Black by Design Read online

  My chief problem was that I didn’t have a natural peer group. All my friends were white and nothing is more imperative for a teenager than fitting in. What with the breasts and my skin colour, all I seemed to do was stick out. I’d also begun to notice that I was no longer treated as the cute little black girl by relatives or benevolent strangers. However irksome that status was, it was infinitely preferable to what I had recently begun to encounter when I went shopping alone in Romford town market, as I sometimes did when my mother was ill with a cold. Often, I found myself subjected to undisguised curiosity and rude remarks and deliberately ignored when it was my turn in a queue. I knew enough about the consequences of racial prejudice by now to know that such slights were intentional, but it was a profound discovery at first hand. In ’60s Britain any black person, male or female, young or old, meant trouble to white people.

  Hardly any black faces disturbed the milky white soup of humanity that inhabited this Essex backwater. It was a different story about fifteen miles further up the road towards London. My brother Tony and his wife had recently moved to Leytonstone. On the rare visits that my mother made with me to see them, I was amazed to see that the streets were filled with quite a few black faces. Some people were dressed in fancy African robes and some black men sported rakish trilbies, tight-fitting, buttoned-up, ’60s-style suits like Malcolm X wore, and walked dragging one leg while still appearing to bounce on their toes.

  When I first encountered such people, my mother grabbed my arm and told me not to stare, but I couldn’t help it. Besides, these people were staring right back at me, particularly some of the men in trilbies. I suppose my mother and I must have made a rather odd couple. The sight of a black child and an older white woman was rare in those days and not always met with benign indifference.

  I was old enough to read the newspapers and indeed had done so for quite a few years. My parents read the Daily Mirror, and at weekends, the News of the World and Sunday Pictorial. Hardly intellectually challenging, in-depth broadsheets, but it was all I had access to and I took a keen interest in what went on in the world.

  It was during an English lesson at senior school that I first discovered the precisely drawn class boundaries that delineated Britain into the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. I already knew that the ‘haves’ had loads of money and the ‘have nots’, like my family, didn’t, but as yet the rigorous system’s Oliver Twists, the ‘please, sir, can I have some more’ middle classes, remained undetermined. Our teacher, Mrs Morrell, thirtyish, dyed blonde and by far the most stylish member of her profession in school – she had once worn a mini-dress – asked us to write down what daily and Sunday newspapers our parents read. Then each of us had to read out our respective parents’ choices in front of the whole class.

  Immediately I discovered lots more newspaper names, some of which would be received by the teacher with a murmur of approval and others, mine in particular, by a slight pursing of the lips and eyebrows raised over the tops of her ‘Marge Proops’ spectacles. Apparently, it was considered good if your parents read The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph or the Sunday Telegraph. The Guardian and the Observer were met with grudging approval, but what could not be tolerated were the Daily Sketch, Daily Mirror and the News of the World. Why, I asked myself? Somebody usefully pointed out in the class that their parents thought that it was ‘common’ to read such newspapers. News to me.

  After this lesson, I began taking a keener interest in the headlines of the different newspapers whenever I went to the newsagents for the Sunday papers with my dad. Our Sunday morning outings to Ramsey’s, our local newsagent, were a ritual that we both enjoyed. I flipped through the pages of various newspapers while he chatted about cars with the shop owner, who he knew from the pub.

  It struck me that the newspapers might be different in their views, but when it came to reporting anything to do with black people, they were usually united, depending on the story, in their condemnation or patronization. Even Cassius Clay, arguably the most famous black man on the planet in 1964, was subjected to vitriolic derision, not just for having the temerity to beat ‘Our ’Enry’, a popular white British boxer, in a controversial fight the previous year, but more importantly for changing his name to the profoundly foreign Muhammad Ali and embracing the Nation of Islam, a new militant black faith in America.

