Black by Design Page 9

  She did too. She even holidayed with them.

  I had arranged in advance to leave my bags with two other girl students that I had recently got to know, who lived in a house in Gordon Street, Earlsdon, the student area of the city. It was a compact, less than bijou two-up two-down with an attic space masquerading as a third room, that backed on to the local abattoir. The stench from this animal funeral parlour was nearly a deal-breaker, but the rent was cheap, so my mother immediately warmed to the idea.

  My two new acquaintances, Helen and Alison, were studying the considerably more trendy subjects of social science and economics respectively. Whereas they were fashionable and had boyfriends, I was still running around in the clothes that I wore to sixth-form parties – mini-dresses and sensible shoes. They were wearing loons, long skirts, cheesecloth tops, Afghan coats and fringed bags bought at those twin hippie Meccas, Biba and South Kensington market in London. They listened to Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez and Janis Joplin. All the new female artists seemed to have names that began with J in those days. I still liked Cilla Black, Diana Ross and Sandie Shaw. Even name-dropping Marsha Hunt was met with derision, because she had appeared on Top of the Pops, which apparently meant that the artist had ‘sold out’!

  Through them and their friends, I was exposed to the music of Jimi Hendrix, Hawkwind, Led Zeppelin, Soft Machine and Eric Clapton. I thought they were all shit except for Hendrix, but in those days I kept my opinions to myself. All I wanted to do was to fit in.

  I acquired another two ‘must-haves’ for the 1971 autumn term: a pinkish-beige, moth-eaten fur coat and a totally inappropriate boyfriend, Ken Harker, whose father was a squadron leader who lived somewhere in Lincolnshire. Ken was twenty-four, much too old and knowledgeable for me. He’d spent a couple of years backpacking around that holy of holies, India, which added to his allure, but rather than expanding his horizons, these adventures had narrowed them down to the tiny airless room that only the hopeless drug taker with serious depressive issues occupied.

  He had shoulder-length blond hair, a blond roué’s moustache set in a hawk-like face, and one blue eye, the other having been traumatically removed in an accident that I think involved a hand grenade. When he was stoned, a favourite party trick involved the removal of the glass eye, which was held aloft for a quick look around and sometimes thrown into the lap of some similarly stoned individual, much to the macabre delight of his student friends. We were both outsiders compared with the rest of the Fresher students; perhaps that is why we were attracted to each other. Who knows? All I know is that he was my first boyfriend, my first fuck and my first suicide all wrapped up in a neat package.

  What he did have was style, which was sadly lacking in most of his contemporaries on the social studies course, who were the usual plethora of spotty, emotionally challenged boys in their late teens, their ungainly arms and legs suffering the nightly vicissitudes of hormonal growth spurts. Ken wore a brown nurse’s cape, which swished and swirled around him, just like Dracula’s. His eccentric dress style was all his own and made him appear confident and self-assured. In my limited experience, he was so ‘far out’ as to be off-planet. He introduced me to salt on my porridge, marijuana and ‘interesting’ sex, in that order. He was well read, if you consider a penchant for the Marquis de Sade’s works useful, and very adventurous when it came to drug taking.

  Within a few weeks of moving out of the Woodbridges’, I was walking barefooted around the concrete jungle that is Coventry city, dressed in an Indian kaftan while twanging a Jew’s harp between my teeth. With Ken a whole new musical world opened up. We saw MC5, Fairport Convention, Arthur Brown, Pentangle and many more perform in the Lanchester Main Hall. I had no idea that within eight years I would be playing to a packed hall on the same stage.

  By now my Afro was way bigger than the head it used as a vehicle and although that made me look like quite the coolest black ‘chick’ in the Poly, I was overwhelmingly aware that was due to my being the only black girl there. I’d made inroads into realizing my student fantasy life. I had friends, admittedly druggie ones, but friends nonetheless. I had a boyfriend, unsuitable maybe, but I no longer wallowed in the virginal frustration of my sixth-form years. For the first time in my life I was choosing how I wished to live, how to present myself to others and absorbing the many new lifestyle ideas on offer – all infinitely better than the closeted unreality of waging guerrilla warfare in the confines of my Romford bedroom. But, and it was a big but, I still didn’t know any black people.

