30 

I was walking home with a paper bag of samosas from Bestways in my hand when the sound of car brakes snapped me out of my daydream. Up ahead a red car jolted to a stop.

‘Here’s an ugly one. Jesus look at that!’ There were three men in the car, all in their twenties, all with short hair through which I could see the pink scalp. Their mouths contorted with hate: ‘You’re a fucking ugly fella, intchya? You’re a right bloody, ugly one.’ Shouts of hard laughter crashed inside my ears.

I looked around. There was a man ahead of me: very tall, skinny, loping stride, shoulders hunched against the barrage of taunts. He had long ropes of black hair hanging down his back – I had never seen hair like that.

Next to him the red car revved, keeping pace with his walk. ‘You’re one fucking ugly nigger, intchya?’ The man walked on, ignoring the car, behaving as though he hadn’t heard. I followed on behind him. The engine roared and the car drove away.

Back when we lived at Grenbeck Court Mum and Mrs Cobally used to sit and watch Love Thy Neighbour, the tears coursing down their faces. Alongside The Liver Birds it was Mum’s favourite TV programme. At school I had sometimes seen The Black & White Minstrel Show. It wasn’t my all-time favourite programme, but I enjoyed the singing and dancing, the extravagant numbers and tap routines well enough. I was baffled, though, by the strange oily, black faces and white lips of the men and it took a while for me to realise they were supposed to be black men.

Once in a geography lesson I had told the class, at the urging of the teacher, that I came from Sierra Leone. I pointed it out in my Junior Atlas. It was one of the pink bits – the former colonies were always coloured pink. Afterwards the teacher talked to us about life in Africa, about how the natives lived and worked on coca plantations or grew coffee for the world market. At some point she segued into a description of rubber-tapping on a plantation, and showed us a picture of a brown man in a loincloth and turban cutting a V into the trunk of a tree. She asked me if I had ever been on a rubber plantation. I told her I hadn’t. I couldn’t seem to recognise any aspect of the Africa she described and I had begun to wonder if indeed I really came from there at all. I only realised after the umpteenth time it happened that people in England often talked about Sri Lanka thinking it was the same country as Sierra Leone.

A girl with dappled blonde hair two seats in front of me raised her hand. ‘Is it true that when children in Africa are born their parents drop them on their heads. That’s why they can carry baskets and things – on their heads – and we can’t. Because their heads are flat?’

‘Goodness, well . . . I really don’t know,’ said Miss Martin.

‘Mummy says that’s what they do,’ replied the girl with absolute certainty.

‘Well, I suppose it’s possible . . . I really couldn’t say. It sounds a dreadful thing to do,’ murmured Miss Martin, putting her hand up to her breast.

‘My mother says so,’ repeated the girl, adding with finality, ‘So does my father.’

I raised my hand. ‘No they don’t,’ I said. ‘Africans don’t have flat heads. In Sierra Leone no one drops their babies on their heads, not on purpose.’

The girl swivelled round in her chair to look at me; the pageboy swung round and settled perfectly on either side of her cheeks; china-blue eyes regarded me disbelievingly. ‘Well, how come they can carry so many baskets on their heads then?’ She held up her book and pointed at the illustration of a woman with a baby on her back and a stack of six or seven baskets on her head.

I didn’t know the answer. I wondered, too. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Well, then. I’m right, Miss Martin, aren’t I?’ The pageboy swung back the other way.

‘Well, I suppose you could be,’ concurred the geography teacher.

The next time we watched the minstrels dance down a staircase and drop to their knees, arms outstretched, grinning at the audience, the boy next to me asked: ‘Is that what your father looks like then?’

I felt sad for the man walking in front of me down the London street, although I felt confused about what exactly had just happened. I gazed at the Rastafarian’s receding back, his lanky legs. He did not know I was there. At that moment, while my eyes were still upon him, I saw him flinch: a shudder that ran through his body like a convulsion. The red car was back. The men had driven round the block and now they were circling us like wild dogs. The car horn bayed:

‘Hey monkey!’

‘Show us ya face, monkey man!

It occurred to me that if they noticed me, which they hadn’t so far, they might pick on me too. Our flat lay beyond the wasteland of the Earls Court Exhibition Centre car park on the other side of the Warwick Road. I still had quite a long way to go. I was wary of attracting attention by suddenly swinging back the way I had come. There was no side road I could turn down, no choice but to keep walking. My urge was to run up to the Rastafarian and walk with him, not because I wanted to show solidarity, although I felt deeply sorry for him, but because I was now genuinely scared and I thought he might be able to protect me when my turn came around. I was shaking, could hear myself breathing. I put my head down and walked on.

