There are no stars tonight But those of memory
– Hart Crane, My Grandmother’s Love Letters
My earliest memories are of Nan – a rocking chair, a crochet blanket on her lap, a teaspoon of sweet tea from her mug. Nan came from Kennington –the slums, my mother said, but Nan had married up and out. My eccentric middle-class grandfather brought her from south London to his home in Ilford, the sprawling suburban town that joins east London to Essex, sometimes called the gateway to Essex. Ilford was always a place where the rich and poor rubbed shoulders – the north side of Gants Hill had big white houses set back from tree-lined streets, and the east side – Goodmayes and Seven Kings – was poorer, but not quite run down: road after road of identikit homes with pebble-dashed walls and small front yards. My grandfather lived in-between at Newbury Park, in a two-up-two-down he bought in 1910. Ilford has changed enormously since then. It still has those enclaves of affluence but it’s a shabbier place. It was shabby when I was growing up. I remember the shopping parade of pound shops and shops boarded up; the scrappy, vandalised parks; the rough pubs where boys hankered for fights on a Friday night.
My dad was lovely, my mother said. Not like my mum. My grandfather, Walter Hart, died long before I was born, so I never met the man who made himself the black sheep of his well-to-do family – spurning a job in their stockbroking firm, denouncing God, refusing to fight in the First World War – who got divorced and married Nan, his cleaner, and, apparently, spent long hours teaching himself Sanskrit in order to decipher ancient Hindu scriptures. He must have loved her I suppose, said my mother, though God knows why.
Nan was the only grandparent I knew and everything about her spoke of another time. Her rooms downstairs were musty and old – the kitchen worktops of yellow, cracked Formica, the fragile china mugs and tiny antique silver teaspoons, the bobbly cardigans and drab blue housecoat she wore every day. There were dusty hairnets on her mantelpiece, dusty ashtrays full of her crumpled butts. Even her pale hair seemed to have a coat of dust. She is only half there in my memory, as though she were already slipping away. The images I have of her possess a certain quality, like the faded lustre of cinefilm. I see her in the flower garden in her polyester bathing suit, her scraggy legs of knotted veins, or her shaking hands spooning jam into pastry cases, or pushing an old-fashioned pram along the road, a floral headscarf tied under her chin. It might be me in the pram, as though I see us from the outside now. Of all the memories, the most striking and clear to me is the morning I pushed open her bedroom door to find her and two of her sisters, Edith and Lily, sleeping top-to-toe on the brass bed’s white eiderdown. Old ladies in pale nightgowns with loose, long hair, snuggled into each other like small girls.
I remember the cups of sweets Nan gave to Sam and me – the strange ritual each morning when we went downstairs to her like Hansel and Gretel, lured by sweetness and sugar, knowing she’d have filled a cup for both of us with broken chocolate and honeycomb, bonbons wrapped in greaseproof paper, barley sugars, cubes of fudge. We loved it, of course, but my mother hated Nan giving us sweets and begged her not to when she’d just got us into the routine of cleaning our teeth.
The day I turned eighteen, she tried to rule my life, she said, decide my friends, my boyfriends, who I married, how I brought you children up. My mother originally met my father through his cousin Joe, whom she had dated some years before, when my grandfather was still alive. Joe was a saxophonist and my mother loved jazz. Every weekend, she’d tell Nan she was staying with a friend and catch the bus up to the East End club he played in. Joe was Jamaican – tall, handsome, always broke, often drunk, and devoted to music more than any woman, and there were many overlapping women. He was thirty-two, my mother eighteen.
‘Joe? Who’s Joe?’ Nan said. ‘A darkie? No! Not on your nelly, lady!’ She was appalled when she found out and wouldn’t look or speak to Joe the one time he came to the house. She cried into her mixing bowl. She couldn’t sleep. My grandfather begged my mother to lie to Nan, to say they’d broken up – he thought the fret might kill her. But Nan needn’t have worried. Eighteen months of lending Joe money, enduring his drunken rages, not knowing where he was, was enough for my mother. She gave him the elbow in a letter she handed him solemnly at Ladbroke Grove Tube station.
By then, she’d already met my father at the house he had shared with Elsie, his second wife, when Joe took her there one Sunday for tea. Joe loved to gamble and thought his cousin was the bee’s knees. Six years later my parents bumped into each other at a hardware shop in Seven Kings. My mother was back from teaching college, dispatched by Nan to buy iron wool. My father had just split with Elsie and was living up the road in a rented room. He was out buying saucepans and asked my mother’s advice. And that was that, she said. They rented a flat together three months later, much to Nan’s disdain.