  As soon as I became old enough to recognise Ali’s extraordinary hubris and eloquence, coupled with an innate ability to antagonize grown-ups, I became his sole champion in our household. My dad reckoned he was a good fighter, but ‘just too damn mouthy’, whereas my mother refused to discuss him other than with a dismissive ‘Tsk’ whenever he appeared in the newspaper or on TV, which was often. Here was a young, strong black man to be proud of; anathema to my mother, particularly if her daughter took an interest in him. The spectre of Janet Sparks’s demise hovered between us like Banquo’s ghost.

  But Ali’s success was an exception, because the majority of black people I saw on the evening news were being savagely beaten or hosed down against a wall by uniformed men, just because they wanted to eat at the same lunch counter as their white counterparts. The images of four little black girls who’d been blown up by a bomb while attending their local church still haunted my memory. They were only a few years older than me. Whenever these kinds of news stories appeared, the newscaster automatically spoke about the fight for civil rights. Most of these fights took place in exotically named places like Mississippi or Alabama.

  When I asked Mrs Morrell what exactly civil rights were, I was told that the people who demanded such things were just troublemakers. In her next breath: ‘Can you spell Mississippi?’ she demanded of the class. I didn’t bother asking such questions again.

  Similarly, African people were relegated to ‘native’ status in TV documentaries about the vast ‘dark continent’. They were normally depicted as living in mud huts, scantily clad, with plates in their deformed lower lips or rings around their extended necks, herding scrawny, half-starved cattle or carrying skinny, fly-blown babies in a scrap of material tied around their waists.

  The only exceptions to this depiction were the troublesome blacks in South Africa and Rhodesia. Occasionally I would overhear conversations among family members about work colleagues who had emigrated to one or other of these two countries for the chance of better working conditions and a higher standard of living. In letters back home, most of these émigrés upheld apartheid as a good thing. Even the lowliest white worker got a house with a pool and black servants. I even heard an elderly retired uncle, a former railway union rep, who fancied himself as a bit of a politician, and who had recently switched from voting Conservative to the National Front, say: ‘They know how to keep their nig-nogs in their place. Pity we don’t do that here.’

  My cheeks flamed when I heard what he said, but I was still some way off identifying personally with the ‘nig-nogs’ in question. Silently, I watched world events unfold. I listened and attempted to learn, but any sense of a deepening black consciousness on my part was embryonic. However, it was beginning to develop. Indeed perhaps it had been developing since 22 November 1963; I just hadn’t realized it.

  Then I had been ten years old, having a weekly piano lesson with my arthritic teacher, the extravagantly named Victoria Maude Bannock, who lived across the road from our family home. My half-hour lesson was almost finished. The next pupil was already ensconced on one of the two uncomfortable wooden chairs which were exclusively for the use of waiting children in Mrs Bannock’s cluttered, antiquated front room. I had long suspected that she used this music room solely for storage, because the rest of the house was completely full. Even the upright piano’s top was chock full of boxes, containing old musical scores, precariously towering up towards the ceiling. For such an immaculately turned-out lady, her housekeeping skills left much to be desired.

  Her long-suffering husband could often be overheard in the back room shuffling about in his tartan slippers making cups of tea for
her and answering the telephone. They were an odd couple: Mr Bannock was a retired pen pusher for the Shell Oil company and Mrs Bannock supplemented his meagre pension by carrying on her lifelong role as a mediocre piano teacher to barely interested pupils after school hours.

  The door burst open and Mr Bannock, who was usually heard but never seen, suddenly appeared. This was worthy of comment in itself, let alone what he had to relate: ‘They’ve shot the President, Vic, they’ve shot the President,’ he shouted in his heavy Scottish brogue, his normally rheumy eyes startled into horror.

  Mrs Bannock leapt up and rushed out of the room with him, leaving me with the next pupil, a boy who attended the Royal Liberty School, a local all-boys independent school, alone in the room. We stared at each other, unable to comment on such a turn of events.