In the winter of 1972 on our portable TV set we watched men, women and children arriving at Heathrow Airport from Uganda. The pictures reminded me of our family, when we came to Britain dressed only in our cotton clothes. These people – ‘Amin’s Asians’ they were called by the newspapers – mostly wore billowing trousers and tunics. Their arrival, broadcast in black-and-white news images, looked chilly and bleak.

Sometime later I had managed to lock myself out of our flat during the holidays while Mum was at work. Memuna and Sheka were off somewhere else together, so I sat on the doorstep to wait. A Ghanaian woman who lived in the basement saw me there and called me in to wait in her living room. While I sat on the sill of the bay window and watched the street, she went about her business.

In the room a radio was playing very loudly. The show was some kind of discussion programme. A man was asking: ‘Is it all right to call black people niggers, wogs and coons?’ He was going up to people in the street and asking them the question. I thought it wasn’t all right at all. I had never heard the words ‘wog’ or ‘coon’, but I knew what ‘nigger’ meant. I couldn’t understand why the man was bothering to ask. But to my surprise there seemed to be lots of people who thought it was just fine.

‘Is it acceptable to call black people niggers, wogs and coons, madam?’

‘It don’t matter. My dad always calls them wogs. That’s what they are, in’t they? Don’t mean anything really.’

‘Do you think it’s all right to call black people niggers, wogs and coons, sir?’

‘It’s our country. If they don’t like it they can go back to Paki Land.’

‘. . . black people niggerswogsandcoons, sir?’

‘. . . sticks and stones can break my bones. It’s harmless, really.’

. . . niggerswogsandcoons . . . niggerswogsandcoons . . . niggerswogsandcoons . . .

I watched the woman. She seemed to be oblivious to the words coming from the radio; she was unpacking her shopping and storing things in the fridge. The room was cold and the air was heavy with stale cooking oil; the carpet was wrinkled and grey; the draylon curtains sagged unevenly on the rail. She was a large, slow-moving woman, with a wrap tied around her head, wearing an old cardigan and a pair of men’s shoes. She acted as though she were deaf. As the radio blared she went about her business unceasingly: a poor African woman, away from her people, alone in a foreign country. Who was she to tell these people what she ought to be called?

At High Trees I suffered the early indignity of being forced to play Mowgli in a school production of The Jungle Book – wearing nothing but a pair of regulation knickers. We were all more appalled by the fact that my perfectly flat chest was on display to the class than anything else. In general we were of an age where children do not find differences of race or class remarkable. Gradually I moved on up the school, left the Cottage, where the junior girls slept, and moved into the main building with the senior girls.

In my first year in the upper school, when I was eight, nearly nine, a new girl arrived to join us. She was a weekly boarder and went home at weekends to ride her horses, and she left school two afternoons in the week to train and to compete at a place called Hickstead. Her name was Susan and she was worldly and self-confident in a way I had never encountered before. I had seen other new girls arrive: they sat in the empty seats at the front of the class and hung around together at break, shouting their presence silently, tongue-tied and trembling. It was ages before they made any friends with anyone. Susan was loud, with a habit of biting the split ends off her straight, sun-bleached hair and chewing her nails. On Mondays she came back to school with chocolates and sweets and shared them in the dorm after lights out. Susan and I instantly became friends.

We spent most of the term in each other’s company. By then I had been at High Trees long enough to have earned a certain amount of respect and I taught Susan everything I knew: the dance routines to the tracks by the Bay City Rollers and Mud, the endless and minute modifications in games of Jacks; the complicated skipping routines we all practised for hours on the tarmac outside the kitchen annexe. Susan wasn’t terribly interested, to be honest, but she went along with it up to a point, then she would cast me a look. At that moment we would break away from the game and wander off to sit and talk – well, mostly Susan talked about her life outside High Trees and I listened.

‘Eeenie, meenie, macka, racka . . .’

We were in class waiting for the teacher to arrive when Susan told me it was her birthday soon. Two girls next to us were performing an impressive clapping routine and everyone was watching, except the swots who already had their books out.

‘Rae, rye, dominacka.’

Susan whispered to me that she was planning a big party at her house in a few weeks’ time, and everyone was invited. I was the first person she had told.

‘Chicka pocka, lollipopa, om, pom, push!’

Susan’s father was a wealthy businessman; they lived in a large house in Sussex with a swimming pool. He had given his permission for Susan’s entire class to spend the day and she told us her father even planned to hire a projector and screen so we could all watch a film in the evening. After weeks cooped up at boarding school we were feverish with anticipation.