  I soon learned that there was ‘student’ life and ‘townie’ life. Student life happened in the little bubble that existed between the Art School campus near Far Gosford Street and the Students Union and administration block that faced Coventry Cathedral. Townie life happened everywhere else. Townies were the young folk who tried to get into the student bar in the evenings for the cheap drinks or to see famous bands in the Main Hall for considerably cheaper prices than at the local Locarno. Student jobsworths made it their business to discourage such unnatural mixing. There seemed little chance of ever meeting black people with such a draconian policy. So I pushed such thoughts to the back of my mind and got on with the serious business of pretending to be an interesting amalgam of Marsha Hunt and Angela Davis around college.

  Ken and I spent a lot of time at the dilapidated three-storey ‘Hawkwind House’, presumably named in homage to the band, in Hillfields, an area that the Woodbridges had derogatorily referred to as ‘Little India’. This rabbit warren of rooms was home to a variety of students whose main occupation was drug taking. It had no electricity, discernible plumbing or heating. It was like entering a ‘Furry Freaks Brothers’ cartoon.

  Ken struck up a friendship with a town-planning student, Duncan, who lived there for a while in hedonistic squalor. This young, hairy-headed and hairy-chinned man, with fathomless brown eyes, had a deep passion for playing the crumhorn, a medieval instrument that turned up at the end in an insouciant curve. Ken often accompanied him on treble recorder after long marijuana-smoking sessions, their discordant duet sounding like Igor’s unearthly lament for Frankenstein’s monster.

  Soon my social life became more interesting than my studies. Nobody realized that Ken was my first boyfriend. I thought I was in love. So much so, that I tentatively suggested, after a particularly drug-fuelled day in London, mainly spent rampaging around Hamleys toy store and making out behind some bushes in Hyde Park, that he come home to Romford with me to meet my parents. I think he was too stoned to refuse.

  Ken and Duncan harmonizing on recorders and crumbhorn at Hawkwind House, 1971

  During the train journey to Romford, some clarity must have entered my foggy senses, because I suddenly became aware of how our outlandish appearance would appear to my parents. But it was too late to abandon the journey and besides Ken was oblivious to my dilemma and I wanted to keep it that way. By the time I knocked on my parents’ front door I was a nervous wreck. I knew I had made a very bad decision. I even went so far as to suggest to Ken that he wait by the gate until I managed to explain away his less than sartorial appearance to my mother. This probably sounds like crazy behaviour, but now I was home, my confidence evaporated in the face of my mother as she opened the front door. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said nervously, ‘I’ve just popped home so that you can both meet my new boyfriend.’

  Her eyes narrowed as she looked me up and down. Her gaze rested on my belly, hidden underneath the new smock-style top that was all the rage – a style that looked good on flat-chested girls, but my hourglass figure gave the illusion of a maternity smock.

  Then she started hysterically shouting. ‘You’re in trouble, aren’t you? Where is he then?’

  Instantly I knew our conversation was about to take a turn for the worse: ‘You’re in trouble’ was Mother-speak for ‘You’re pregnant’.

  Having made this quantum leap in her mind, her thought processes reached warp spe
ed. Before I’d even had a chance to put her mind at rest or introduce Ken, she jumped to the only conclusion that would satisfy her. ‘He’s black, isn’t he? That’s why he’s hiding. I knew this would happen,’ she yelled.

  We were both yelling by now. ‘No, no. He isn’t. You’ve got it all wrong.’

  ‘You’re lying, you’re lying. I always know when you’re lying.’

  ‘Besides, what if he is?’ I was screaming by now.