  After a few minutes, a red-eyed Mrs Bannock reappeared, with tears coursing down her wrinkled cheeks. This was another first, because Mrs Bannock was from another era – emotion was never shown; she wasn’t named Victoria for nothing. She demanded that we accompany her into the back room where we were invited to sit on the sofa and watch the whole sorry saga of the assassination unfold.

  When our respective mothers arrived to collect us, they were invited in too. Soon the back room was awash with people, all transfixed by the shocking images on the TV screen. People who lived through these tragic events often know exactly where they were on this unfortunate day. For me, the mournful first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is inextricably linked with the death of President Kennedy, because that is what I had been playing when Mr Bannock burst into the music room.

  For a ten-year-old these were shocking events. It was my first experience of violence being meted out to a leader of the western world. The one word on everybody’s lips when discussing the President’s assassination was ‘Why?’

  I devoured the coverage of the horrific events in the newspapers and on the nightly television news. I particularly paid attention when it was said that President Kennedy was a good guy when it came to helping black people. Pundit after pundit said he was on the side of Dr Martin Luther King, who was also considered to be an all-round good guy, because he believed in getting laws changed by peacefully marching for justice, despite the violence meted out to the marchers.

  This concept of non-violent demonstration captured my imagination. In the aftermath of the President’s assassination, much was made of Dr King’s iconic ‘I have a dream’ speech, which had been delivered just a few months before Kennedy’s fateful journey to Texas. Throughout my teenage years I wondered when ‘little black boys and black girls would walk hand in hand with little white boys and girls’ as predicted by Dr King. Did some parallel universe exist where cruelty and inhumanity to American blacks was absent? Even though they were on another continent, separated by thousands of miles of ocean, these were ‘my people’ who were maligned, spat on and ridiculed and somehow I wanted to put that injustice right, but I wasn’t sure how – yet.

  I had nobody with whom I could discuss this discovery. My peers at school were not interested and, indeed, why should they have been? They were far too busy discussing the latest hairstyles, skirt lengths and boys. I rarely spoke to any of the boys at school. They only seemed interested in football and cars. If we did speak, it was to discuss music, youth’s international language.

  In 1965, as if to miraculously further that musical discussion, Ready Steady Go broadcast a Motown Special presented by Dusty Springfield. I don’t remember too much detail about the programme, but I do remember the first time I saw the Supremes sing ‘Baby Love’. Dressed in spotless white shift dresses, with shiny, lipsticked mouths and swathes of straight, styled, black hair on their beautiful heads, the three young women shimmied and swayed in time to the music in a discreet spotlight. I’d heard Diana Ross sing on the radio, but nothing prepared me for the sophistication and precision of her performance. I spent hours that night trying to straighten my hair with the aid of a hairbrush and quantities of water. All I got for my efforts was a bad cold, because I’d gone to sleep with slicked-back wet hair, convinced that I would wake up with it straight, only to find it had reverted to its usual fluffiness by morning.

  A few of my schoolfriends had seen the programme, but weren’t inclined to join me in a discussion about it the following day, although a few of the boys enjoyed lampooning Little Stevie Wonder’s harmonica playing, closing their eyes and shaking their heads from side to side while grinning impossibly wide. I felt cheated. I wanted them to talk about the Tamla Motown sound in the same way that they enthusiastically discussed the Liverpool sound but, just as I found it hard to identify with Cilla Black, they didn’t want to look like Diana Ross. My friends were quintessentially English, whereas I felt my lodestone weighted with a black American sensibility, because for me, ‘That’s where the black people were at.’ Maybe if I’d lived in London I might have felt differently, because I would have come into contact with West Indian and African immigrants, but they were not present in Essex, so I could indulge my American fantasies any which way I chose.

  The monotony of family routine and my adolescent angst were relieved between the ages of twelve and fifteen with a week-long annual holiday in North Wales. My youngest brother Roger had flown the coop and my parents could now leave the house without worrying about what he was doing at home while they were away.