Monday morning, a fortnight before the party, Susan arrived at school with the invitations. She said she would give them out after lunch, and all through the morning the pile of envelopes sat at the front of her desk. I was sitting close enough to see the names in beautiful italic script, handwritten on the front of each envelope. I had never, ever received an invitation like that.

At lunch time we walked down to the main building and went to change out of our coats. At the beginning of each term the matron allocated the coat pegs in alphabetical order, and on the first day of term we swapped the name tags around to suit ourselves. Susan and I had pegs next to each other, even though our surnames began with completely different letters. We were busy preparing ourselves for lunch when Susan caught my arm, letting the others go ahead.

‘What is it?’ I asked. I was keen to get to the table. My stomach was rumbling.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Susan, looking me straight in the eye, ‘but you can’t come to the party.’

I stared at her. I thought I had misunderstood or misheard, but Susan’s perfectly serious expression filled me with cold dread. ‘But why not? Who else isn’t going? Aren’t you having a party any more?’

‘It’s my dad. He says you can’t come.’

‘Your dad says I can’t come?’

‘My dad doesn’t like black people. He told me he won’t have anybody black in his house. Sorry. Really.’

There were no other black kids in our class. Marius Georgiades, who was a Cypriot, was olive-skinned but unquestionably white. What Susan was saying, I realised, was that everyone was going to her birthday party except me. What took me aback was her utterly matter-of- fact tone.

‘Have you told him – that I’m your friend, I mean, your best friend.’ She nodded. ‘Well, speak to him again. It’s not fair. He doesn’t even know me.’ I was desperate to go to the party. I couldn’t believe I was going to miss it and nor could I compute the explanation I had been given. I couldn’t go to the party because I was black. There seemed to me to be as much sense in it as asking someone the way to Brighton and being told that apples are green.

Susan handed round the invitations later the same day. I stood by and watched. In the excitement no one seemed to notice I hadn’t been given one. After the weekend, when Susan came back to school I ran up to her: ‘Did you ask him?’

‘Yes.’ Her father hadn’t changed his mind.

‘I don’t understand – why not?’

‘Dad says the reason is because once when I was a baby he left me outside in my pram in the garden and three big, black men came with broken bottles and smashed them over me. I was cut all over. I had to go to the hospital, he said, to have stitches. Of course I can’t remember anything about it because I was just a baby, but he was there. So that’s why, that’s why he doesn’t like black people. I mean, you can see that . . . can’t you? If your baby was attacked.’

I didn’t know what to say. There were a million things I could have said, but I didn’t know where to begin. I nodded in silence.

After breakfast on Saturday all the children who were going to the party were called out of the dining room. As some of my friends passed me they whispered: ‘Aren’t you coming?’ No, I mouthed and shrugged. There were quizzical looks as they hurried off. I spent the afternoon lying on my bed in the dorm, reading my book alone. After supper the girls and boys arrived back, high on sugar and sun, carrying paper bags full of Liquorice Allsorts, aniseed balls and coloured pencils; they were chattering like birds.

In my dorm the two girls who had been to the party smiled at me with sorry eyes: ‘You didn’t miss much really. It was just a party.’

‘Yes, not even that good, actually,’ said the other girl.

I knew that wasn’t the point. I didn’t know who they were trying to make feel better, themselves or me.

When Susan came back to school two days later she brought one of the goodie bags for me, and a piece of birthday cake wrapped in a blue paper napkin. I put it on the chair next to my bed, where I hung my clothes. And I left it there.

The Rastafarian kept walking as the taunts flew around us. We were quite alone – it was a one-way street between the busy Earls Court Road and Warwick Road, where few people passed, but now the silence was replaced by mocking laughter and the trumpeting horn.

Just when I was wondering how it would all end for us the hounded man did something that made me stand quite still. He turned round to face the car, threw his arms behind him as though he were baring his chest and lifted up his chin. He was showing them his face, the very features the louts demanded to see. His face was gaunt and hollow-cheeked; he had a thin beard and protruding teeth with wide gaps. It was an ugly face, but a nice ugly face. He bellowed: ‘Leave me alone. Leave me a-lone! Why can’t you people just let . . . me . . . be?’ Then he closed up again, turned to the wall and covered his face with his hands.

The car sped away, engine roaring in triumph. I wanted to say something to the man. I wanted to run up to him and say something kind. But I didn’t know how. He still hadn’t seen me and he didn’t look back now. He just carried on walking, still hunched up; the loping stride had vanished. I sensed that if he knew that I, a small girl, had been a witness to his humiliation it would only be made worse, so I went on home, holding my oily bag of crushed samosas.