29 

The pale-blue aerogramme arrived on 6 July 1971. On the right-hand side, above the address, was a red eagle, with the words: ‘Sierra Leone, Land of Iron & Diamonds, 9 Cents.’ It was addressed to ‘Sheka, Memuna and Aminatta Forna’ and arrived at Grenbeck Court a few months before we moved to our new place. It was from our father. Inside, at the top of the page, was the oval stamp of the prison office in purple ink and our father’s prisoner number: D 6/70. I looked at the address at the top of the letter, the signature of the prison censor, and I thought about my father being in prison and what that meant.

At Minister’s Quarters a group of prisoners had come to clear the garden. We had watched them from the upstairs bedroom window as they scythed the overgrown grass. They wore ill-fitting, buttoned cotton jackets and trousers that had once been white. They were barefoot and worked silently, uncomplaining, before they were herded back into the unmarked prison Land-Rover. They did not look awesome or frightening as I thought criminals should, but rather small and skinny and old. Nonetheless we did not venture out to play until they were gone. We went to the garden where they had been working, looking for I don’t know what – some evidence of their criminality left behind on the lawn, perhaps – then we saw the enormous pile of cuttings and we jumped into it, laughing, and rolled about there for the remainder of the day. Next morning we were back: we leapt straight in to begin again, only to find the cuttings were now alive with thousands of red and green caterpillars.

On our way to and from town I had seen gangs of prisoners by the side of the roads. Their legs were chained and they worked clearing ditches and mending potholes. After my stepmother had finished reading the letter from our father I asked her: ‘Does Daddy have to mend the roads and work in people’s gardens now he’s in prison?’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked. And I told her what I remembered seeing: men stripped to the waist; they had looked like moving shadows beneath the glare of the sun.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. He doesn’t have to do that.’

‘Why doesn’t he?’

‘Because he’s not that kind of prisoner.’

‘He’s not what kind of prisoner?’

‘The kind that has to mend roads.’ She meant he wasn’t a criminal, although the Daily Mail in Freetown did its best to portray him as one. All the same the idea of my father being forced to labour in front of crowds of onlookers chafed at my imagination. I could not let go of the terrible image.

At school on Sundays we wrote to our parents after we had been to church and eaten our lunch of grey meat and colourless vegetables. We filed into the unheated classrooms for letter-writing, sat at our desks and filled our fountain pens with ink, while a teacher handed out paper: plain white, ruled paper for everyone except the overseas pupils, who were issued with floating leaves of onion skin.

My father slept in a cell no more than six foot by eight foot. It had no natural light, except for a small opening protected by steel bars high up by the ceiling, but the electric bulb hanging in the middle of the room glowed day and night so that there was never a time when it was dark. After years under the bright light many detainees left prison with their eyesight permanently ruined. In the centre of the door was a peephole which allowed the guards to see in, but my father could not see out. The cell contained nothing except a blanket and a chamber pot, which was emptied once a day. On the first day he was stripped naked and issued with prison clothes. He was held in solitary confinement and fed a plate of rice and stew twice a day for two weeks, after which he was allowed out for a single hour of exercise in the evening. A whole month elapsed before he was taken to the shower block and given a bucket of water to wash. In time, through lawyers, he was able to request books, which he sometimes received: novels by Morris West, Edwin Fadiman and Solzhenitsyn’s five-hundred-page volume Cancer Ward, which parallels a prisoner’s life on a ward for the dying in a Soviet labour camp, and the cancer at the heart of the police state. After the first few months he was given writing paper.

In his letters my father urged me to work hard at school, praised me on my grades when they were good, and asked me if I had stopped sucking my thumb. I told everyone I had, but secretly I continued to suck it at night. He asked about the goldfish Goldie and Orangie, and remembered the names of the girls with whom I was currently friends at school. I wrote back in turn begging him to allow us home. I was allergic to England – my skin was dry and ashy, my lips were cracked and I couldn’t help licking them, which only made the problem worse; my hair had turned frizzy and my fingers were tattered with bleeding rag nails. I hated being stuck at boarding school and I hated being in England, and in my mind one was synonymous with the other.

Our father placed an unshakeable faith in the British education system – as did many Africans in those days. They believed the key to success lay in a British education, of which by far the most superior was one acquired at boarding school. Going to Bo School had changed his life immeasurably. My father wanted me to become a lawyer (I got as far as completing my degree before I gave up law for journalism) and Memuna, who was the brightest of us, to become a doctor, as he had been. I can’t remember what ambitions he had for my brother – something equally elevated, certainly. As an adult, when I spoke to other friends of mine - other children of the empire growing up in Commonwealth countries after independence – I found we often shared similar experiences. Most of our parents did not own their own homes; foreign holidays were rare or unheard of; the bulk of our parents’ income went on their children’s schooling – this was the price of securing our future. Many years later I finally began to understand the sacrifices our parents had made to give us our education and why they cherished this particular dream. But at the time I felt as if I were being punished.

