. Not that Nanny will ever run down a garden path again. She is so full of nerves, so asthmatic and has such poorly legs that it is a great trial for her to walk. So Nanny drives almost everywhere.
When Aunty Wendy walks me back to Nanny’s later, the first thing Nanny will say is: ‘What did Neety eat? Did she have enough to eat?’ and Aunty Wendy will recount every little thing (that she knows about) that I ate.
The second question Nanny will always ask is: ‘Did Neety touch anything dirty?’
At this point, Aunty Wendy will lose patience with Nanny. She’ll mutter, ‘Get a grip on yourself, Mum,’ and refuse to answer the question.
Nanny is terrified of germs.
Uncle Mick takes a fat squishy bottle of Tizer out of the fridge as Aunty Wendy glowers at him. He pours some into a glass and then drinks it in one swallow. ‘Bloody lovely that is,’ he says, banging his glass down into the red washing-up bowl.
‘Give me some, give me some, Uncle Mick,’ says Effua, displaying the gap between her teeth.
‘No. Give some to me,’ I say, running up to him and grabbing him round the legs.
Uncle Mick smiles. ‘Plenty of water in the tap, girls,’ he says. He opens the cupboard over the sink, takes out two plastic beakers and fills them both to the top with lovely, bubbly, orange Tizer. He hands us a beaker each. Nanny has said that only people with ‘absolutely no breeding’ drink Tizer. But I gulp it down.
‘Don’t use it all up, Mick,’ Aunty Wendy says. ‘We’ve only got one bottle to last us till I go shopping.’
‘I might use it all up. I might not,’ he says. ‘What do you think, Neeta? Will I or won’t I?’
He takes a hearty swig from the bottle as I watch him admiringly.
‘What we got for tea then, Wendy darling?’ says Uncle Mick.
‘I thought we’d have fish and chips since it’s Saturday. That all right, kids?’
‘Might be, might not be,’ says Uncle Mick, before Effy or I can answer. He’s picking at the wallpaper under the windowsill, where a little bit of it is peeling off.
‘I thought you wouldn’t mind ridin’ your bike down the chippie, my feet are bloody killing me. I don’t feel like walking another step.’
‘It was your idea to get fish and chips, Wendy, so you’d better bloody well walk down there yourself.’
‘Come on, it wouldn’t hurt you, love.’
‘It won’t hurt you.’
‘You go, Mick. I’m not even hungry am I? Me and the girls had Kentucky for lunch.’
Uncle Mick suddenly takes Aunty Wendy into his arms. ‘I was only joking wasn’t I?’ he says, pressing his thin pink lips against hers and making a squidgy noise. ‘What’s all that eyeliner muck you got on your eyes then?’
Effua and I stand there, not sure whether to puke or giggle. ‘They’re in love, aren’t they?’ I whisper to Effy who just laughs like an idiot.
Without warning, Effy pinches my arm and skips away. I try to catch her and pinch her back but she is far more nimble than me. She appears behind me and pinches me again, on the back of the arm.
‘I hate you so much I could die, Effy,’ I say.
But I’m fibbing. I love her. Kind of. Grown-ups say we complement each other perfectly, Effy an
d I. They say that I’m the brains and Effy’s the cheek and that we’re just like real sisters.
And these are my memories of her. Fighting and giggling. Effy creating mischief, me trying to get her into trouble even on the rare occasion when she hasn’t done anything.
And then, on one Saturday that started out just like any other, our sisterhood crashes to a terrifying halt.
‘There’s some coloured lady just pulled up in a big bloody taxi outside,’ Mick says.
‘Stop pulling my leg, Mick,’ Aunty Wendy says.
A car door slams outside.
‘I’m tellin’ you,’ says Uncle Mick. ‘There’s some coloured lady gettin’ out of a big taxi. Come here and have a bloody look out the window then.’
I’m staying the night at Aunty Wendy’s.
As soon as Uncle Mick says the word coloured, Effua and I shoot out of her bedroom, where we’d been playing noughts and crosses.
Aunty Wendy’s standing by the front door doing nothing, just looking confused. Finally Uncle Mick opens the door and that’s when I see Effy’s real mother – Aunty Akosua – wriggling out of the taxicab and moving up the garden path like she’s dancing at a disco, her bottom rolling and shaking with every step. I look at Aunty Wendy; Aunty Wendy looks at Uncle Mick. Effua looks at me.
‘Long time,’ says Aunty Akosua. ‘I’ve come for my daughter.’
‘It’s a bit late,’ Aunty Wendy replies shakily. ‘The girls. The girls are about to go to bed.’
‘Ama-Effua,’ says Aunty Akosua. ‘Go an’ pack your things.’
‘Akosua! They’ve got school tomorrow,’ says Aunty Wendy. Her neck’s going pink and her eyes are moving around really fast.
Precious Page 2