  Llandudno was my dad’s choice of holiday resort. In between working as a coalman and his present mechanic’s job, he had been a long-distance lorry driver. Many of his deliveries were in North Wales and he had grown to love the dramatic scenery. He had often stayed overnight in this seaside town, which nestled in a bay between the rocky outcroppings of the Great Orme and the Little Orme. On first sight, I shared his enthusiasm. I kidded myself that Wales was a foreign country. It was here that I first performed in public, playing the piano in a kids’ talent contest in Happy Valley, a pleasure park on the Great Orme. I never won.

  We stayed in a family hotel. I had to share the room with my parents, which probably wasn’t much of a holiday for them. My mother and I generally spent the day on the beach or wandering around the shops while my dad spent lunchtimes and evenings in the pub. He loved to eat whelks, but I think he was probably allergic to them. When he was the worse for drink he would forget about his allergy and down a few pots of jellied eels and whelks, which meant that he would be up half the night puking into the sink in our room with great heaving retches.

  A favourite haunt of ours was an octagonal camera obscura on the Great Orme, an unassuming little building housing an ingenious arrangement of mirrors that offered panoramic views of the town. My mother and I watched enthralled as this magic eye zeroed in on areas of Llandudno Bay. Once we spotted my dad lurching out of a pub on a Friday afternoon and making a beeline for the whelk stall on the promenade.

  ‘Look, there’s Dad,’ I blurted out, much to the mirth of our fellow viewers, whereupon Mum grabbed my arm and dashed out of the round hut, running down the narrow roads that wound their way up the Orme, to try and intercept him before he downed too many of the offending sea creatures. Needless to say, he began throwing up approximately two hours later. He was hospitalized on that occasion.

  I had decided long ago that my best ticket out of Romford was to study hard and go to university. I was in the express stream at Romford Technical High School, which meant that I got the chance to take the nine ‘O’ levels that I had been entered for a year earlier than designated for my age. In my quest for the freedom that higher education offered, I turned my bedroom into a study haven.

  Just lately, it had felt as if I had very little to talk to my parents about any more. A discussion about the assassination of Malcolm X wasn’t exactly suitable fodder for an after-dinner chat on a Sunday afternoon. For much of the time I felt isolated and unhappy, but to be fair, feeling confined and at odds with one’s parent’s chosen lifestyle is almost a rite of passage for any teenager. I fervently wished that I had more friends,
but my troubled thoughts about inequality and racism in the wider world preoccupied me and turned me into a loner. I tried to use my self-imposed exile wisely and studied at the local library for an hour after school every day so that I could read more informative newspapers and books.

  Slowly I began to understand the problems of the black diaspora. I discovered a horrendous catalogue of injustices against American blacks throughout the continent’s comparatively short history. The Deep South had even denied black people the vote until recent years. Such knowledge filled me with a deep anger and resentment. These feelings were made worse by the arrival in Romford of organized racism when I was thirteen. The National Front had begun to sell their newspaper and actively recruit within the newly built shopping precinct. On Saturdays while out shopping with my mother, I made it my business to stare at them very hard and with a hateful expression that I had perfected in my bedroom mirror. How could they peddle such vitriol without anybody complaining? From the activity at their stall, it looked as though many passers-by welcomed the new NF presence on the street. Far from being a problem, they were treated as part of the solution. My Uncle Will, Aunt Vi’s husband, often said, ‘The NF’s got the right idea.’ He was an irascible old fool.

  One hot summer night in 1967, while listening to Radio Caroline underneath the bedclothes, I heard Aretha Franklin sing ‘Respect’. I was instantly bowled over by the energy with which she asked the questions: ‘What you want? Baby, I got it. What you need? You know I got it’ – questions that were followed by the ultimate statement: ‘All I’m asking is a little respect…yeah…Just a little bit!’ In the hands of a lesser artist, the song might just have been dismissed as yet another wronged woman’s rant against her errant lover, but Aretha Franklin’s visceral vocal inhabited the lyric and music so totally that it transcended the obvious unrequited love lament and became a future clarion call for unempowered people everywhere.