By anyone’s standards, my parents were an unusual couple. She was a young, white teacher – he was twenty-three years older, an immigrant gambler. Only later did I wonder what drew them together. On my father’s part, my mother was young, attractive and educated. He had a great respect for education. He loved that she was a teacher. She was also English. My father’s upbringing in colonial Jamaica had left him conflicted – on the one hand he was committed to anti-imperial politics, on the other, he revered England and all things English. Socially, my mother might well have represented a ‘step up’ to him. Or maybe this didn’t come into it at all. On a simpler level, my father was in his mid-forties, living alone, two marriages behind him, two children. He might just have been glad that anyone would have him.
As for my mother, she’d already been out with Joe, who spent half the time ignoring her, half the time sponging off her. My father compared well. Like Joe, he was handsome and well dressed. Unlike Joe, he was charming and thoughtful, had money and liked to spend it, although it took my mother a while to realise where he got it. He was well-read and articulate. He had a sense of humour. He liked to cook. He came from another place, a million miles from Ilford. He was a way out from her mother. Or so she thought.
One Boxing Day they drove out into Essex, to Theydon Bois, where my mother’s elderly aunts lived in a little bungalow. They managed to feign politeness towards the only black man they’d ever had in their house, serving tea and cake and trying not to be caught staring at him. Driving home along the country roads, my parents got to talking about my father’s past, and somehow he found himself telling her the story of his life – his sad childhood, running away, leaving Jamaica. They pulled up on a lovers’ lane somewhere – a freezing night, snow melting on the banks. They put the heater on and sat smoking and talking past midnight. That’s when she fell for him, she said – when he told her his story.
If going out with a black man caused her trouble beyond Nan, my mother never said so. She was broad-minded and expected other people to be the same. While Nan was bigoted and full of class anxiety, my grandfather was a progressive free-thinker, irreverent of convention and fascinated by other places in the world. My mother inherited his liberalism. Years later, I asked her what she saw in Joe and my father. I just found them fascinating, she said. Compared to local blokes. All the things they’d seen and done. Just as my father might have had an investment in my mother’s Englishness, she was pleased to be married to a foreigner.
They lived for a year and a half in a flat on Empress Avenue in Ilford, a place my mother always mentioned with a wistful look in her eye. Then my grandfather died, and Nan, scared of being lonely, made my mother a proposition. She had some money, my parents had none – she would put down a deposit for a house they could share. Despite my mother’s reservations, together they bought a house in Ashgrove Road in Goodmayes, a semi that backed onto the railway tracks. My childhood home. Nan lived downstairs and we lived above. I must have been mad, my mother said.
When Nan found out my mother was expecting Sam she told her, ‘What a mess you’re in. You’ll have to keep on working. I’ll look after the baby.’ Over my dead body, my mother told my father, but she couldn’t stop Nan from interfering. My mother used to put Sam in the pram and park him on the lawn so she could see him from the upstairs window. She had a theory babies should be in the garden, rain, shine, or snow. But every time Sam so much as blinked or whimpered, Nan came running out the door, whisked him up and took him in. She wouldn’t give him back, my mother said. We used to have a tug of war.
The wedding came later. A photograph outside the registry office shows my mother plump and smiling. I worked the dates out – she was four months pregnant with me already. ‘I suppose we should get married,’ my father said the night she did the pregnancy test. Always a one for romance, my mother said. I said, I suppose we better. Nan didn’t like my father any better than Joe, and she didn’t want my mother marrying him, even though they had one child together and were expecting another. In Nan’s mind, the immigrants were taking over, and her only daughter planned to marry one and parade their miscegenation right above her head.
Every plan they had, Nan was against. They saved up for an extension to give her a bigger kitchen. Weeks talking about it, all the plans made. Nan would stay with us because she couldn’t breathe with all the dirt and dust. But the day before the work was meant to start Nan declared that all she needed was a cooker and a sink, and when the workmen arrived – Charlie White and two Jamaican chaps – she refused to come upstairs. ‘Didn’t know the blacks were coming in,’ she said. ‘I can’t be leaving all my things for them to get their grimy paws on.’ I could have killed her there and then, my mother said. When she told my father, he went down and grabbed the sledge hammer, flung it through the window of her kitchen, shouting, ‘Now you have to come up, don’t you, don’t you?’ Nan went running out the house without her coat, and into next door, telling the neighbours about the terrible son-in-law she had, the black man who’d just assaulted her. She stayed there all day. But in the evening she was upstairs at the dinner table. Nan never missed her dinner, and knew my mother had a bit of liver in. She always loved a bit of liver and bacon, your Nan, my mother said.
