7 
White Flight

But to go to school in a summer morn, O it drives all joy away!

– William Blake, The School Boy

In the summer of 2012 I took the train from London to Norwich to see a friend – reading all the way, oblivious to my surroundings. But on the journey home I stared through the window at the country landscape speeding by, so fresh and green after the endless summer rain. Drawing closer to London, the scenery shifted to factories, scrapyards, backs of houses. Suddenly it looked familiar and I recognised the view – we were on the line that ran behind my childhood home. I hadn’t realised the train’s route – through Ipswich across the Suffolk border into Colchester, to Romford, Chadwell Heath, Ilford, then on to London. Growing up, I’d caught trains along this line all the time. I strained my neck to see what I might recognise. Soon we were racing through Goodmayes, past the back gardens of Ashgrove Road, a blur at seventy miles per hour. I tried to pick out my house from the others, and I think I saw it flashing past – the skylight in the roof, the weeping willow still cascading onto the lawn.

I felt a strange bewilderment. I’ve thought so much about that house and what went on there, its existence in my mind so powerful, and yet it’s locked in my memory as a place just always out of reach, a history I can’t go back to. But of course the physical house, the bricks and mortar, still stand. All houses have their histories, but it’s strange to think about the other lives that must now unfold between those walls – another family in the house of my mysteries. There will be different secrets there now.

When I was a child, I was fascinated by those railway tracks. You could clamber on the old stone wall behind our shed and push your way between the pines to reach them. They were so forbidden. I never made it further than the trees, but I’d overheard the other children on our street claim they’d walked along them, or worse, run across the eight steel rails to reach the other side and back again. Sam made those boasts as well. On the other side there was a bus garage, the red double-decker buses parked in tidy rows. I’d driven past that garage with my father a hundred times, but from my bedroom window, with the tracks in-between, it seemed as distant as a foreign land.

I spent many night-time hours, when I was supposed to be asleep, with my face pressed to the glass pane, watching trains run past, the blur of scribbled figures in the windows. Sometimes the train stopped at a signal on the track and those blurred faces came into relief, brought into focus the fact of other people living other lives. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked them silently, but the real question was, ‘Who are you?’

♥

I didn’t talk to the other children on Ashgrove Road. All of them had gone to the same school as my brother in Goodmayes, and they all knew each other. But I had gone to Cotton Lane, ‘the other school’, which meant we didn’t have the common base for friendship. I knew their names, though – Dean and Leila Franklin, next door but one; Bobby and Rami Bent across the road; a family four doors down with seven children. Their dad was Dennis, a wiry Jamaican friend of my father’s who appeared at our house all hours of the day and night, always dressed in jeans and a denim jacket, a can of Tennents Super in his hand.

Then there was Michael McCabe, Sam’s friend, who lived at number 83. I was often dispatched to his house to fetch my brother home for dinner. I loved Michael. At our house, he would lie on the carpet of our living room playing computer games. I’d lie beside him quietly, pretending to be watching, but really I was sniffing him. He smelt of coconuts. Sometimes, if I was sure he wouldn’t notice, I’d nuzzle my face against his jumper and kiss it.

My brother and he were amateur breakdancers, teaching themselves moves from a book called Breakdance: Mr Fresh and The Supreme Rockers Show You How to Do It! and from repeat viewings of Breakdance: The Movie. Sometimes they were joined by Raminder, a Sikh boy who lived round the corner. The three of them would take my brother’s tape recorder into the back garden and stand around a square of lino, swinging their arms in time to the beat of Grandmaster Flash or Run DMC. Raminder’s topknot posed problems when he tried to head-spin, but he was the best by far at the other moves – the caterpillar, which involved throwing your torso down and wriggling along the ground, or the windmill, in which the dancer’s body rolled around on the ground while his legs rotated at speed in a sort-of windmill motion. I was irked that I could perform all kinds of dexterous manoeuvres at gymnastics club which would have enabled me to breakdance well, but daren’t ask to join my brother’s garden rehearsals, knowing full well what the answer would be. Instead, when they had finished and disappeared to the ghetto of his room, I would go into the garden alone to practise head-spins.

I wished I had friends my own age on Ashgrove Road to practise breakdancing with, to do anything with. Every day I walked silently past the children on my street – no ‘all right?’ or ‘watcha’, no knocking on their doors to see if they could come out. No one knocking for me. I had the feeling that they thought I held myself above them, which I didn’t, not one bit, but I was embarrassed, and if I saw a group of them sitting on the low wall outside somebody’s house, I crossed the road. Of course, I had my friends at Cotton Lane, and I was sociable, gregarious. But seeing them always had to be arranged – lifts from my father there and back, or sleepovers – because we lived that bit further away. I used to watch the children of Ashgrove Road racing down our street from behind the net curtains in the front room. Summer evenings, games of run-outs. I’d hear their shouts above the piano as I practised, and I always felt left out, somehow forgotten.

♣

That last summer at Cotton Lane, the staff arranged a Leavers Country Dance for the fourth-years, about sixty of us. We’d do-si-doed our way through both Infants and Juniors, and at eleven we had become experts at formation dancing. I promenaded with half the boys that night – our arms folded across each other’s bodies, holding clammy hands. I danced with Jitsingh Bansal, who had slammed my fingers in the classroom door two years before, an accident I’d just forgiven him for; with Marvin Pearl, who didn’t love me any more and who had a girlfriend in the year below called Mickey – Mickey and Marvin, pah! – with Lucien Festen-Jones, an eccentric boy who’d joined in the middle of the year and was picked on for his funny accent and 1940s clothes. Lucien had replaced Marvin as a potential suitor to me. One day he trailed my father and me as we walked home from school, Lucien declaring his love, much to my father’s amusement.

