WAKE UP AND SMELL THE RACISM
You see, back in those days, Hockley was a traditional white working-class area, even though it was only a couple of miles away from Aston, where there were lots of black families. Up until we moved to Hockley, my parents had been renting wherever they could find a landlord willing to let a house to a black family, which wasn’t easy in the early 1960s. But now we had our first council house. Like everyone else on the street, we just about made ends meet, with both my parents working all hours. Money was tight, but all the families around me were at the same level. You didn’t have rich people living side by side with poor people. You didn’t have kids with fancy clothes and toys living next door to kids with nothing. So no one compared themselves to their neighbours on the basis of wealth because we were all living the same way.
But of course there was one immediately obvious way in which Valerie and Oswald Springer and their family were different. From the day we moved to Farm Street everyone knew there was a ‘coloured’ family in the neighbourhood. And from about the age of five or six, once I was going to school, I was coming up against people who didn’t want us there.
As the months passed and I tuned my ear to the language of the people around me, I started to realise that some people were hostile; they used words to express their dislike of us that they didn’t use about white people. I was only small but I sensed in my heart that nobody around us was going to defend us. There was no point going to my teachers. Although they didn’t use horrible words, they were frosty and strict and religious, and ran the place along Victorian lines. Anyone who was regarded as different in some way had to fend for themselves. I did this by making friends with the other outcasts – the gypsies and the Irish kids.
One day, someone had been horrible to me and I was sitting by myself in the playground when this kid with a really strong Irish accent came up and said, ‘I’ll be your friend.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘You’re still white.’
‘Yeah, but I’m a Catholic and I’m Irish. They pick on me too. We can be mates.’
So we became friends. We found a game we both loved – we started nicking apples together, mostly from gardens. This soon became easy. One day he dared me to take an apple from a grocer. I dashed across the road and a car caught the very edge of me. I wasn’t hurt but I was shocked. I said, ‘I don’t think I wanna do that kind of scrumping anymore.’ But by this time we were really close, me and the Catholic boy.
I was thinking that people in authority were uptight and not to be trusted to help you if you were in trouble. So in a bid to coax me in the direction of conforming, like the boys and girls that weren’t black or Irish or from a travelling family, I was enrolled in the Boys’ Brigade. The local branch met at St Mathias at the weekend and some other boys from the school had joined up. They told me there’d be orange squash and adventures but it didn’t seem much fun compared to the adventures I’d had with the gypsies and my Irish friend. Mum bought me a new uniform, which looked like something a sailor would wear, and I had to do an initiation: running from one tree to another, counting from one to ten, and swearing to save all the boys and girls in the world from folk that were not like us.
The orange squash was OK, but there wasn’t much adventure, apart from marching in the street on Sunday mornings and banging drums, which I didn’t enjoy very much. We were rivals with the Boy Scouts, but we were forever being told that the Scouts were odd, doing weird rituals, and patting each other on the back all the time. But we didn’t pat each other on the back. We were the Boys’ Brigade, and we were soon to become the Man’s Brigade. So we did drill, our clothes were regularly inspected, which seemed a pointless waste of time, and we had to stand to attention a lot.
It was all too regimented for me. I lasted three and a half weeks. I knew it was time to go when I stood in line with a group of boys and a rather intimidating moustache attached to a uniform went down the line and asked the boys what they wanted to do when they grew up. They all seemed to want to join the army, be firemen or policemen, but when it came to me I said I wanted to be a poet.
‘A poet!’ shouted the moustache. ‘A poet! When was the last time you saw a poet skin a rabbit? Think of something better, and when you do you’ll be one of us.’
I knew then and there that was never going to happen. I was never going to be part of the authority culture.
It was around this time that I suffered my first physical racist attack. I’d been called names at school but at least no one tried to hurt me. I had been playing football in the street with some friends one day, and I was walking home down Farm Street. It was hot and sunny. Birds were singing, dogs were barking and I was happy. I skipped with joy and made up rhymes about the sun and the moon and the dogs, reciting them quietly to myself. Then I heard someone behind me shout, ‘You black bastard!’