My mother was relieved when Nan died, but I remember loving Nan – her spindly hands, her smoky breath, her long face with its deep grooves. The evening she fell ill I was curled on her lap like a cat. She was fidgety, wheezy, out of breath. She had emphysema. They took her away in an ambulance in the middle of the night. In the morning there were no sweets, no knees in the rocking chair to rest against, no more teaspoons of sweet tea.
♠
Nan died just after I began school. Cotton Lane Primary. Days of tapping the xylophone and cake-baking – soft pink and yellow sponges I took home wrapped in foil. Gymnastics, painting, Christmas mobiles made from wire coat hangers and tinsel, angels cut from silver cardboard. I can’t remember learning to read or write or do sums, only the classroom’s corner library of bright picture books, the sugar-paper walls, the neat click of the abacus on the teacher’s desk.
The children in my class are locked in time, back in that classroom with their paintbrushes and potato printers, sat in their little chairs, or lined up at the wall ready to be led to the school hall or playground. I don’t know any of them now or where they are, what happened to them. My best friend was Mina, a Pakistani girl who wore pink plastic clips in her hair and had tiny, furry wrists. She was so light. I used to swing her on the field, round and round, her head thrown back laughing. There were lots of Pakistani children, children from India and Bangladesh, Sikh boys with topknots, girls who wore saris beneath their winter parkas. I was fascinated by the children who spoke different languages, walking home with their mothers or fathers, chatting in Gujarati or Urdu. Nirpal Singh gave me Punjabi lessons as we sat on the bench in the playground watching the others kick a tennis ball around. He taught me how to count from one to ten and every swear word he could think of. There were black children too, whose parents came from Africa or the Caribbean, like my father: Marvin Pearl, who told me he loved me in the stock cupboard, who saved me his biscuit at milk-time and tried to hold my hand.
My mother had a new job teaching at my school and that was the reason I was there. I had swapped schools, making it easier for her to bring me with her in the morning. We walked the mile from our house. Sam had stayed at the school where she had taught before, because he’d been there for years and could walk there by himself. We didn’t get on, or rather he didn’t get on with me. Like lots of little sisters, I worshipped my brother and wanted to endear myself to him. Despite, or perhaps because of this, he found me intensely annoying, an annoyance which most often expressed itself as a Chinese burn to my wrist or a quick jab in the ribs. His temper was changeable, from a relaxed coolness to sudden black anger. I put him on a pedestal but I was scared of him. I was glad he wasn’t at my new school.
My mother’s income provided stability, but even if it hadn’t, she would have wanted to work. She loved teaching, she loved the children at Cotton Lane and all the challenges that went with teaching children who couldn’t speak English well, or refugee children who were often traumatised.
She ran a gardening club for the worst behaved in the school – local children, more often than not – my little delinquents, she called them. I’d watch from my classroom as she led them across the asphalt to the school’s small garden, where they would plant raspberries and runner beans and fight over whose shoots were whose or where the boundaries of each child’s patch lay. There were biters and spitters and scratchers in her wayward cohort. She spent much of the time keeping the peace.
Her work was consuming. The hours were long, and most mornings she left my father a note with a list of instructions for when he woke: Defrost chicken. Pick up dry-cleaning. Book dentist. It suited her to have him at home taking care of the domestic tasks, and he didn’t seem to mind. Just as my mum was a liberal thinker, my dad was open-minded about gender roles. He always cooked dinner. He tidied up and hung the washing out. He liked to experiment with making puddings and cakes – his ‘colonial fusions’, he called them. Traditional English puddings with a Jamaican twist – coconut sponge, ginger roly poly.
At the end of the school day, my father usually picked me up because my mother had to stay for meetings or to plan lessons. I’d come through the gates to find him waiting, occasionally on foot but usually parked up with the radio on, a cigarette in the hand on the steering wheel. ‘Hello, Han!’ he always chimed as I appeared at the school gate or by the side of his car with my satchel and lunch box. ‘Hello, Han!’, as though he hadn’t seen me in years and what a surprise it was for us to bump into each other. All my life he greeted me this way, whether I’d been upstairs in my bedroom for an hour or, years later, flying back from a year living in California to find him, unexpectedly, waiting for me at the airport arrival gates. He was in his seventies by then, and dying, stood looking out for me in his old mustard cardigan, his hair gone wild and cartoonish. We never hugged or touched. ‘Hello, Han!’ he said, reaching out his thin arms to help me with my suitcase.
♥
‘Is that your dad?’ Solomon Kallakuri asked me one morning as we hung our coats on the pegs in the cloakroom. We were six. Solomon was my new friend since we’d been paired on a school trip to the farm, ordered to walk round hand in hand. He wasn’t white but he wasn’t black either, or Pakistani, and I still don’t know where his tanned skin came from, or his surname. He had a cheeky face with big, thick eyebrows that joined in the middle. ‘Yes,’ I said, but I didn’t say anything more, knowing only that I couldn’t lie, though I’d have liked to. We went into the classroom. Later, washing our paintbrushes at the sink, Solomon had more to say:
‘Your dad looks really old,’ he said. ‘How old is he?’