On the night of the country dance, filtered lights were set up in the darkened hall and pools of colour shimmered on the floor. We drank plastic cups of Coke and stuffed ourselves with French Fancies and Wagon Wheels. There was fractious feeling that night, as though we all knew that nothing from now on would be the same. We were on the verge of new lives, whatever they might hold.

Outside, the late evening light fell on the playground’s asphalt. I walked across the chalked lines of the tennis court, knowing I’d find Solomon Kallakuri round the corner from the Juniors annexe. He’d become rebellious this year, talked back to the teachers, mucked around in class. He had a fight one weekend with a boy from another school and came to class with a black eye and a split in his lip. Now he was leaning against the wall, where I knew he’d be, smoking a cigarette. This was not the first time I’d seen him smoking. When he saw me, he stubbed it out and came towards me. He was still a few inches smaller than I was. His joined eyebrow seemed to have thickened in the last year. He put his hand on my shoulder and kissed me quickly on the lips. He tasted of smoke. Then he kissed me again, and held it for longer. He tasted of getting older.

♦

I’d like to say that I failed the eleven-plus on purpose, but in fact, I simply failed. I could manage the arithmetic and writing tasks, but I was lacking the ability to apply logic to simple problems. I couldn’t crack codes or arrange a sequence of numbers. One morning my mother announced that I’d be attending after-school revision sessions for the exam. She was standing in the doorway of her bedroom, half dressed, getting ready for work. My father had just arrived home and was lying in the bed behind her with the newspaper. ‘I don’t want to take it,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go to grammar school!’ This was Woodford Girls, on the other side of Ilford. I had no interest in going to an all-girl school.

‘You’re doing it, Hannah, whether you like it or not.’ She sounded stern. ‘Your dad wants you to.’

I was too surprised to say anything more. My mother sounded unconvincing, trying to assert my father’s authority. I peered past her at him. My dad wanted me to? He’d expressed an opinion? I caught his eye, but typically he said nothing, just shook the paper as he turned a page. He had always deferred to my mother in regards to my education – this was the first time I’d ever known him to express an interest.

Then later, after the revision session when I failed to understand most of the questions, I felt angry. What right did he have to interfere now? What did he know about education, for that matter? He wasn’t a proper father. He was more like a lodger who came and went as he pleased. He never told me what to do. If anything, it was I who told him what to do – and worse, he would do it. And now he wanted me to take the eleven-plus, because he respected that old-fashioned exam, respected grammar schools, and because if I passed, it would reflect well on him. And my mother supported this decision. So I would have to take it. I was enraged.

And then I failed, as I knew I would. There were twenty or so of us that day in the sweltering gym, the big clock on the wall ticking distractingly – as distracting as my schoolmates’ pencils scratching away on their answer books. I answered the questions I could, but half of them made my brain clog, unable to move forward or recall the previous line of thought. Eventually I gave up, staring out to the bright school field instead, where a class of infants were happily running races.

I was only slightly disappointed the morning I opened the letter with the news, even though I knew I wouldn’t have gone to Woodford Girls by then. I’d been accepted into Pinners, the school my cousins went to. This was better than a grammar school. I’d had to take a test and attend an interview where the scary headmaster asked about my future plans and ambitions. My mother briefed me thoroughly – Make sure you talk about the piano, she said, and somehow I’d been admitted, one of only thirty children from outside the borough, a significant feat, considering my brother had failed the same interview four years previously.

Sam was another reason my secondary school had become a subject of such fuss. My mother didn’t want me to go to his school – Hope Park – because of the trouble he’d been in. My mother blamed the school, but I was pretty sure Sam would have rebelled anywhere. His latest misdemeanour had been ‘accidentally’ setting off a fire extinguisher, covering his Geography teacher in chemical foam. By then he’d been behaving badly for months, staying out later with new friends my mother didn’t like. She suspected something, but didn’t quite know what. He was short with her and surlier than ever. Then one day the police phoned to say they’d caught him in the train yards at Farringdon, with a rucksack full of spray cans they doubted he’d paid for. They brought him home in a police car. The following week my mother hid his trainers to stop him from going out, a strategy I could see was unwise. They had the most terrible row – my brother, just fifteen but over six foot tall – squared up to her in the kitchen, shouting and shouting, bright red in the face. I thought he might hit her. Finally, she relented, retrieved his trainers and threw them at his feet. He in turn threw a brick through our front door on his way out.

He was caught a week later, at the same train yard, spraying graffiti with two other boys. The police didn’t charge him but he was assigned a social worker, a small black woman with close-cropped hair and dangly earrings. She came to our house once a week, sitting in the front room with Sam and my mother, who laid out bowls of potpourri and doilies as if these would demonstrate how undysfunctional our family was. I listened at the door, but was unable to hear the details of my brother’s rehabilitation. My mother had allowed him to spray the walls of his bedroom in the hope this would keep him away from public property. The room smelt constantly toxic, each wall daubed in a thick blear of red, purple and green paint, dried in thick, globular tears.