  God knows what Ken, who was within earshot, thought about this extraordinary scene. I glanced towards the gate where I could just make out his shape in the dim twilight. He appeared to be engrossed in looking down the end of a toy kaleidoscope that he had nicked from Hamleys. Since he had only one good eye, such a practice rendered his peripheral vision almost blind. At that moment I fervently wished he was deaf too. Fortunately Dad, wondering what all the commotion was about, intervened and told her to get out of the way of the door, whereupon she started loudly exclaiming: ‘He’s not coming in here, you needn’t think he is. I’m not having him in my house.’

  ‘Shut up, woman. I don’t care what bloody colour he is, just so long as he’s treating my girl right.’

  I’d had enough. In my heart I secretly thanked my dad for his words, but all I could think about was getting as far away as possible. I grabbed Ken by the hand and we ran all the way to the bus stop, a quarter of a mile away. There was still time to get to London and catch a train back to Coventry.

  My relationship with Ken was irreparably traumatised. The whole episode was made worse because he had been tripping on LSD throughout that day. A week later, at the end of term, he unceremoniously dumped me, saying that he was too old for me. I blamed my mother.

  I spent most of the following term trying to get him back, but to no avail, until he unexpectedly attended an end-of-term party just before the Easter vacation at the ‘abattoir’ house. Within an hour, we were on our way back to his flat. That was the last night we ever saw each other. The following day I went home for the holidays.

  During the afternoon of my first day back at college, while in the middle of a particularly difficult chemistry experiment, I was summoned to the administration block. I thought nothing of it. I assumed that the admissions office had discovered some problem with my grant payment. On arrival, a secretary ushered me into a room where several be-suited men waited. One of them asked me in a hushed, kindly tone if I knew Ken Harker. I said that I did. The other men tried hard not to make eye contact as I looked from one to the other. I was told that he had been found that morning by the head porter, swinging by a length of washing line from the railings outside the Students Union building. He was dead. Of course.

  I think I cried, but I can’t be sure. The men were duly solicitous and told me to go home and not to come back to college until I recovered. But where was home? The news had gone round the students like wildfire. People looked away when I entered the coffee bar in search of my friends.

  Suicide among one’s contemporaries is an unsettling business. Why? That is the only question that screams at the back of your mind. Why? I still don’t know why, but then I didn’t really know anything about him anyway. The gossip was that he took rather more belladonna than was good for him, which spiralled him into a depression so deep that there was no way back. The coroner reached a verdict of death by suicide.

  I hardly remember Ken’s funeral. I was not introduced to any of his family. Afterwards I grieved for weeks. Fleetingly I contemplated suicide too, in that copycat way that many recently bereaved people do. I don’t think I was ever particularly serious about it, because I loved life far too much to want to leave it. I struggled through to the end of term and then flunked my exams at the end of the year. To go back to Romford would have been like admitting defeat. I wanted to stay in Coventry, but how?

  Some months before Ken’s death, he had introduced me to a young couple, Jerry and Pip, who had three children below the age of five. They affected a bohemian lifestyle in a small semi-detached in Radford, an area of Coventry about two miles from the city centre. Pip was the spitting image of John Lennon. Jerry was a blonde hippie-ish earth mother, much like the future Mrs Linda McCartney. They were older than us but very cool. They ran Gestalt Therapy evening classes at Lanchester Poly, which Ken often attended. The sessions were very popular with students and a big audience was guaranteed. I went along to one with him and was amazed that this huge group of strangers were quite prepared to sit down and talk about their personal problems with each other. This pre-dated all the touchy-feely stuff that is currently seen on morning television.

  Jerry ran the group while her husband offered practical assistance when required. She had a beautifully soft, lyrical voice, which coaxed all manner of painful confessions from people. Her calming presence pervaded the room. I had never met anybody like her. So, naturally in my time of trouble I sought her out. Instinctively I knew it was the right thing to do.

  I only vaguely remembered where she lived, but I searched the streets of Radford on foot until I found her playing in the front garden with two of her children. She took me in her arms when she saw me standing at her front gate and let me sob until I was completely cried out. Then she invited me to join a weekly meeting of people at their house that evening. It was called an encounter group.