My dad was really old, I knew that. ‘I think he’s sixty.’
His eyebrow went up. ‘That’s well old! That’s older than my grandad.’
This wasn’t the first time I’d had this conversation. ‘My mum’s not that old,’ I offered, as though it might compensate for the outrage of my dad’s years.
‘And he’s black.’ He turned off the tap. ‘It’s weird that he’s your dad.’ He was dabbing his brushes on the rainbow-blurred kitchen roll at the side of the sink.
♣
‘Mum, am I half-caste?’ She was washing up, lost in thought. ‘Mum!’ I spoke louder. I had just returned from a sleepover at Anna Faulkner’s house, where her dad had expressed surprise after he’d seen my father dropping me off. ‘I didn’t know you were a half-caste,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘You look English, doesn’t she, Pam?’ Pam was Anna’s mother, a nervous woman with fluttery hands who looked even more flustered at her husband’s remarks. I said nothing, carefully carving the steamed kidneys we were having for dinner. They were disgusting but I forced them down out of politeness. Anna’s dad also whispered I was ‘very pretty’ the moment Anna and her mother left the room to fix the pudding. I’d found this more disquieting and decided not to mention it. ‘Am I half-caste, Mum? Yes or no?’
‘No, love. That’s not a nice term. You’re not half anything.’
‘But am I half Jamaican?’
‘Well, your dad is from Jamaica. But his dad was Chinese, and his mum was black, which makes you part white, part Chinese and part Jamaican.’ Right. My mother had it sorted. Jamaican was synonymous with black, then, I assumed, and since my father was from Jamaica, and looked like a black man, that part made sense. But the Chinese aspect always threw me a little, since my father didn’t look like other Chinese people I knew, like Eileen Ng in my class at school with her shiny flat hair. And my father never mentioned anything about China or his Chinese father. As far as I knew, he couldn’t speak Chinese. China showed itself in the ornate chopsticks we kept alongside the knives and forks in the cutlery drawer and the small bowls painted with red and gold dragons he sometimes ate Chinese food from. And he liked to drink jasmine tea from little porcelain cups. I did too. Steaming cups of aromatic tea. The twig-like leaves sunk to the bottom and looked like tiny bird’s nests.
But Jamaica, Jamaica. I knew the sound of the word long before I had any clear idea where Jamaica was, who lived there, or why my father had come all the way from that island in the sun to Ilford, Essex. Jamaica showed itself in the sing-song lilt he would sometimes put on to make us laugh. He was rarely jovial, but occasionally after dinner he might lean his head back and break into an old calypso song about a woman selling herbs and weeds at the village market:
She had the man piaba, woman piaba, Tantan, Fallback and Lemon Grass,
Minnie Root, Gully Root, Grannie Back Bone,
Bitter Tally, Lime Leaf and Toro, Coolie Bitters, Caralia Bush,
Flat o’ the Earth and Iron Weed, Sweet Broom, Fowl Tongue, Wild Daisy, Sweet Sage …
I loved the names of these weeds, imagining what they looked like and what magic they held, but my father loved the final line the most, as though he sang the whole song through just to reach a climax we never found as funny as he did:
The only one she didn’t have … was the wicked ganja weed!
He would hold his stomach and fall around laughing.
Jamaica also revealed itself on the telephone – long conversations in the hall where he would suddenly switch to a thick Jamaican accent. I stood listening through a crack at the dining-room door. Was he talking to someone actually in Jamaica, I wondered, picturing a payphone below a palm tree on a beach, turquoise sea in the background, and the man who had decided to phone his long-lost friend Ralph standing there shouting into the receiver, ‘Man, long time no see!’ Now I realise it was often his cousin Dolores in Canada. Other times it was London-based West Indians, as he called them (and himself), discussing some business of home or family but more likely a card game, or a dice table someone needed making, or a croupier wanted for an all-night game.
Jamaica named itself most regularly at dinner time. My father loved to cook and he loved to boast about his cooking. ‘I can cook anything,’ he said. ‘I don’t need a recipe! Trust me, I know what I’m doing!’ He did most of the cooking in the week, an arrangement that fitted my parents’ disparate lifestyles – my mother at work all day while he went out gambling after dinner, returning around dawn to sleep through to lunchtime. Before she came home from work he’d already be at the stove, lifting the lid of a pan of rice and peas, stirring chicken, chopping ginger, crushing star anise. He concocted soups and stews of yam and dumpling, back bacon flavoured with pig-snout and pig-tail, or fried johnny cakes of flour and salt to dip in stewed tomato – poor man’s food, he called these – the fare of the field workers from his childhood.