♠

There were two ways for me to get to Pinners. On my own, I could take the train from Goodmayes to Romford, along the line that ran behind my house, then change for another train to Upminster. Or if I was up in time, my mother would drop me round at Uncle Terry’s and he would take the three of us – myself and the girls – to Upney station where we’d catch the Tube. It was seven stops along the slow end of the District Line, then a mile’s walk to school in our stiff school uniforms, loaded down with school bags full of folders, textbooks, our PE kits. Pinners was a sporty school, and there was no escaping netball, swimming, hockey, rounders, tennis, high jump, discus and the torturous twice-weekly cross-country runs.

Soon after I started at school, Maria and I had a strange encounter on our journey. We were travelling alone one day as Susanna had an eye test. It was a bright morning but freezing cold, so we sat in the platform waiting room where the old-fashioned radiator was turned up high, filling the small space with the smell of hot paint. A man came in. He wore bright jogging clothes – tight turquoise tights, a red tracksuit top with stripes, a woolly hat and gloves. He was black, forty perhaps, with a short, grey beard. I thought it strange that a jogger would catch the Tube, and sure enough, we both soon realised that the man wasn’t waiting for a train. He was in the waiting room for us. He stood facing the radiator, but slightly angled so he could watch us, making slow movements with his body, circling his groin against the hot metal bars. He watched us, and we watched him, and I had no idea what he was doing. Then the train pulled in, Maria grabbed my arm and we rushed out.

‘Dirty old man!’ she exclaimed, slumping into the carriage seat and pulling a face.

‘Was he?’ I said, surprised. ‘What was he doing?’

‘Didn’t you see? He had a big hard-on. That’s what the tight clothes were for. What a perv!’ But she was laughing. And then so was I. He’d looked so stupid, gyrating around.

The next day he was there again, and the next. It was the same routine, but we couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed so much my stomach hurt, until I could hardly breathe. And on the third day, he smiled coyly at us as though to say Look, I know I look ridiculous, but it’s something I have to do. Then he laughed. The three of us laughing at a really bad joke.

He wasn’t there the next day or the next and he didn’t come to the waiting room again, but I used to see him around and about, on buses in Ilford, or in the park. Sometimes with a beard, sometimes without – always in those coloured jogging clothes, but I never saw him jog.

♥

I hated Pinners from the moment I started there – the uniform code with its pedantic requirements for hair accessories to be only brown, box pleat skirts to be two inches below the knee at least, girls’ shoes to be chosen from a selection available at Wards of Upminster, the ancient department store which stocked the school’s uniform. On the third floor, my mother bought me a pair of ugly buckled sandals called ‘Clarissa’. ‘They’re not too bad,’ she said, and I agreed, in so far as they were styled more attractively than the lace-up ‘Veronica’s or ‘Lucy’s I’d tried on, which made my big feet look like lumps of wood.

I only wanted to go to Pinners because my cousins did. At eleven years old, I didn’t care about the school’s long tradition of academic excellence, its national reputation for sport. And although the school booklet said I should be proud to wear the Pinners coat of arms embossed on the breast pocket of my blazer, I didn’t really give a hoot. I hated that the teachers wore academic gowns and mortar boards as though they were Oxford scholars, marching briskly down the wood-panelled corridors, sweeping dramatically into classrooms, expecting us to stop whatever we were doing and stand up to show them our respect, until they told us we could sit down again. I hated that I was meant to care about the history and reputation of the school, that I was meant to feel myself esteemed in some way, privileged to be there, that I should consider myself somehow above the other children who had not been selected by Pinners, like Sam perhaps, that I was expected to look down on the pupils of other local schools, with whom we had great rivalry. With this as our unofficial ethos, was it any surprise we were hated by the pupils of nearby schools? I didn’t blame them.

♣

I made my first friend in Claudia Dean, the only black girl in my class. Her parents were Jamaican but had divorced. She lived with her mother and her white stepfather. I still have a photograph of her and me sat at the dinner table in my house. She has short cropped hair and wears a lime green blouse with a gold brooch at the neck. We are pulling faces at the camera. ‘She’s a lovely girl, isn’t she? Nice mum too,’ my mother said when Claudia went home. Our mothers had stood at the doorway discussing the school and work. Her mother was a social worker.

Claudia was a really nice girl. Gossipy and excitable. She sort of fizzed. But she had trouble at home, not getting on with her stepfather, and she didn’t like Pinners either, had an irreverence similar to mine. My first report said I was an instigator of low-level classroom disturbance, meaning I talked when I should have been listening, and did stupid things like flick fountain-pen ink across the classroom, once onto the back of a teacher’s shirt. Claudia didn’t do the daft things I did, but she was loud and outspoken, refusing to automatically accept the school’s authority and its endless, pointless rules.

Then one day she had a fight with a boy, a bully from another form. There were rarely fights at Pinners, and never between a boy and a girl. A rumour went through the classrooms at lunchtime. Someone said the boy had lost a tooth. Good old Claudia, I thought, both excited and repelled by the news. I'd never fought, except with Sam. It seemed a serious thing, something from the adult world. She wasn't in class that afternoon. I phoned her that evening but there was no reply. I phoned the next night and she told me that Rhys had called her names, but she didn't say what. I saw her the next day outside the school office. Then she was gone. Her mother phoned my mother and told her they'd decided Claudia would be better off elsewhere, but we should stay in touch. I had a book of hers, a Judy Blume I knew she'd want back. But I didn't phone, not that week or the next, and somehow we never spoke again.