I didn’t even have time to look around before the full-sized house brick hit the back of my head. The boy actually had the brick in his hand, and he hit me with it as he rode past me on his bicycle, so the force was terrifying. It was as if the brick went through my brain, bringing with it 2,000 watts of electricity. He looked back at me as he rode off and shouted, ‘Go home, wog!’ and for the first time in my life I had to ask myself where home was.
I ran to Mum with my head pouring with blood, not crying but confused. As she cleaned me up, I asked, ‘Mum, where is home?’
‘This is home, Benjamin,’ she replied. ‘This house is your home.’
Then I had to ask the big question, the one I really wanted to know the answer to: ‘What is a bastard?’
I had heard the word black before, even the word wog, but not the word bastard. I needed to know what a bastard was, and no matter how much my mum asked me about the attack and how much pain I was feeling, all I kept asking was, ‘What is a bastard, Mum?’ But all she could say was, ‘Is a bad word, son.’
After my first physical racist attack, the attack of the golliwogs, and other strange happenings, I was becoming more and more aware that some people didn’t like other people because of the way those other people were born. Not because of anything they’d said; not because of anything they’d done; not because they didn’t share their sweets or pass the ball when playing football – but because of the way they were born. I thought about it for a while and a big question arose in my little head. If you wanted to be treated well, and you wanted to be liked by everyone, was there anything you could do before you were born to make sure that you were born ‘right’? Or was there anything your parents could do?
Around this time I’d found another friend; someone to play with when the gypsies weren’t in town. His name was Tommy. Tommy had lots of board games and he would let me go to his house after school and play with them. He had a sister, who was okay, but she didn’t have any scars, and sometimes I would see his mother, who, if she was going to explain anything to me, would start the explanation with, ‘In this country we . . .’ Or, if she was talking about the past, she would say, ‘In the olden days, before the country started going downhill . . .’ I used to find it all very confusing. By saying ‘in this country’ was she telling me that she came from another country? And if the country was going downhill, did this mean we were all going to fall off the edge of the country because it would be too much of a steep slope? Yet more big questions for me to ponder, as I tried to understand the workings of civilisation.
One day, as I was walking to Tommy’s house from school, his sister, who had gone ahead of us, came running back to us. She looked panicked.
‘You can’t bring him home because Dad’s at home,’ she said to her brother. Tommy looked at me, unsure what to say next. I thought the problem was one of space. I thought the house was too small for us, so I said, ‘That’s okay. I’ve always wanted to meet your dad. I’ll just say hello and then I’ll go.’
Tommy’s expression quickly went from unsure to worried. His sister ran off back home, shouting, ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ And then Tommy said, ‘Sorry, you can’t come home. My dad doesn’t like black people. He thinks they should all be slaves.’
I wasn’t educated enough to be angry. ‘What’s a slave?’ I asked Tommy.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘But whatever it is, he thinks you should be one.’
As soon as I got home I asked my mother what a slave was and she said: ‘A long time ago our people sinned, and God punished us for those sins, and slavery was part of that punishment. But don’t worry, just be good, and if you are good you can receive redemption and go to heaven.’ She smiled and finished by saying, ‘There’s no slavery in heaven.’
Trying to work out civilisation was hard enough, but now I had to work out the merits of heaven, which I immediately thought was a strange concept, but then I thought most of the concepts and stories that came out of the Bible were strange. I remember thinking at that very moment that as a place to hang out for eternity heaven sounded okay – a place where there was peace and clouds and women playing harps and, best of all, no slavery. But I didn’t like the idea of having to wait until I died to get there, and to get there I had to be so good, so perfect, so well behaved that I couldn’t play with the bad gypsies. So I said to my mother: ‘Mum, I don’t want to wait until I die to be free from slavery, and there must be some good white people alive, or why would God make us live? We could have all stayed dead or unborn.’
My mother looked at me as if I was mad, and I looked at her as if we were living in different dimensions. We might have sprung from the same heritage, but our experiences were already diverging.