I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey Read online

  I Used to Say My Mother

  was Shirley Bassey

  I Used to Say My Mother

  was Shirley Bassey

  Stephen K Amos

  Constable • London

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012

  Copyright © Stephen K Amos and Hugh Sington, 2012

  The right of Stephen K Amos and Hugh Sington to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-78033-857-6 (hardback)

  ISBN: 978-1-78033-889-7 (ebook)

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Prologue: South London, 1980s

  ‘K-THWACK K-THWACK K-THWACK K-THWACK.’

  ‘Doo doo duh doo duh doo doo duh doo.’

  ‘No I … CAN’T wait. No I … CAN’T wait, anoTHER MINute! For it all to begin!’

  That was Jonny and his wife Natalie, our white neighbours when I lived in Fountain Road in Tooting. It was a three-bedroom flat in one of those red brick 1940s council blocks and, including Mum and Dad, there were seven of us squeezed into it. We hadn’t been there long and Dad said he was going to do it up. It needed doing up as there were holes in the kitchen walls, the fuse blew if you turned on the telly and even though it was a ground-floor flat, somehow, the ceiling leaked.

  Jonny and Natalie were trying to sing the latest 5 Star song for our general amusement. Something our parents would never have done. Together they sounded terrible. Separately they sounded pretty terrible. But with everyone in the room clapping time along with them? Well, they weren’t going to win any big awards but it would do for a Sunday morning. Even Maxine, Natalie’s white-haired elderly mother, had come along that day and sat in a chair in the corner guffawing with laughter.

  In case you don’t remember, 5 Star were the short-lived British equivalent to The Jackson 5. By which I mean they were a family of singers, they were black, and their dad used to manage them. My twin sister Stella and I were showing off the moves we’d been learning from watching our favourite band on Top of the Pops as everyone else clapped out the beat. We had all the steps down pat. We were two thirteen-year-olds, looking pretty fly, holding out the shoulders of our T-shirts to mimic those massive shoulder pads everyone on TV used to wear.

  Jonny and Natalie were of similar age to my parents, and Dad worked with Jonny in construction. They’d helped dispel my parents’ mistrust of the area when we’d moved in a few months previously by making us feel very much at home. We really looked forward to them coming round as they were great fun. They had no children of their own and so I wondered where their youthful sense of vitality came from, because my parents couldn’t have been more different. Mum and Dad were feeling the pressure because this was the late eighties and we were already a big family living on a tight budget. Growing up we had to share everything – clothes, bedrooms and even bathwater. I was sixteen before I realised that water didn’t come out of the tap grey (and hairy). Looking back I’m not surprised my parents were constantly stressed out as it costs so much to raise kids. I read somewhere that by the time a child reaches eighteen you can have spent £100,000. And that’s just on Valium.

  Jonny and Natalie sometimes came around to babysit us and we were encouraged to call them Uncle and Auntie. This was not unusual as every friend of the family was automatically an auntie or an uncle. Sometimes they didn’t even have to be a friend. Even the milkman was an uncle to us. That was until the unfortunate incident when for a laugh I told my youngest sister Cordelia that the milkman had a special udder and that she should go and pull it. I didn’t think that she would actually do it. He never came around again and as punishment it became my job to get milk every day from the Happy Shopper down the road. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise because the Indian man who ran the shop would always give me a free Wham! bar to chew on the way home, thus bolstering my already rampant addiction to sweets.

  ‘Where’s the party?’ Mum poked her head around the door from the sizzling kitchen to look at the front room with Stella and me dancing centre of the makeshift stage. Mum always called it a party at the weekends when all the kids and parents were home at the same time. A more accurate description would be a whirlwind of destruction with an occasional pause for meal breaks. Normally, when Mum said something like ‘Where’s the party?’ it meant you had better shut it up right now or you were going to get thumped into the middle of next week, but at the weekend we cranked the volume up to full blast. It was the Amos family in high fidelity.