♦

It was around this time my father gave me a book, an unusual occurrence as he rarely showed an interest in what I was reading. The book was as thick as the Bible with a dark purple cover. Its title was Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith. ‘I want you to read this,’ he said seriously. He was wearing his reading glasses. ‘It’s well researched and well argued. Everyone should read it.’

I took the book up to my bedroom, but every time I tried to read the introduction, I’d get lost. The words were too complicated, the subject too dry, like all the books my father chose to read – long biographies of socialist politicians or histories of labour movements. His appetite for politics and current affairs was seemingly insatiable. He read the Guardian every day from cover to cover and always had a stack of books on his bedside table, while I was still reading Enid Blyton and progressing onto Judy Blumes. Still, I appreciated owning The Case Against God. I felt it confirmed my family’s creed, rebelling against Pinners, a school so proud of its Church of England ethos. Now, when other people declared their Christianity or Hinduism, I would announce my atheism, as though it were my faith.

A few weeks later my mother gave me a letter to give to Mr Harrington, my head of year. ‘What does it say?’ I said suspiciously.

‘Your dad wants you to be exempted from saying the Lord’s Prayer in assembly, which means you’ll have to miss assembly altogether.’ My mother sighed. ‘This is a permission letter.’

Once again, it seemed my father had spoken in regard to my education, but this time it was in my favour. I hated assembly, less because of the Lord’s Prayer than because it was half an hour sat cross-legged on the cold, hard gymnasium floor. My fathered hovered in the doorway, avoiding eye contact with my mother. ‘No more Lord’s Prayer for you, Han!’ he said jollily.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘If you say so.’ This was all very strange. ‘Thanks, Dad.’

♠

If my mother resented my father’s part-time parenting, she rarely said so. In fact, she didn’t say much about his absences, the petty criminality, his dubious living. Hers was a conflicted position. When he did try to assert himself as a father, she supported him. When he didn’t, she tried to fill his shoes. If she begrudged the countless nights he was away from her and us, the solution – that he stay home – meant we’d be poor. It was only years later that she told me how hard it was. I missed out, she said. You children missed out. He knew it too. But what could we do? Of course, it wasn’t just that my father was a part-time parent. He was a part-time husband too.

There was often a tense atmosphere at Ashgrove Road, my father in the proverbial doghouse for reasons unnamed, and occasionally my mother’s frustrations spilled over. There were rows. Not cross words that easily erased themselves after an hour or two, but full-on rages. Once, from my bedroom, I heard the sounds of smashing china and crept downstairs to find my mother launching cups at my father, who was ducked behind the kitchen counter.

‘You useless bastard!’ she shouted.

‘Bet!’ my father implored. A sea of broken china surrounded him. ‘Calm down, will you please? Calm down!’ He raised his head above the counter to meet her eye.

‘Don’t you tell me to calm down!’ She lifted another mug from the draining board and launched it at the wall, too angry to aim properly.

‘You’re bloody mad!’ my father shouted. ‘Do you want to kill me?’

‘Yes!’ she cried. Another crash.

Neither of them noticed me, watching from the hall. I had no idea what they were rowing about. I crept upstairs.

Other times, they were the best of friends. My mother loved gardening, and after Nan died she took over the long back garden behind Ashgrove Road. It was a lovely garden, with a pond and a rockery. An old cherry tree stood at the end of the lawn. Behind it, my mother kept a vegetable plot between the shed and Nan’s old greenhouse with its rickety frame.

My father helped out in the garden. They spent most Sundays out there – wrapped in big coats when it was cold, gloves and wellies on. My father would dig where my mother told him to, load up the compost, go down on his knees to pull up weeds. It was his job to make the autumn bonfires, a task he relished. I stood between them on those cold evenings, marvelling at the flames, the lovely warmth of the fire. My enthusiasm for bonfires ended abruptly when one of my parents – it was never made clear which, though I suspect my father – threw a cardboard box containing Doug, our hibernating tortoise, onto the pyre – an accident so horrendous no one spoke of it afterwards. We found the remnants of his cremation among the ashes the next day.

My mother ordered a new greenhouse when the great storm of 1987 made the old one keel over. Some of the glass panes cracked, others were loose and threatened to fall out. The new one arrived in twenty different cardboard boxes the delivery men propped on our patio. There was a thick manual of assembly instructions.

‘Destructions, more like,’ my mother said. ‘God knows how we’ll put it together.’

She needn’t have worried. My father erected it for her the next day while she was at work. It must have taken him hours. She was amazed

‘Did you do it on your own?’ she said disbelievingly as we all stood in the greenhouse. It was much bigger than the old one, with a small porch and a wooden slatted floor.

‘Yes, just me,’ he said. ‘See what I do for you?’

‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘It’s like a bloody palace!’

‘Oh it wasn’t too hard,’ he said. ‘I knew you’d be pleased.’ He patted her waist as he stepped outside to light his cigarette.

♥

‘Your homework is to write an essay about someone in your family,’ Mr Apricot said, chalking instructions onto the board, ‘and link it with an important event or events in history.’ His yellow moustache was so thick you couldn’t see his mouth. It moved when he spoke. ‘Go home and talk to your mums and dads – you might be surprised.’ The bell rang and the chairs scraped back. We pushed each other out into the corridor.