His cooking had legendary status among my mother’s friends, other teachers who came often for dinner. They were solid left-wing women like her who wore floaty clothes and ethnic earrings, who cooed over my father’s culinary inventiveness, his knack of making everything taste good. It was at these times I could see my mother was proud to be married to a Jamaican man. He’d cook lavish dishes – mainly Caribbean food but sometimes Chinese food too – nothing like Chinese takeaway, but salty won ton soup or steamed egg that had the consistency of slime but tasted delicious. Sometimes he returned from the butcher with a whole pork belly, rubbing salt and five-spice into the skin, stringing it across the oven to roast all afternoon. My mother was less pleased with this – the sizzling pork filling the kitchen with smoke, spitting fat onto the oven that someone, i.e. me, will have to scrub off, she said.
She also objected to the sweet sausages of pork and chilli he made every summer and hung in clusters on our washing line to dry and preserve. Nan was dead by this time but if she hadn’t been, she might have dropped down from a heart attack to see those sausages hanging in the garden. They were a deep, dark red, gristly looking with twisted ends and oily skins, swinging in the English breeze. In Jamaica, the hot sun would have dried them out nicely, but here they hung limply for a week between the bed-sheets and tea-towels and might easily be ruined by a sudden downpour. I can still see him pulling the back door open, crying, ‘Oh no, oh no!’ and running down the path through the rain to pull the clothes pegs from the strings and shelter his precious sausages in his shirt. My mother’s objection was never specified, but I suspect she found them a troubling symbol of my father’s exoticism in Ilford and his efforts to save them an embarrassing spectacle in front of the neighbours.
The cooking arrangements in our house were unlike those of my friends, whose fathers didn’t cook and whose mothers, for the most part, served up bland dinners of fish fingers and peas, pizza, chicken nuggets, everything with chips and everything English, except chilli con carne or spaghetti bolognese. We ate English food as well. My mother liked us to eat traditional Sunday lunch together, and on Sunday evenings, when my father was always out playing cards, a tea of egg sandwiches, buttered scones and fruitcake, accompanied by endless cups of strong teapot tea. I hated this ritual. It went hand in hand with the awful dullness of Sundays and the night-before-school feeling. Sam and I would disagree, arguments that often ended in violence, then an hour of tears before The Antiques Roadshow and Last of the Summer Wine, and maybe before that Songs of Praise, because my mother liked the singing. All of this had the effect of making Sundays more English than other days, but it was an Englishness I had little experience of – countryside and church halls and cake sales and boredom – an Englishness I didn't want to know about, not from the television, and definitely not in real life.
My mother was also enthusiastic about frozen food. This was the 1980s and a trip to Sainsbury’s Freezer Centre delivered different delights each week. ‘Try these,’ she said, marvelling at the crunchiness of Findus crispy pancakes or Birds Eye potato waffles, or the convenience of Brussels sprouts and chopped carrots you didn’t have to peel. When my father was older, and in fact, when he could no longer eat very much – the doctors took half his stomach, trying to remove all the cancer cells – his enthusiasm for food unsurprisingly diminished, and he resorted to the freezer when he had to cook dinner, serving up anaemic sausages and pale oven chips. By then he was uninterested in the whole ritual of dinner time and if we ate at the table, he would excuse himself halfway through, his plate still full, and sit a way off, thumbing the paper or watching television as though eating was no longer something that he could be wholly concerned with – his stomach had betrayed him.
I think my father must have learned to cook because he had to. He left Jamaica in 1947, sailing to Liverpool on the HMS Ormonde, one of the immigrant boats before the Empire Windrush. Over a hundred young men were on board, hoping for better opportunities in England. My father had lived with his friend Lionel in a damp cellar with one bed they had to share. I see the two of them in the drab light of their digs, frost on the windows, cooking on a single hotplate – simple, inexpensive food. And I remember the one-man meals my father would cook for himself when he was home alone – a tin of sardines steamed over a pan of rice, potato hash cakes, callaloo mashed with nutmeg. He never spoke about this period of his life and much of what I know is gleaned from my mother – how he came to London, found a job as a shunter at King’s Cross, joining and decoupling the heavy steel train carriages. She told me how he hated that work – a whole winter when he bandaged his hands and wore two pairs of gloves to protect his fingers, but how they still cracked and bled from pulling the freezing metal.