  At 8 p.m., after the children went to bed, a steady stream of people arrived on the doorstep. They all seemed friendly and open. When the room was full enough Jerry began laying out the rules of engagement: no swearing, no physical violence, only love and understanding. Some people, like me, were new to the group, but others were stalwarts and launched straight into discussing what had happened in their lives since the previous meeting. I sat in the circle that we made, astonished that everybody sounded so self-absorbed. The smallness of the group made it much more intimidating than the huge group that I’d attended with Ken. So I just listened. Then I noticed that another member hardly said a word, but Jerry spoke to him by name, so this wasn’t his first time. His name was Terry.

  He was slight, well-muscled, with shoulder-length hair and a face like a Cherokee, a large square jaw and high cheekbones, slender nose and wide mouth. From some angles he bore an uncanny resemblance to Charlie Watts, the drummer in the Rolling Stones. When he did offer an opinion, he spoke with an urgency that suggested he was there on serious business, not in a ‘go-see’ capacity. He dressed in the fashion of the day: flares, black shirt with two embroidered red dragons on either side of the buttons, black leather jacket and black Chelsea boots. I was instantly attracted to him.

  We struck up a relationship within a few months of attending the group. Terry wasn’t like the others, probably because he wasn’t a student. He worked as a production engineer at Rolls-Royce aero engine division in Coventry, having relocated after being made redundant at the same company in Derby. Eventually, we outgrew the encounter group and decided to discuss our problems only with each other.

  I struggled on with my studies. I was exempted from first-year exams after the trauma of Ken’s death. I opted to repeat my first year, but within a few months I knew I had made a mistake; I no longer seemed to have any interest in my science course. In 1973 student life was still the province of middle-class white kids, who fancied a few years out of the rat race before succumbing to the inevitable – a job. These kids, with big allowances provided by their parents, had the most fun. They were free to experiment with hair, clothes, music, politics, attitudes and food. Exams were considered a nuisance, but a necessary evil. I remember one of them telling me that it didn’t really matter whether he got a degree or not because employers just wanted to see that you had survived three years of drug taking and listening to rock music! Such hippie ideals were on the wane, the ‘summer of love’ was forgotten history. Change was in the air again. I began to realize that this laissez-faire lifestyle that my friends and I had enjoyed as Freshers wasn’t for me. I badly needed some structure to my life, but more importantly I needed my own money.


  Terry and me, 1974

  I decided to call it a day with my academic career after I flunked my exams for the second time. Terry suggested that I get an interim job while I figured out what to do with my life. He had a friend who was a social worker at the Central Hospital, locally known as Hatton, a psychiatric institution on the outskirts of Coventry near Warwick. This friend recommended me for an unskilled job as a temporary nursing assistant for three months. The hours were long, forty hours spread over three and a half day shifts. The pay was even worse, twelve pounds a week. But for the first time in Coventry I got to see where all the black people were at!

  Most of the untrained staff, nursing assistants, porters and domestics in this sprawling Victorian eyesore were black Caribbeans. At first they treated me with suspicion, particularly because of the way I talked, which was very English. My knowledge of patois, their favoured means of on-duty communication, was non-existent. The only time they spoke recognisable English was when they were talking to a nursing sister or doctor, who were universally white. I envied this useful bilingual capability. But they were not unfriendly, quite the opposite. When they discovered that I was quite prepared to do my share of the work, they soon took me under their wing and showed me the ropes, even relaxing their patois so that I could understand what they were telling me to do. A twelve-hour shift spent with psycho-geriatrics is a character-forming experience. Many of my new acquaintances had been doing these shifts and bringing up a family, often single-handedly, for years. I was a complete novice and rapidly formed a huge respect for these ladies who downed tools at precisely 7.30 p.m., grabbed their hats and coats and ran for the utilitarian grey bus that shipped them ten miles back to Coventry and their hungry families, only to return again the next morning at 7 a.m. My life was a doddle by comparison.