I didn’t go home and talk to my parents but I did write an essay about my father. I must have known enough to write about his Anglocentric education in the colonial system, which taught him little about the struggles of his own island, but plenty about the lineages of English royalty – he could name in order every single king and queen since William the Conqueror, and all the countries in the Commonwealth. I wrote about his reverence for the institutions of England and how he’d taught himself to speak English ‘like a gentleman’. I wrote about his schooling in colonial Jamaica where he’d learned poems by heart to recite for competitions – always English poetry about places and things he had never seen, like ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ or ‘Daffodils’ by Wordsworth. Sometimes he would recite ‘If’, an ironic choice, given Kipling’s ambiguous association with the British Empire. He would stand at the dining-room table, delivering the lines in his best English accent. I wrote about the ship he took from Kingston to Liverpool, believing that England would welcome him, only to be shocked by the hostility and prejudice he encountered, not only in finding a place to live, but also by people shouting racist insults at him in the street.

When I got the essay back, Mr Apricot had circled ‘Anglocentric’ in red pen with a question mark and a comment: ‘Not a proper word.’ I stuffed the essay in my bag. Even then I knew there was a heavy irony here – that my dusty, English History teacher pacing to and fro before the blackboard in this dusty, English school would have no need to know a word that just confirmed his position and privilege in the centre.

♣

There was no doubt that Upminster was a whiter place than Ilford, but the racial demographic of Pinners was disproportionate – there were only one or two black faces in each year, and with Claudia gone, there were none in our year. Of course, I looked white, so anyone might wonder why it mattered to me. Was it that I didn’t feel white? At Cotton Lane, everyone knew my father was black and I was surrounded by people who had origins all over the world. But at Pinners, something told me I’d be better off keeping my background to myself.

The schools were only eleven miles apart but Upminster is further into Essex than Ilford, at the end of the A124 – halfway to Grays and Thurrock. Most of the pupils at Pinners came from Upminster or round about – Hornchurch, Cranham, Emerson Park, relatively well-off neighbourhoods, but still within a stone’s throw of poorer places such as Harold Hill and parts of Romford. That whole area of Essex, from Ilford heading east, was sometimes called the Essex Corridor. The term white flight was applied here, meaning the migration of the white working classes out of the East End and into Essex, along that corridor, seeking to escape the influx of migrants into London. Lots of the children at Pinners came from such a background, had parents or even grandparents who’d moved out from Aldgate, Bow or Stepney Green. Others had families who’d been in Essex for years and years. But whatever the case, the diversity I’d known before had disappeared, and in its place I found a casual but pervasive racism.

The curriculum at Cotton Lane had been multicultural, responding to the shifts of ethnicities in the area the school served, the high proportion of children whose parents came from India or Pakistan or a country in Africa. The teachers liked the pupils to talk about their backgrounds and we learned about different cultures. I don’t think it occurred to me that I was English or white in any self-conscious way, or if it did, it didn’t matter. I saw myself as part of a big mix of children and I loved to learn about the way other people lived.

We did projects on the plight of Native Americans and read Jamaican folk stories and poetry. In maths we learned how the number 0 came from India and how the abacus came from China and Egypt. Later, this type of education was nicknamed the ‘Sari, Samosa and Steel Band’ approach, seen as tokenism, inadequate to address the real inequality between cultures and races. But perhaps what went on at Cotton Lane was a start. There was something in the spirit of that school that was really positive – a tolerance, a notion that difference was good, a disdain of racism and prejudice. At six or seven, the worst thing we could accuse each other of was being a racist, or a rachist or racialist as most of us mispronounced. ‘You’re a rachist! I’m telling Miss!’ We couldn’t always say it right, but we knew what it meant and we knew it was wrong.

At Pinners, that spirit was gone. It was a monocultural school and any efforts to look beyond this were always academic, never real, never lived. I missed the mix of people. I missed the sense that I was part of a world far bigger than Ilford or Upminster. At Cotton Lane I saw outside my own small place, reminded every day that there were other people and far-off places. Perhaps at heart, I missed my friends: Mina, Solomon, Marvin. Even Lucien. They’d all gone to Hope Park, and despite our promises, we hadn’t stayed in touch.

After Claudia had left, I became friends for a time with Frankie, who lived in Harold Wood with her mum Viv and three brothers, and their mum’s boyfriend Carl, who was twenty years younger than her, and wore black varnish and skinny jeans. I liked Viv. She had peroxide blonde hair and wore skin-tight gothic clothes, always joining in when we gave each other makeovers or backcombed our hair. She used to spray us with her perfume, put her feet up while we watched TV, drinking gin and tonics. She drew us into the adult world with advice about men.

‘Let them take you out and treat you nice, girls,’ she’d say in front of Carl, ‘but never get involved.’ I was only eleven, but appreciated her sagacity nonetheless. But after dinner, she might send us to get a bag of sweets or a can of Coke from the Paki shop, a term I knew was wrong, but couldn’t say so because Viv was an adult. And I was outnumbered – Frankie and her brothers said it too. Then Viv would curse the ‘bloody blacks’ who took her parking space in the shopping centre, or held the queue up in the post office, sending packages to ‘Zululand no doubt’.