There are no letters from this time and few photographs, apart from his old passport and two pictures of his mother, Hermione Harriott. I loved looking at the images of my other grandmother, long dead, the Nan I would never meet. In one, she stares face-on into the camera. She is very light-skinned but her features are African – a broad nose, high cheekbones, wide lips. Her hair is pinned in a chignon and she wears a white lace dress, her best perhaps, as though the taking of the portrait was an important occasion. Her young face has a kind, dignified look. The resemblance between her and my father is strong. The other photograph is from a wedding. Hermione is dressed in an organza frock on the left side of the bride, her niece, but her face is fixed in an angry frown, whereas the other guests are smiling. My father told me that his mother disapproved of the groom, because her niece, in her view, was marrying down. In the strict shade hierarchy of Jamaica, the paler you were the better – the higher in class, the more socially superior – and the groom in the photo, compared to his bride, is much darker.
But surely these intricacies of shade and colour are unpredictable? I used to look for myself in the image of Hermione, but there is little likeness. I am white, fair-haired, green-eyed. No one would ever think I was mixed race. I wonder if my father cared that my brother and I looked so white, if he wanted us to look more like him, more easily recognisable as his children. That question – ‘Is that your dad?’ – was a common one throughout my childhood. It came from children at school who, not bound by the laws of polite social interaction, looked at me with that old black man and wondered aloud what their parents would think, but not dare say.
♦
Charlie White was never reticent in his opinions. A scholar of the ‘university of life’, he had a range of hare-brained theories about the world and universe. His views on racial mixing were extraordinary, and more so that he would share them with my family and me. ‘Look, it’s like this,’ he said one day while my father was making us tea. ‘You like dogs. You buy a dog. Let’s say you buy an Alsatian. Great big dog, big ears, slobbering tongue – you know the deal. Let’s say your neighbour’s got a Chihuahua – a little poncy dog, cross-eyed. Now they’re both dogs, right? But they’re different breeds. They’re different species. You’re not gonna mate them. There’s no way you’re gonna mate them. Cos what would you get?’
‘A medium dog?’ I asked. ‘But a weird-looking one.’
‘Precisely!’ He looked pleased, as though I had proved his point. ‘Weird is the key word. It wouldn’t be right, would it? I’m not a racist, but it’s the same thing with humans. We’re from different parts of the world, we’re from different civilisations. Some of us need to be out in the sun so we’ve got black skin. Others live where it’s cold, like this poncing country, so we’re white.’ He prodded himself. ‘Then you’ve got your Indians, your Pakistanis, all different, job done. But we’re not meant to mate, no way. I’ve read a book about it. I’ve thought about it. It’s not about race, it’s the same with dogs – we’re just different breeds, it’s obvious.’
‘But what about normal mongrels, who don’t look weird?’ I asked, unable to follow his logic. I was thinking about our dog Chloe, whom Charlie loved.
‘Well, they’re not right either,’ he said. Chloe was sat at his feet. He bent forward to tickle her. ‘Chloe’s a sweet dog and all, but she’s not a pedigree, is she? She’s not the best that she could be.’ Chloe jumped into his lap and licked his face.
‘She likes you though,’ I said.
‘That’s as may be.’ He leant back in his chair, straining his neck to see if my father was in earshot, stroking the dog. ‘Now your dad, he’s all right. You know he’s my best mate. I’ve known him half my life. But bloody hell, we’ve had some rows about this one. We’re never gonna agree on this one.’ He was speaking conspiratorially, as though I could surely see the reason of his argument, even if my father couldn’t. ‘I told him, “Chick, it’s like two different dogs – no reason not to get on, but just don’t mate them.” But he sits there in his bloody armchair, lights his cigarette and looks straight back at me – like I’m a fool, like I’m a bleeding idiot!’
♠
My father liked to remind me that I was, in Charlie’s words, a mongrel. ‘You’ve got a touch of the tar brush,’ he would say. ‘Don’t forget now.’ He’d be laughing, knowing well enough how loaded that phrase was – its origins in the bigoted slang of those obsessed by racial purity. He found it funnier because of that. His humour was often irreverent and sometimes careless – a sort of schoolboy insolence. He took the joke one step further once or twice, finding a ruler in the bureau drawer to measure the width of my nose. I was seven, completely unaware of the implications of this, long before I knew about scientific racism that used this type of anatomical investigation to prove its awful theories. I laughed along as he measured my nose from side to side, then let me measure his. It was strange to be so physically close to him, to be touching his face. But his nose was 6.5cm across at the widest part, a figure I was impressed with.
‘Your nose is massive, Dad!’ I worried that mine might grow to match the size of his.
