Black by Design Read online

  My oldest brother Trevor, a hard-working, upright, Duke and Duchess of Windsor-admiring fellow, had married a winsome, auburn-haired secretary the month before I was born and immediately moved into the new home they had saved up for, so I never really knew him.

  Tony, the next in line, eighteen years my senior, was doing his National Service when I arrived in the family. He often joked that when he took me out for a walk in my Silver Cross pram, many older women would peer at me and then disapprovingly glance at him in his army uniform and say: ‘Look what you’ve brought back with you from overseas.’

  Then there was Ken, my always smiling, happy-go-lucky brother, thirteen years my senior. He was always a bit of an outsider. He had been adopted too, although he was white. It drew us together as I got older, but he was married and had left home by the time I was eight, so we never got the chance to swap notes on what adoption meant to either of us.

  Despite the undercurrent of racism that pervaded British society in the late fifties, I made friends easily with many of my white schoolmates. Just as well because there were no black pupils at the primary or secondary schools that I attended. I was good at reading, writing, spelling, music and running and therefore I was much in demand for netball, school sports days, reading the Bible lesson at School Assembly and tinkling the ivories at my mother’s behest whenever she thought that visiting relatives had stayed too long. I could clear a room with the opening bars of Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata.

  Many of my girl friends at school were in the Brownies. I wanted to be too, but apparently it wasn’t possible to join unless I first attended Sunday School at the local church where the Brownie meetings were held. I badgered my mother for weeks until she relented and promised to enquire about enrolment. I remember standing by her side while she had a heated conversation with a woman just outside the door of the church’s adjoining hall. The door was ajar and I peeped inside. I recognised a few of my friends among the horde of little girls running around the small room in their smart brown and yellow uniforms. I could hardly wait to do the same. It was winter and there was snow on the ground. I was aware that a lot of breath was condensing in the freezing air between the two women. Suddenly my mother grabbed me by the arm and hauled me off down the road towards home. She looked very angry, so I didn’t dare ask when we could buy my uniform. I later heard her talking to my Dad: ‘That bloody woman wouldn’t take her for the Brownies or even the Sunday School. She had the bloody cheek to ask me why we adopted a coloured girl and not one of our own. Call themselves Christians? Don’t know the bloody meaning of the word.’ I’d never heard her swear so much.

  Calmly, my Dad said: ‘If she’s not good enough for their church, then their bloody church isn’t good enough for us.’

  It was my half-blind Aunt Lily who eventually offered to take care of my religious education. She took me along to the local Salvation Army Hall on Sunday mornings. The only thing I liked about the Sally Army were the women officers’ bonnets, the old-style ones with the heavy grosgrain ribbons that tied in a huge black bow under the right side of the chin. The severity of their stiff black form edged with red, as if the cloth had been dipped in the still warm blood of Christ, was intoxicating. Even the raddled old face of the Brigadier’s wife became beatific in a Sally Army bonnet. One day I plucked up enough courage to ask if I could have one, but to my bitter disappointment, I was told that it took years of dedication before anybody got a uniform and bonnet to wear.

  Annually, the Sally Army had what they called an ‘International Pageant’ and all the kids had to dress up as somebody from each of the different countries in the world. They had no black children, so they were overjoyed that they had finally found somebody who could wear a grass skirt, hold a cardboard spear and paint the ends of a white bone on either side of their nose. This costume was supposed to signify a native from deepest, darkest Africa; apparently national boundaries were unimportant for black people. Even then, I was precocious enough to refuse point-blank when offered the raggedy old skirt. I screamed and created such a fuss that I was never asked again.

  I acquired a very special friend at school when I was nine. Her name was Dorothea – Thea for short – and she was the middle one of three sisters from the Hawthorne family. Both parents were teachers. Her mother was a lecturer at a London art school and her father taught English at a local secondary school. Her mum wore shift dresses and Capri pants in vibrant pinks, yellows and purples, sometimes with crazy geometric patterns. Long red curly hair tumbled over her shoulders. Kitten heels adorned her shapely feet. She oozed an indefinable cool. My mother wore pastel-coloured Crimplene dresses with matching dinky hats and gloves, topped off with an assortment of badly hand-knitted cardigans. Unfortunately she oozed uncool like a thawed-out burst pipe.