Another time, when I told Kevin Morris in my class that my family lived in Ilford, he said, ‘Oh, my dad says Ilford’s a right dump – loads of coons and Pakis there, like a bloody jungle!’ Those terms and phrases were used so nonchalantly. For half of the second year, the accusation ‘Jew-boy!’ was in vogue, so if, for example, Mark Parker dropped his lunch money on the floor and bent to pick it up, Tim Sanders might shout out ‘Look he’s picking up his pennies off the floor – what a Jew-boy!’

Looking back, I can’t remember how often I heard this kind of prejudice or to what degree I’ve let those individual comments stand for the views of the majority. I was sensitive to it. I felt conflicted by it. The norm at the school was white and English, and by anybody's measure, from the outside, I looked normal. But inside, those comments really got to me. They made me feel protective of my father, protective about Soloman and Mina and Marvin. I felt protective about me. 

♦

A man called Ray the Pilot was often on the telephone to my father at that time, and the two of them were in cahoots. Ray was from Texas but lived in Durham, near to an airbase from where he flew private jets for wealthy north-easterners. I’d met him once when he’d come to the house in his tan leather jacket and cowboy boots. He was tall and the boots made him taller. He had a suntan and floppy blond hair. He stayed for dinner, directing most of his conversation to my mother, whom he called Betty-Boo. He told stories about women he’d seduced from France to Russia to Thailand. What a pillock, she said when he left. Total sexist pig.

One evening, my dad put down a small suitcase in the hall. He’d polished his shoes for half an hour that afternoon, and now he had them on with his smart belted mac. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked him. I’d never seen him with a suitcase before.

‘Newcastle,’ he said, and winked at me. ‘To see a man about a dog.’ This was one of his favourite phrases. He was always vague about his evening jaunts, the proverbial dog often cited as a reason for his outings.

‘Oh right. If you say so.’ I was generally annoyed with my father these days, for reasons I couldn’t specify, and I wasn’t going to let him think I cared what he was up to.

‘See you, then,’ he said, picking up the suitcase. ‘Tell your mum I’ll be back on Thursday.’ It was Tuesday and my mother was at Keep Fit, bounding around in her new leotard and legwarmers.

‘Hmmm,’ I grunted as he shut the front door.

There would many more trips in the coming months. Newcastle again. Guernsey. Then Paris, then Berlin. No more explanation from him. My mother said he was ‘doing a bit of business’, whatever that might mean. Each time, I’d watch him straightening his coat in the hall mirror, the little suitcase at his feet. Then he was gone, just like that, just like a lodger.

The last time he went abroad it was to Prague. It must have been the one time my father’s preparations were not concealed from me. I remember he stayed up very late the night before, sitting at the dining table doctoring the cards, the overhead light supplemented by two bright lamps on either side. He was there after dinner and still there when I went to bed. Nothing was said. There were glass pots of ink on the table, the little guillotine from the hall cupboard. In the morning I watched him climb into the big black car waiting at our gate. There were three others – two I didn’t recognise, but driving the car was Sylvester, one of the men who made dice tables with him.

I watched them pull away and, for the first time, had a pang of worry about my father. From snatches of overheard phone conversations I had gathered there was a dealer in a big casino there who was willing to swap a deck of marked cards into a poker game for a share of the winnings. Surely my father was too old to be doing that sort of thing?

He was supposed to be gone a few days, but he was back the next afternoon when I came home from school, and in a stinking mood. ‘The guy lost his nerve!’ he was telling my mother in the kitchen. ‘He was blind drunk! Stumbling round the place, security guards everywhere. Oh, it was a posh place. Top notch. We could have cleaned up.’ He took a long drag on his cigarette. ‘But as soon as we saw him, it was game over. We were in bed by nine. And here I am now,’ he said, leaning back on the counter. ‘What a waste of time. And the fool man still has my cards. They could make him a bit of money, I can tell you.’

‘Well, what can you do?’ my mother said, pulling on the washing-up gloves. ‘Ring the casino and complain?’

‘Hello, Dad,’ I said, making myself an orange squash. ‘Thought you were gone until Sunday.’

‘Hmmm,’ he said. ‘The dog I went to see was dead.’

♠

There was a swimming pool in Romford called the Dolphin – not just any swimming pool, but a special one – hexagon-shaped and surrounded by tropical plants and rockeries. You could walk into the water on the sloped floor of shell-coloured tiles as if it were the ocean. The showers at the side of the pool flowed like waterfalls, cascading out of fake rock. There was a high slide to slip down and splash into the deep end, and it had a wave machine. I’d had my tenth birthday party there with eight friends from Cotton Lane. We’d swum and played, then changed into our party dresses, heading upstairs to the café where coloured balloons floated above the table spread with sandwiches and birthday cake.

At twelve, I still loved the Dolphin. I had another new friend, Kim, and she and I spent most Saturdays wading and flopping through the turquoise water. The wave machine began every hour, creating huge surges as the water rose high and dipped low on the pool’s sides. I was just playing around when the accident happened. It didn’t occur to me that the depths of the water shifted so dramatically when the wave machine was on, and so I dove deep into what should have been five feet of water, but was actually much shallower. My chin hit the tiled floor hard. At first I couldn’t right myself. Then I was standing and all the lights above were wobbly. Someone gasped and someone else put their hand on my shoulder, and suddenly the lifeguard was there. I put my hand across my mouth. Where my front teeth should have been was a hard, jagged ridge. I had a palm full of blood.