♥
Up close to my father was too close to his moles. There were literally hundreds of them, covering his face and neck, down his arms, across his back. The ones on his back were large, the size of five-pence pieces. Others were smaller and resembled sultanas, raised from the skin and gathered in clusters with waxy surfaces. In some places, there were more moles than actual skin. Once he went to the doctor’s about a mole that had become irritated and had an operation to remove it. Apparently the hospital dermatologist had been fascinated by the volume of moles covering my father’s body and had wanted to conduct tests on them. But my father didn’t want to be experimented on. He seemed unfazed by the moles, which he called his black spots, even though there were more and more every year.
But those black spots horrified me and he knew this. I had a few dark moles on the side of my face he used to point at or try to touch. ‘Oh dear, Han,’ he said, ‘looks like you’ll be covered soon, like me!’ I ran to the mirror in the hall to check the size of the moles and search for the appearance of more.
It was a rare skin condition – Seborrhoeic keratosis – although I don’t think he was actually ever properly diagnosed. Sufferers develop multiple benign moles from the age of forty onwards. They weren’t so bad when I met him, my mother said. But by the time he was sixty, his black spots covered the surface of his skin and one day, driving with them, I announced my decision to stop kissing him. ‘I don’t want to catch black spots,’ I said, pulling a face.
‘They’re not catching,’ my mother turned round from the front seat. ‘They’re just moles. We’ve all got moles.’ My father said nothing, his hands on the steering wheel.
‘Well, I’m not kissing him anymore, just in case.’ Although I didn’t mean it, I really didn’t kiss him again, not once, not a kiss, not a hug, for fifteen years, until he was lying unconscious in our living room, the night before he died.
♣
The Ashgrove Road house was a place of mysteries. I both knew and didn’t know it. It was so familiar, my house, my home, but something made me a snoop there. I was in everything. No drawer unopened, no cupboard I hadn’t rooted through. For a while I was a thief and liar too.
One morning I rose early and found a packet of meringues in the kitchen cupboard. Six perfect white meringue nests. I crunched through them, one after another, washed them down with orange squash. There were crumbs on the carpet in front of the television where my cartoons played. I was happy. It was good to be awake at 6 a.m., alone with myself and sated with sugar as Wile E. Coyote pranced across the screen.
But hours later, at lunchtime, my mother went to look for those meringues. It was Sunday and we had a guest at the table – not just anyone, but Dolores, all the way from Canada. She was my father’s cousin, but much younger. They had known each other in Jamaica, but had lost touch for years. Then out of the blue, she was on the phone and coming to visit in her red blouse with a jewelled brooch pinned to it. She had long fingers with red painted nails and wore gold rings. The lunch was special. The good white-and-brown china was on the table, and – how could I know? – raspberries from our garden and a pot of whipped cream were waiting in the fridge to be spooned onto those meringues.
To lie well you have to shift reality to match your truth. For a second before you tell a lie, you must believe that what you are about to say is unequivocally the truth and hold your nerve about it. Stick with the lie and not betray it. So when my mother came back into the room, I already knew I hadn’t eaten the meringues. When she asked, the denials came easily. Even when I saw she really knew – because, after all, what other explanation was there? – the only thing that mattered was to hold the lie, to keep denying, and so I lied and lied. ‘I swear, Mum, I didn’t eat them.’ She sat down at the table and watched me. ‘I didn’t, I didn’t.’ It was all planned – the raspberries, meringues, whipped cream, and I had ruined it all, ruined the lunch, the visit. ‘I promise, Mum, I didn’t eat them. I didn’t eat them.’
We sat around the table and watched the lie, like a ball I rolled towards my mother. Every time I rolled it, she rolled it back, harder each time. So then I rolled it to my father, who was keeping the conversation going with Dolores as though they couldn’t hear the lie rolling on the wood, and without even looking, he raised his hand and stopped the ball and rolled it back. Sam sat smiling at the other end of the table. Slowly he shook his head. By then, of course, I was crying, and there was only one place for me to go, and I was grateful when my mother sent me away to my bedroom. Yet I still felt I was the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice, even as I lay sobbing into my sheets, the tears were not of guilt, but of indignation – sorrow, not remorse.
Was it minutes or hours after that Dolores held me and told me everything was all right? She smelt of a sweet perfume. We were on the bed and she was leaving. I was crying still because she couldn’t give me what I wanted – her belief in the lie. Instead I took what was offered – forgiveness. It made me heavy in her red silk arms, still sobbing: ‘I didn’t, I didn’t.’