  Inside their house was light and airy, our interior was dark and old-fashioned. They had real art in sleek wooden frames on the wall; not just any old art, but modern art, modern inexplicable art. In our house there were a few faded prints in gaudy filigree frames of Bubbles and Little Lord Fauntleroy, picked up at jumble sales. A mahogany-framed sepia print of The Return from Inkerman, visibly stained in one corner, a depressing heirloom left to my mother by her dead father, was displayed above the hearth. It complemented the drab, overstuffed room with its flowery wallpaper and multi-coloured swirly carpet.

  Thea and her sisters romped around their home as if it belonged to them as much as to their parents. Nobody told them to be quiet if they offered up an opinion on something they’d seen in the newspaper or on the television. One afternoon when I was invited round for tea, Mrs Hawthorne gave me a bowl of pasta. I watched in horror as they spooned the white wriggly food into their mouths.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Mrs Hawthorne asked, as I sat staring at my plate.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ I said.

  ‘Try it first. It’s Italian, darling,’ she said helpfully. She called everybody ‘darling’.

  ‘I’m not allowed to eat foreign muck,’ I chirped up, because that’s how my mother referred to foods from other cultures. In fact, ‘foreign muck’ was her pet phrase when confronted with any food she didn’t like, even Mulligatawny soup.

  Thea and her sisters laughed. Her mother told them to be quiet. I knew I’d said the wrong thing. Mrs Hawthorne took my plate away and made me tinned spaghetti on toast instead. Just like my mother made at home. The Hawthornes put a whole new spin on my concept of ‘them’ and ‘us’.

  We lived in a three-bedroom, semi-detached house which had been bought by the local council after the war. We were the only family in the street who paid rent for their house and our next-door neighbours, the Greens, never let my parents forget this. Not by saying anything, that would be too rude, but just by gesture or nod; this was enough to keep the Vickerses in their place. My mother compounded the rent-paying felony by telling our neighbours that we lived in a ‘privately owned council house’. A definite oxymoron!

  Mr Green, a tall, upright and distinctly uptight man, went to work in the City every morning wearing a bowler hat, crisp white shirt, striped trousers and carrying an umbrella. His wife, Mrs Green, a homely woman, would spend the day laundering his shirts so that a fresh one was available every morning. You could set your watch by Mr Green’s departure to catch the bus, from which he would alight at exactly 8 a.m. directly opposite Romford station, where he caught the 8.10 a.m. to Liverpool Street, which enabled him to be at his desk for precisely 9 a.m. Mrs Green liked to relate these kinds of details to my mother across the garden fence as she pegged her washing out.

  Dad, a short, balding, slightly tubby man with stained brown teeth from incessant smoking, left a full hour and a half before Mr Green, clad in brown overalls, a donkey jacket and flat cap, to drive six miles to Dagenham, where he clocked in with a punch card. As a mechanic, he was cleanly efficient, but the work was difficult and dirty. Dad constantly smelt of oil, which congealed in a black mass under his nicotine-stained fingernails, and no amount of Swarfega co
uld shift, whereas the no-nonsense carbolic aroma of Lifebuoy soap noticeably enveloped Mr Green when you passed him on the street. Despite Dad’s sartorial shortcomings, I loved him implicitly. I loathed Mr Green explicitly.