I must have gone on begging and pleading with him, and Mum must have described in her letters how I clung to her legs on the platform at Victoria Station at the start of every term and the end of each exeat, forcing her to prise me off and hand me over to the teacher escorting the Horley train. Three months into our second year apart, my father wrote to me at length: ‘The Fornas, men as well as women, boys as well as girls, are brave people and they never cry. So you should not cry. Okay? The Fornas face everything bravely.’ He promised, when the time was right, we would be a family again one day. But not just yet. Never just yet.

One Sunday at High Trees a new teacher came in to supervise our letter-writing session. His name was Mr Newman; he had a fat grey moustache and silver spectacles. At the end of the session we lined up as usual while Mr Newman wrote out our parents’ addresses neatly on the front of our envelopes. When it was my turn I gave him our address in London. Mr Newman asked why, if I lived in London, my letter was written on airmail paper.

‘My father lives in Sierra Leone.’ I gave the most minimal and discouraging reply I could.

‘And what’s your father’s address in Sierra Leone?’

‘I don’t know. My mum has it. We send our letters to her and she sends them to him. That’s the way she likes to do it.’

‘Well that’s a bit of a silly waste of time, not to mention stamps. Why on earth don’t you just post the letters from here, you daft girl?’ I quite liked Mr Newman, really. He was very funny and when he called you daft he didn’t really mean it. It was just his way. But I still couldn’t tell him the reason my letters weren’t posted directly to Freetown was because no one at school, neither teachers nor pupils, knew our father was in jail.

I left the old Nissen hut that served as a classroom with Caroline, one of my closest friends. I had spent a weekend at her home near Winchester and, in return, I asked her home to Philbeach Gardens. Caroline was clever, small and neatly turned out, with matching clothes and the kind of grown-up manners English children have.

‘How do you do, Mrs Forna?’ Caroline extended her hand confidently, formally. A beat passed before Mum took her hand. She greeted her pleasantly, but there was an expression upon Mum’s face I couldn’t quite read.

At Caroline’s house I had slept in the spare bedroom, where everything matched the sprigged yellow paper on the walls: curtains, eiderdown, valance, dressing-table cloth, cushion covers. In the corner was a washbasin and a bowl of miniature, scented soaps. When I invited Caroline to stay with us I imagined showing her to a room just like the one I had stayed in. But we didn’t have a spare room and I shared the same bedroom under the eaves of the building with Mum and Memuna. At bed time it occurred to me for the first time there was nowhere for Caroline to sleep. I had spent the night on the divan in the sitting room, while Caroline took my bed. It made no difference to our friendship, but I hadn’t invited anyone home since.

‘Why is your dad in Africa when you’re all here?’ Caroline asked me. ‘And how come you never go home to see him?’

It was the first time anyone had ever enquired directly. I suppose I could have made an excuse, but I didn’t. A few minutes later, sitting on the damp grass of the lower playing fields, I asked Caroline if she could keep a secret. I told her my father was in prison and though I didn’t understand all the details myself, I gave her the best account I could.

When I had finished speaking. Caroline regarded me gravely and at length. ‘I’ve a secret about my father, too,’ she said presently in a low tone which spoke of confidences about to be shared.

‘What kind of secret?’ I was a bit worried I had said too much and now I was eager to be reassured in any way.

‘My father’s a murderer.’

I looked her straight in the face. I certainly hadn’t been expecting that. ‘Who did he murder?’

This is the story Caroline told me that day on the playing fields, while we watched the rest of the boarders playing a game of Stuck in the Mud: Caroline and her family had lived in the Cameroons, where her father was an executive with an oil company. They lived outside the capital, close to the rain forest in an area then being surveyed and scouted for drilling opportunities. In due course new reserves of oil were indeed discovered, the land was cleared and work began.

‘One day,’ Caroline recounted, ‘some Africans came up to our house, lots, a whole crowd of them. They asked to speak to my father. They were villagers and they said they used to live on the land. Now the land was gone they had nowhere to go and nothing to eat. They were so poor. They begged my father to help them, to give them something to eat.’

‘Why did they come to your house?’

‘Because my father was head of the company. They thought he would be able to help them. They didn’t know where else to go. They were just asking, begging.

‘They stood there for ages. My mother didn’t like it at all. She said they were treading on the flower beds and so in the end my father went out, but he wouldn’t speak to them. He told them to go away. He said they must get off our land. So they all went away. There were old people and women and children.’ Caroline stopped speaking.