♦
My mother’s younger brother, Uncle Terry, lived a mile away from us with Auntie Lyn and my three cousins, Susanna and Maria – ‘the girls’ – both older than me, and little Alfie, a year younger. Lyn had been my mother’s close friend at teaching college, which is how she’d met Terry. I was sometimes scared of my uncle, of his big dark beard and loud voice. My aunt was gentle and pragmatic. I liked her and I pretty much worshipped Susanna and Maria, just for being older than me and for being my cousins. In each other’s pockets, my mother said about the five of us together before my brother outgrew us, leaving the girls with me trailing after them, and Alfie trailing after me through long summers in the bright garden and the park with its hideaways and secrets, the endless games of leapfrog and hide-and-seek, dressing up in Nan’s old dresses and old hats with peacock feathers, our small feet in her old-lady shoes, and the sleepless sleepovers and camping holidays, Christmas Day not starting until they arrived at our house, or us at theirs.
In 1982, I was desperate to join the girls at Margie Sparrow’s Dance School in the church hall at Chadwell Heath and my mother finally agreed. On Wednesday evenings after school would-be ballerinas aged five to fifteen would train under the tutelage of Margie herself. Some looked as though they were born to dance, while others had been pushed into the class by their mothers. They looked dazed and lonely, loitering at the back of the hall to fidget with their leotards and pink tights, until we were called to our places to warm up. Then we rested our hands on wooden chairs as Margie, frail and ancient in a yellow gauze dress, her dyed black hair in a tangled beehive – swept down the rows, turning our knees out with her wooden cane, her rheumatic eyes locking with ours as though she could see the bad inside of us.
Susanna was ten by then. She was studious and bookish and didn’t like dancing at all, but Maria was a natural dancer, full of self-confidence. Even Alfie had a go at ballet, wanting to be wherever we were. He was the only boy in a class of fifty girls, his thin body clad in black tights and a wrap-around cardigan. The older girls laughed at him when we lined up to run and leap, one by one, across the hall’s polished floor, even though Alf could jump higher than all of us, and looked so lithe and elegant moving through the air. ‘Saut de chat, girls!’ cried Margie Sparrow. ‘Your arms are wings! Reach for the stars!’ Alfie looked like he was flying. I thought he was brave for joining in, and said so, but he stopped coming at the same time as Susanna, then Maria moved to the advanced class on Saturday mornings, leaving me to fend for myself.
At seven, I was as tall as the ten-year-olds and it soon became clear to me that long limbs were not an advantage in ballet, in the way that they were in netball or running. I wasn’t going to excel at dancing. Joy and Suki Lovell were in the same set as me – small, blonde, angelic sisters, who stood at the front and executed every plié and jeté perfectly. I persevered through the twice-yearly exams – always Commended, never Highly Commended, never a Distinction – and through the annual shows at Ilford Town Hall, which required our parents to pay out for garish pink or lilac tutus and obliged our mothers to spend hours stuffing us into our costumes in the dressing rooms, slicking us in blue eyeshadow and red lipstick, before the curtain rose and we spun and polka-danced across the stage.
My father never came to these events but he dropped me off and picked me up from every lesson. We spent more time together in his car than anywhere. He patiently ferried me to choir and piano lessons, to and from school, to birthday parties and back again. After ballet, I would come out to find him standing among the Essex mothers in their leopard-skin leggings and stiletto boots and gold jewellery. Once, after a particularly gruelling class in which I had failed to master a series of chassés, my feet seemingly too large for one to ‘lightly chase’ the other, an exasperated Margie Sparrow had ordered me to stand aside to let the other girls pass. ‘Fairy steps, girls!’ she cried, ‘Don’t wake the fairies up!’ Her look told me I was more elephant than fairy. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as horribly body conscious as I did at that moment. Afterwards my father was in the foyer, standing to the side looking dishevelled in his old suede jacket and jeans, grey hair uncombed, jingling his car keys. ‘Hello, Han!’ he called out to me. Why couldn’t I just be normal, I thought, the same size as other girls, with a normal father, who looked like other fathers?
I saw Suzette Bryce, a portly girl who struggled with dancing even more than I did, look at him, and then look quizzically at me. As we went to the pegs to retrieve our coats and shoe bags, I turned to her and whispered, ‘My mum’s at work so she sends a cab driver for me,’ and she whispered back, ‘Oh right, I wondered.’
Penny Hodge, another little dancer, was nearby, listening. ‘I always wondered too,’ she said, leaning in. She looked in my father’s direction. ‘Is it always the same man?’
We were conspiratorial. I nodded. ‘They always send the same one.’
‘Well,’ said Suzette. ‘I could ask my mum to give you a lift if you like.’ We all looked at my father again, who suddenly looked exactly like a cab driver.
‘Oh no, it’s OK,’ I said quickly. ‘I don’t really mind.’
‘See you next week, then?’ Penny asked, picking up her bag.
‘Oh, I suppose,’ said Suzette. She looked miserable at the thought.
‘Yep, next week! See you!’ I replied brightly, pulling on my coat. I turned away to my father, who reached out for my shoe bag, completely unaware of my betrayal.