  Dad grew vegetables to supplement the meagre household budget, whereas Mr Green could tell you the Latin names of the flowers he grew. The only time Mr Green had a lengthy conversation with Dad was when he complained about the squawking of our chickens, which lived in a makeshift wire run at the end of our long back garden. The chickens disappeared the next day. When I asked about their whereabouts, my dad explained that he had given them away, because they needed too much upkeep. The next time I spoke to Stephen, the Greens’ oldest child, across the garden fence, he imperiously informed me that his dad considered it ‘common’ to keep chickens. I wondered if there was a list somewhere that let the unwary among us know when we were doing something that was considered ‘common’. I asked my mother if she knew where I might find it.

  ‘Common, common,’ she repeated, sounding very much like a squawking chicken, ‘I’ll give them common. Just who do they think they are? Don’t take no notice of that stuck-up lot,’ she muttered, her face as purple as a boiled beetroot. ‘Wait till I tell your Dad what he said.’

  But she never did. We ate a lot of chicken stew in the following weeks.

  To avenge this slight against my family, I plotted my revenge on the Greens. One afternoon, when they were out, I got the idea to dig up Mr Green’s prized gladioli. I had recently planted some seeds in the small patch of garden previously occupied by the chicken coop. Dad said it was my very own little patch to grow anything I wanted. When nothing grew after a week, I became impatient, so I thought I would ‘borrow’ a few ready-made plants from next door. They had so many flowers that I didn’t think they would miss a few. How wrong can a young girl be?

  The terrible deed was done while my parents took their habitual Sunday afternoon nap. The only problem was that gladiolus plants are very tall and although they stood proud in Mr Green’s flower bed, they took on the appearance of the leaning tower of Pisa once replanted, particularly since I had dug them up without their root balls. I managed to prop them against each other in a delicate balancing act, but as I stood back to admire the fiery redness of the flowers, a loud screech went up next door and I heard their back door slam shut. I had been so engrossed in finding a solution to my tilting flower problem that I hadn’t noticed the unexpected return of the Greens. The next minute, an angry Mr Green appeared, striding down the garden path, gobs of spit and invective flying from his mouth, his arm outstretched, finger pointing just like Donald Sutherland’s in the last frame of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers: ‘Wait till your father hears about this, you little thief. I might have known you’d turn out like this.’

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by that last remark, but suffice to say, my mother’s punishment was swift and accurate. I didn’t venture into the garden for the remainder of the summer.

  Instead I begged my mother to let me spend more time at Thea’s house. She always allowed me to go because she was secretly pleased that I’d made friends with somebody who lived in a posher area than we did. My mother was a closet snob. If only she had known the reality of what the Hawthornes’ three free-spirited daughters were allowed to get up to, then she might have thought twice before letting me go round there. Fortunately she was never privy to the mayhem of their birthday parties, dressing-up boxes, impromptu dancing and poetry recitals in the garden, picnics up in their tree-house, home-made puppet shows, zooming up and down their sedate cul-de-sac on rollerskates or picture painting on the huge pine-wood table in their vast kitchen. Their life seemed such fun and my home life seemed so dull by comparison.

  The Hawthornes would pile into an old blue VW camper van bound for the Pembrokeshire coast in the summer holidays. Sometimes they even went to France. Bliss. I was so jealous. How I wished that I could have gone with them. I got a week in a bed and breakfast in Clacton-on-Sea with my mum, not something you bothered bragging about!

  But the star attractions at the Hawthornes were the bookshelves in the living room, which were crammed with books and LP records. The ceiling-high shelving unit housed large books, with glossy covers bearing names like Picasso, Dali and unpronounceable French words in huge print on their spines. The only books in our house were the ones I got from the library each week. Even more interesting were the rows of LPs that occupied the shelf nearest to their sleek new radiogram, which housed a cocktail cabinet in the underneath cupboard. Sometimes Thea’s mother would play these records while she painted. Her easel was a permanent fixture in the living room. The smell of turpentine was the only air freshener. When she was painting, us children were banished from the house to play in the garden. Thea and I would peer through the window at her as she boogied round the living room to weird-sounding music, which Thea informed me was called jazz. Her paintings didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before, but the music seemed to complement the brightly coloured zigzags that she seemed fond of spreading all over her canvases.