The lifeguard walked me out of the water, wrapped a towel around me and led me to the first-aid room, where a young woman in sports clothes tried her best to fix me up. I couldn’t stop crying. All I had left were two stumps of front teeth. They had punctured my lip. I looked in the mirror and cried harder. I’d liked my front teeth. Half an hour later my father was there, car keys in hand. I was still crying, but as soon as I saw him I pulled myself together. I didn’t want him to hug me.

‘Oh dear, Han,’ he said in the car. ‘You’ve ruined your teeth.’ This was the last thing I wanted to hear. I knew it was bad. I held back the tears as we drove silently home.

♥

The South African dentist made me a pair of veneers to match the size and shape of my old teeth, and fixed them on with ultra-violet rays. This was not before I had to spend two weeks at Pinners with a dull ache in my jaw and my smashed teeth on view to everyone. ‘You look well ugly,’ Simon Porter told me, and I spent lunchtime locked in the sports changing rooms, where no one would find me.

‘Make sure you say thanks to your dad,’ my mother told me on the drive back from the dentist. She wanted me to respect him. The veneers had cost £300, money he had spare since he’d been taking his various trips. The new teeth were really good. I looked normal again.

‘Thanks for my teeth, Dad,’ I said, hovering in the living-room doorway.

‘You’ll have to be careful with sports,’ my father said, looking over his newspaper. ‘I need to protect my investment.’ He laughed. I could see that he was pleased to be acknowledged.

♣

It was a year of accidents. Sam had broken his collar bone three months before, falling from a wall behind his school. I wondered what he’d been doing on that wall. There was a rucksack hidden below his bed, stuffed with cans of spray paint. My father had an accident too, one Sunday after lunch. He was outside, up a ladder, painting the window frames. My mother was in the back garden, Sam was in his room, and I was practising the piano. Suddenly the doorbell rang, and rang, and rang, shrill and intrusive, as though someone was holding it down. But in the hall I saw a pane of the front-door glass was smashed and protruding through the gap was the end of a ladder. I opened the door to see the ladder had fallen, one of its legs breaking the frosted glass. The other leg had wedged against the doorbell. I pushed the leg to the side to stop the bell ringing, and at the same time saw my father, lying across the garden path, half in the flower bed, surrounded by red rose petals. His arms were tidily folded over his body, as though he was asleep. One petal on his cheek looked like a tear.

‘Dear God!’ shouted Irish Bridget, our next-door neighbour, rushing up our path in her apron. She crouched down by my father.

‘Ralph, Ralph, can you hear me? Don’t worry, my darling. Oh dear God, dear God!’ There was no response. My father looked very peaceful. ‘Dick, I think he’s dead!’ Bridget cried, looking up to her husband, who was coming up the path looking perplexed. ‘Call an ambulance!’

Then my mother appeared. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘What’s he done now?’ She knelt down beside my father and lifted the rose petal from his face. ‘You silly old fool,’ she said, and stayed there holding his hand as the other neighbours came. A siren sounded in our street. The medics lifted my unconscious father into the back of the ambulance and my mother climbed in. I watched them disappearing down Ashgrove Road, the blue light flashing.

Joshua from Trinidad, our neighbour on the other side, came up behind me. I was scared of him. His clothes were always stained, he smelt of ale and something sour. He put his arm around me, bent down close, his face on my neck. ‘Don’t fear, don’t fear about your daddy,’ he whispered hotly in my ear.

♦

There was the sensible way, my mother said, and your father’s way. And the two were not the same. The ladder had been uneven and my father thought to prop it in the flower beds on a piece of Contiboard to even up the legs. Contiboard is both shiny and slippery, so it was surprising he’d even reached the top of the ladder before it slid from under him and he toppled ten feet into the roses. He was lucky. He’d only cricked his neck, bruised his coccyx, banged his head. He had mild concussion and had to stay in hospital overnight.

My mother took me to the ward the next day. He was sitting up in bed, tearful and glum. ‘I do everything wrong,’ he said. His head was held rigid by a thick white neck brace. ‘Don’t make the mistakes I make, Han,’ he said to me, a statement I understood had a far wider resonance about his life in general.

‘I’m more concerned about the roses,’ my mother said gently, repeating what she’d said the day before, her hand over his hand: ‘You silly old fool.’ I was surprised to see her gesture. I’d never heard my parents say they loved each other, never seen them kiss.

As soon as my father’s neck got better, the trips to Newcastle recommenced, once a fortnight. He took the train from King’s Cross, returning the next day or the one after, appearing in the kitchen with his little suitcase. We were noticeably better off. My mother was redecorating. There were new things in the house. Something was going very well up north.

♠

Now I can look back on life at Ashgrove Road with more clarity. The illegal goings-on were interwoven with the everyday domestic. My father often did the ironing, standing with a pile of clothes, watching the television as he worked his way through them. But now and then, instead of clothes, he’d be ironing a square of cellophane around a deck of cards he’d marked, to make them appear brand new and still wrapped. When Sam and I were very young, everything was kept secret, so if we were playing in the garden he’d be upstairs loading dice in the back bedroom, or he’d wait until we were out to mark a deck of cards for the next night’s game. As I grew older I saw more, perhaps because I was more observant, or perhaps he was just less concerned. Perhaps he had worried that a younger child might accidentally blab about what they’d seen.

