MAYBE BABY
Amina and I started to discuss children, but as far back as my rude boy days I’d realised I wasn’t making babies, so I told her I was pretty sure I couldn’t have any. Back in Birmingham there were times when me and my friends seemed to exchange girlfriends, or looking at it from the other side, our girlfriends were exchanging us, and many of them were getting pregnant, but none of them were getting pregnant by me. I told Amina all this and we decided I should go and get tested.
Over the course of a couple of months I went through many tests and, sadly, all the results came back negative. I knew of men who had a low sperm count, but I had a no sperm count. Even though I was expecting it, it was still an emotionally difficult time. I was keener than Amina to have a child, I had always loved children, but now I suddenly felt a big-time urge to have my own. I would walk in the park and watch men playing with their kids and feel a kind of paternal jealousy. It wasn’t rational; I knew I shouldn’t be feeling jealous, but when I watched men passing on skills to their little ones I wanted someone to pass mine onto as well. I wanted to recite my poems to my babies.
I started visiting friends who had kids just so I could play with them; I even began to fantasise about Amina and me living in some kind of domestic bliss in a revolutionary household with a large family. I remembered people saying when I was small how special our family was because we had two sets of twins. I used to say then that I wanted nine kids, but with just three pregnancies; three sets of triplets would do it. I grew out of that idea when I learned now much childbearing takes out of women, but still, the need to be the daddy was urgent. Actually it was overwhelming and it dominated my thoughts. Amina wasn’t feeling the same, but I warned her that her time would come.
We began looking into adopting, and when we first made enquires the agencies were over the moon that we’d approached them. It’s always a struggle for them to find homes for kids; it’s hard for white kids, hard for black kids, hard for kids who have dual black and white ancestry, but even harder for kids who are mixed black and Asian, so agencies welcomed us and at the same time wanted to use my public profile to publicise the need for people to come forward and adopt these kids.
In the end we went with an agency in north London. Our social worker, an Australian, was a great guy. He began to take us through the process, which is a long, difficult rigmarole that involves lots of probing questions and checks to make sure the couple are suitable to be parents. As part of the process the social workers had to look at our police records. I told them I had a long record – one that listed violence against police officers and other such serious offences, but he said because my years of offending were such a long time ago, the offences would be wiped.
He sent off my details to be checked, but when the results came back there was one conviction that meant I wouldn’t be able to adopt. It all went back to that time when Trevor walked free from court and I teased the cop who’d had a grudge against me and who’d framed me using the sex worker. The one I’d called a dirty Babylon and a loser. Yes, that case had come back to haunt me.
The Home Office had wiped all my other offences, but the reason they couldn’t wipe this charge was because they needed to prove that the girl I’d allegedly robbed was over eighteen. If she had been under eighteen at the time of the offence, it would be seen as a crime against a child. Of course, there was no record of her.
We tried to find her from the court records, but we couldn’t find any record of anyone who had lived in Birmingham with her name, and the street where she was supposed to have lived did not and had never existed. I also found out that the two officers involved in my arrest were now in prison for importing marijuana.
I spoke for a long time to Lenny Henry and Dawn French, who around this time adopted their child, and they recommended a solicitor who they thought might be able to help me. He suggested I go back to court and challenge the original conviction, get the case reviewed and recorded as a miscarriage of justice. He warned me that it would be a long, hard process that could take a couple of years, and his charges were in the hundreds of pounds per hour ballpark. We thought about it and I decided not to pursue it. My social worker told me he had to drop the case; we could not be given approval, and that was the end of that.
Not long afterwards, at the end of 1995, Mark Fielder, a BBC producer, approached us asking if we would participate in a TV programme about couples that couldn’t have children. I said yes. Amina hesitated – she was never keen on being on screen with me – but eventually she agreed and the BBC asked me what I’d like to do in the programme. My answer was immediate. I’d seen Professor Robert Winston on TV and had heard he was the best in the country when it came to reproductive medicine, so I said I wanted him to work with me. He came on board straight away and we started filming.
It was the kind of documentary that followed me as I went through the process of exploring why I was infertile. Camera crews followed Amina and me as I did my tests and interacted with Robert who, by the end of the programme, only confirmed what I already knew – I had what I called a ‘no sperm count’, or what he called azoospermia. I would never have children.
I’d been put through the emotional wringer again, this time in front of the entire nation. It caused me a lot of distress and ended our hopes of ever having children, but it got a lot of other infertile black men talking. Many of them wrote to me, many of them cried to me, and I realised I had touched on something the black community was unwilling to confront. Not only did I become a champion for that cause, I also started a campaign to encourage black men to donate sperm, something I had never dreamed I’d end up doing when I was performing poetry on the streets of Handsworth.
There was no change in my condition, but the documentary was very informative and did help a lot of people. But there was a rather sour ending. At the end of the programme, before the credits rolled, Robert Winston said he was doing research and that I should get all my notes sent to him because he thought he might be able to help me further along the line. This began to give me renewed hope. Straight away I got my doctor to send my notes over to him, but there was no reply. I tried to call him, but he didn’t return my call. I got so desperate that the BBC producer wrote to him, reminding him that he’d made a promise to me that had broadcasted to millions of viewers, but still no reply.
I never heard from Robert Winston again. I was told by people who knew him (and an ex-member of his staff) that he was very good at getting publicity, and he probably made the promise to impress other people working in this field. I don’t know, and I probably never will because he wouldn’t let me get near him. At the Radio 4 Woman’s Hour fiftieth birthday party in 1996, I made a point of finding him and standing next to him, but he took his champagne, and his meat on a stick, and slid away from me. The programme gave hope to others, but it ended up causing me more distress by offering me false hope.
Most of the letters I received after the broadcast started with the person begging me not to reveal their identity – such was the fear of them being ‘found out’ by people in their community. They would then go on to outline how they grew up thinking everything was okay, until they noticed they weren’t fathering children when their friends were. Very few suffered silently; most took drastic measures or simply told lies to cover up their infertility.
I was horrified by what some of these men had done to appear ‘normal’, and I was surprised at the diversity of people contacting me. They ranged from gangsters to religious people, and from poets to well-known television personalities. Most thought that as black men who looked fit and healthy they had to live up to the image of the virile male. Although most of them functioned normally physically, they would still associate fertility with virility.
Men stopped me in the street and took me into shop doorways to talk. They waited for me at stage doors after concerts; they pretended they had poems they wanted me to see in order to get access to me, and one even flew from England to Finland to see me when he heard I was performing there. In terms of negative feedback from the community, there was but one. Shortly after the programme aired, a well-known black personality said I should be ashamed of myself; black men should not talk about these things in public.