  Once I sneaked into the living room when she was out. I eagerly ran my finger along the book spines, randomly alighting on one and then trying to read the title. To Kill A Mockingbird was my favourite one. Next I peered at the photos on the fronts of the LPs. Some of the cover photos were of black people, mostly men, some playing piano or trumpet or saxophone. One LP cover in particular caught my eye. I pulled it out of the stack for a closer look. It depicted a close-up photo in profile of an attractive-looking black man. His hair was heavily greased and combed back from his large smooth forehead. Half the photo was stained in sepia and half was in black and white. ‘The voice of Langston Hughes’ was written on the sepia half, the words ‘voice’ and ‘Langston’ in yellow type, the other words in white. I was suddenly startled by a familiar voice: ‘Why aren’t you outside with the others?’ Mrs Hawthorne asked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I stammered, my cheeks hot with embarrassment at being caught in the living room unsupervised.

  ‘Don’t be,’ she said lightly. She was unlike any other adult I had ever met. She treated kids like equals, never talking down to them.

  ‘I like looking at all the coloured people in the photos,’ I offered by way of explanation.

  ‘He’s very handsome, isn’t he,’ she said, gesturing towards the photo on the LP cover. ‘But he’s not coloured, darling. He’s a mulatto like you, see his wavy black hair?’

  She elegantly slipped the record out of the cover and put it on the turntable. She poured herself a drink from a brown bottle in the cocktail cabinet and bade me perch on the sofa with her. As she sipped from her glass, a man with an American accent intoned a poem while music played in the background, very much like the stuff she listened to all the time. He kept talking about rivers. I couldn’t understand all that he meant, but it was one of those moments in life when you know to pay attention because somebody is at last taking the trouble to tell you something.

  ‘This is Langston Hughes,’ Mrs Hawthorne said, handing me the cover of the LP. ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’ I’d never heard anybody refer to a black man as wonderful before. Mrs Hawthorne was a strange lady, I thought. But the solemnly spoken words stilled the air in the room. I felt as though I was making a connection with something that had been lost to me. But the feeling was fleeting and passed as soon as the poem ended.

  Many years later I bought the same album in a tiny record shop in Laguna Beach on the west coast of America. The discovery of the poem’s name, ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, written on the back of the sleeve, was a vivid reminder. When I finally managed to listen to it again, I was catapulted back to that day in Mrs Hawthorne’s living room. Even though I had been a child, there was something in the choice and cadence of the words which conjured up an eternal river that demanded my total immersion in its depths, a symbolic baptism into an underworld where I instinctively knew that I belonged. This river and its many tributaries was a metaphor for
black life, depicting the journey of Africans from their homelands into slavery in the New World and beyond. But I didn’t know that then.

  Mrs Hawthorne lifted the stylus from the record after Langston Hughes had said the final words of the poem, ‘My soul has grown deep like the rivers.’ Her eyes glittered as she turned to me and simply said: ‘Beautiful.’

  She returned to her easel. Soon she was lost in her work. I ran back outside to play. The word ‘mulatto’ rang in my ears. She had pronounced it ‘moolatto’, in that weird, higher-pitched way that people have when they say a foreign word. Only a few months before I had seen that word written down, but I had pronounced it mullet-o, like the fish, but with an extra ‘o’ at the end.

  Most weekends my parents and I were obliged to visit one of the many elderly relatives. That’s what happens when your mum and dad are already middle-aged when they decide to adopt. This particular afternoon we were at the home of my Aunt Rose, a spotlessly tidy house near Elm Park. My mother and she spent much of the afternoon roasting themselves to the colour of cooked lobsters on plastic recliners in the remarkably well-kept back garden, while their husbands worked on an old second-hand Humber that my uncle had just bought. I feigned a headache to avoid having to listen to the gossipy nonsense that was normally shared between the two women. My mother suggested that I go indoors and lie on the sofa in the sitting room. My aunt didn’t seem to like this idea.