I remember another failed mission, like the one to Prague, when my father was supposed to fly to New York. I didn’t know it then, but he was planning to carry back a suitcase full of cannabis. I assumed he was going to play cards. All I saw was my mother’s fury. ‘What good are you to me locked up?’ she shouted at him, tears springing to her eyes. And late in the night, I heard him knocking around downstairs. I came down to find him at the table, smoking a roll-up, the ashtray brimming with his crumpled butts.

In the morning, he stood at the front door. ‘See you in a few days,’ he said.

‘If I’m unlucky,’ my mother said.

It was a Saturday and I had ballet. She dropped me off and picked me up. When we came home, he was making tea in the kitchen.

‘How far did you get?’ she asked.

‘Halfway to Heathrow.’ He laughed, and put his arm around her. ‘Your old man lost his nerve.’

Then there was the time the two Americans came to stay. They dealt in emeralds, they said. Emerald dealers? Bloody emerald thieves, more like, my mother said. Their names were Jed and Spike. I was small, but I remember them hazily. Jed was tall with a big Afro. They wore flash clothes – flared suits, thick gold rings and heavy chains at their necks. Spike had a fur waistcoat. The house was full of the scent of strong cologne.

My father had met them at a poker game in Paris. Six months later they were on the phone, coming to stay. It was meant to be three days, my mother said, not three bloody weeks. According to her they were lazy, expecting her to cook them dinner, clean up after them and make their beds. Jed lingered too long in whichever room she was in, constantly asking her questions – what were her favourite flowers, her favourite food, her favourite perfume? ‘They’ve got to go,’ she told my father. ‘As soon as possible. Like today!’

But nothing was that simple. Apparently my father had set a job up for them, to earn them some money to move on – delivering an important package for an Indian friend of his, but something had gone wrong. My mother and I came home one day to find the Americans gone, but there was a big hole in the garden, right in the middle of the lawn. It was deep and narrow, the size of a grave. My father was filling it in. ‘What on earth’s been going on?’ my mother asked.

It turned out that the important package was a Mini, the panels of which were packed with top-quality hashish. It was parked on a side street in Hamburg, waiting to be driven to London. The Indian had been keen when my father had suggested the two Americans for the job, but had been put off when he met them. He didn’t trust them. He was meant to come to our house a week later to give them plane tickets and directions, but arrived an hour late, full of excuses and without the tickets. Jed disappeared from the room, gone for ages as the chat became more stilted, the excuses running out. Finally, my father went to see where Jed was, and found him in the back garden, digging the earth up with my mother’s spade.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked, and Jed had leant conspiratorially towards him, a sheen of sweat on his brow.

‘Keep that fucker there,’ he whispered. ‘I’m going to shoot him dead and bury him.’ He patted a gun-size lump in his jacket.

My father relayed the story with great relish as my mother’s eyes bulged.

‘I had to stall him,’ he said. ‘And thankfully Mr Singh had let himself out. Anyway, they’ve gone to Manchester. Probably to rob a bank. We’re lucky no one’s dead.’

‘Just fill this bloody hole in,’ my mother said. ‘And never again, you hear me?’

♥

I came downstairs in my school uniform one morning to find a commotion in front of the house. My father had just arrived home from Newcastle, driving all night in a bright yellow Triumph with a black roof. It was a gift for my mother. She had taken her test years ago, but hadn’t driven in decades. Now she was going to have to, and no one was going to miss her in that car. She was standing on the path with a tea towel in her hands while my father showed the car off to Irish Bridget. ‘Well she’s a beaut for sure,’ Bridget said, nodding. ‘What do you think, Betty? I wish Dick would buy me a car. No chance of that!’ Her laugh turned into a hacking smoker’s cough.

‘It’s only done ten thousand,’ my father said to my mother. ‘She drives beautifully.’ He looked pleased with himself. ‘I drove all night to wake you up with a surprise.’

‘It’s lovely,’ my mother said. ‘A real surprise.’ She opened the driver’s door and shut it again. ‘I better go in and get the kids off.’

She passed me in the hall. ‘What do I want with a bloody car?’ she said. She didn’t require an answer. ‘Oh I could bloody kill him.’ I could hear my father outside, still talking to Bridget.

‘Bright yellow,’ he was saying. ‘I knew she’d love it.’

♣

The next time he came back from Newcastle, my mother, Sam and I were eating dinner in front of the television. It was a documentary about death row. He popped his head round the door. ‘Evening,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Oh, hello,’ my mother said. ‘Didn’t think you’d be back tonight.’ The yellow Triumph was still parked on the drive, waiting to be driven.

He rummaged in the pocket of his suede jacket, pulling out an envelope and dramatically slapping it on the coffee table. ‘Who’s going to open it?’ he asked, looking from one to the other. Sam was slouched in his armchair, his legs spread. He craned his neck to look past my father at the TV. My mother looked worried. Suddenly I felt sorry for my father.

‘I will!’ I said brightly, leaning over for the envelope. I picked it up, unpeeled the flap and pulled the papers inside out. It took me a while to realise what I was looking at.

‘It’s tickets to Jamaica!’ I said. I was holding four plane tickets. The summer holidays were only two weeks away.

‘It’s bloody not,’ my mother said. ‘Is it?’ Her eyebrows were raised.

‘We going to Jamaica?’ Sam looked up.

‘Yes we are,’ my father said emphatically. ‘For the whole of August. What do you think?’ None of us said anything. We were shocked. He rubbed his hand through his hair. He looked sad.

‘I need to go home,’ he said.