When she began the story I had fancied maybe he’d pushed her mother down the stairs or put a poisonous snake into her bed. ‘But that doesn’t make your dad a murderer.’

‘The people went away and they never came back. I asked my father what would happen to them and he said he didn’t know. But one of the Africans who worked for us told me they’d all died. They didn’t have anything to eat and they died of hunger . . . all of them, even the children.’ Caroline had tears in her eyes. ‘So you see, your dad might be in prison. But mine’s a murderer and that’s worse. He killed all those people . . . he didn’t care what happened to them.’

I wondered if Caroline was right. After all, nobody had sent her father to prison for what he had done. Caroline called him a murderer. We were children guarding our parents’ shame, hiding from the world adult secrets we barely understood ourselves. Caroline never betrayed my confidence, nor I hers, although our friendship ebbed and flowed, as the affections of small girls are inclined to do. But even so, at some level we always remained close until the day we both left the school in 1975.

After the first letter, our father wrote to each of us separately and we came to expect his letters at the beginning of every month. Every now and again there would be an unexplained gap, and once for four consecutive months none of his letters reached us and none of ours reached him. When the airmails arrived at the flat in London Mum kept them until we came home at weekends and often I would ask her to read mine. I pretended I had difficulty with his doctor’s script, but really it was an excuse for me to curl up and just listen.

Since the day we parted we had not heard once from my mother. After she married our stepfather and returned from Mexico our father had written to her to say the Mexican divorce was not recognised in Sierra Leone. He went to court in Freetown and obtained a divorce himself, and then applied through the Nigerian courts for custody. It was under this authority that he arrived in Lagos to claim us back; our mother saw no alternative but to hand us over. Since then, throughout all the upheavals, there had been no word from her.

Finally a letter did come: Christmas cards arrived at Grenbeck Court, posted from East Africa. There were three of them. The illustrations on the front cover were all by the same artist, coloured drawings of Masai people. Sheka’s had a warrior carrying a spear, Memuna’s showed a woman with a baby on her back. My own, the most striking in my opinion, was of a woman wearing dozens of coloured rings about her swan-like neck. Our stepmother had called us together one day and handed the cards to each of us. Afterwards she asked me: ‘Do you remember your mother?’

‘Sure,’ I said, although I wasn’t. I had stopped thinking of her so much lately. Sometimes, and for a few days after the cards arrived, the three of us talked about her together in secret. We called her ‘Real Mum’ now and if anyone had ever overheard us they would have been confused. Mum was what we called our stepmother, and then there was Real Mum or Other Mum. Sometimes we called them both Mum and Mummy interchangeably – we always knew who we meant. When we talked about Real Mum we talked about her hair, mostly her hair. Or we rehearsed certain memories over and over, like the time Memuna found cockroaches in her Wellington boots. Once at school we had sung ‘Lord of the Dance’ in assembly. It was the first time I had heard the song since our days in Koidu and I didn’t understand why the words and the tune were so familiar, or why I knew them by heart. I suddenly felt overwhelmed by the memory of my mother and instead of singing along with the others I began to cry, cross-legged on the floor in the middle of two hundred other children. My form teacher picked her way across to me and led me out of the hall, assuming it was a case of homesickness. I asked Mum: ‘Are we going to see Mummy again?’

Mum answered slowly: ‘I don’t think so, Am. I think she has a new family of her own now.’

‘You mean she has other children?’ This thought had simply never crossed my mind and it shocked me. ‘How many other children does she have?’

‘I don’t know. One? Maybe two? I don’t really know.’

Later I thought about what Mum had said and I wondered who they could be, these other children who had my mother now.

In my dormitory I had a friend called Helen, the only other person at the school, apart from Memuna, whose skin was the same shade as mine. Soon after I began at High Trees Helen had told me her mother was white and her parents were divorced. Helen lived with her mother, her new stepfather, who was white as well, and two half sisters. But Helen and her brother were the only ones sent away to boarding school; she said it was because her parents didn’t want them around.

‘Is that why you’re here, too?’ she had asked. We’d been sitting on our beds in the Pink Room. Helen was picking at a scab on her arm – it made me wince to watch.

‘No.’ At the time I had explained how really I lived with my dad, although he was in Africa, so we couldn’t actually be together. Helen looked at me and shrugged.

Poor Helen. I did not want to be like her. She had such an air of dejection about her that she attracted few friends. She spent most of her time alone, sitting on the swings or walking down to the main school. As the term strung out, long after the rest of us overcame our homesickness, I would hear Helen at night crying. I could see the outline of her body, her face turned to the wall, and though I leant out of my bed and whispered to her, she never answered me.