  Sunday was the best day of the week because the whole family could enjoy a proper cooked breakfast. In time they would become so legendary that half of our neighbours on the block would turn up for a grilled tomato or a slice of ham. With five kids in the family (and another on the way) we had to have cereal every other day of the week and no sugar. Sometimes no milk. I hated cereal so much by the time I was ten years old that I promised myself when I grew up I’d never eat a bowl of it again. The only good thing about cereal was the tiny toy you used to get at the bottom of the box. But it was always the same toy. A bicycle reflector! I had about a hundred of them – all the colours of the rainbow. I didn’t let the fact that I had no bike put me off collecting them. I spent most of my school days trying to get someone to buy me a bike. I used to leave Littlewoods catalogues open at the BMX page but Dad didn’t take the hint. When I started pinning half a dozen of my best bicycle reflectors to my school jacket I hoped he’d think I looked sad enough and cave in. But that isn’t his style. He said I looked so cool and this way everyone would see me coming a mile away. Well, they could, but I might have looked a bit funny because most of them didn’t come any closer.

  A voice from the kitchen:

  ‘Where is your father? Jonny, have you sent him out to work on a Sunday? Can’t a man have peace just for a day?’ Jonny and Dad worked together professionally, but they also used to do local odd jobs in the area to help people out. Sort of like handymen. They could be out at night-time, in the day and even at the weekends. Whenever. Mum couldn’t always find Dad (especially if he was hiding from her) but Jonny could. They were best friends.

  ‘Not me. Maybe he’s gone to church.’ Jonny winked at me.

  ‘At church? He has already found his angel in me, so he can’t be there. Unless! Ah! He has found another wife!’ Mum came swinging into the living room brandishing a skillet. ‘Let me at him. I will go back home to Nigeria for him if he has run away with some wretched woman.’

  Mum was still cut-and-thrusting with the frying pan and pulling a mean-looking face when Dad walked right in the front door and almost lost an eye. He smiled his big broad smile. ‘Ah! Ifemi! How now?!’ He always called her either ifemi, which means ‘my love’ in Yoruba, or simply ‘mummy’.

  ‘Why are you smiling? Don’t show your teeth like that?! Do you want to eat me?’ The thing about Mum and Dad was, I could never tell if they were joking or really arguing. Well, they’re st
ill together today so they must have been joking most of the time. That’s Nigerian people for you. Sometimes if you walk down the street and see two Nigerians shouting at each other you think they might be about to come to blows but they are really good friends. We come from an expressive culture and that means that my mum could pretty much terrify anyone just by talking to them. Great if you’re getting bullied by the local kids for not having the latest trainers, not so great if you’re queuing up at the post office to buy a stamp and a little old lady in front is taking too long at the counter.

  ‘What is this racket going on in here? Mummy, the bacon is already in the frying pan so why does it sound like you are killing the pig? Jonny, my friend! How are you, Mr Man? And Natalie here as well?’ He kissed her on the cheek. ‘Good to see you too Maxine.’ Dad would always bow down low when he greeted Maxine, Natalie’s mother. It’s a big Nigerian thing to pay respect to your elders. If I met my older relatives any time and didn’t give them proper respect Dad would give my ears two boxes. In Nigeria it’s a regular thing to see grown men fully prostrate themselves in the street when they are greeting older people. It means that saying hello to a big group of seniors can take upwards of half an hour.

  I’m pretty sure we were the first black people Maxine had ever spoken to and I think Dad liked to play with her expectations. She always giggled and blushed bright red when Dad greeted her like this, and so every time they met he bowed a little lower and for a little longer. ‘Oh stop it!’ she’d say in a broad cockney accent. But secretly she loved it as she regularly commented on how much Dad looked like Sydney Poitier – ‘You know that dark fella in them films! Oh! If only I was a bit younger!’ She was a typical, jolly, old lady with silver hair and a friendly smile. She’d lived in the area since just after World War II when the flats were built.

  ‘Mummy!’ Dad embraced my mum, who shooed him away with a greasy spatula. ‘Ah, no greeting for your husband?’

  ‘Fine words do not produce food!’ But she kissed him anyway before heading back to the kitchen. ‘Have you been working?’

  ‘Of course not. Jonny is here and he is the boss. Not to oversee workmen is to leave your purse open.’

  Dad laid a hand on Jonny’s shoulder, who paused from his ‘Doo duh duhs’ to look up at Dad and say, ‘How did you get on with the Cit–?’ My dad glared at him, but before anything else could be said Stella cut in.

  ‘Jonny! You’re messing up the beat!’ My twin sister was twirling in the middle of the room doing the all-important 5 Star solo section and miming into a hairbrush. Stella is a great singer but Natalie was supplying the vocals today (‘My heart is reeeeeaching for you. And my looooooove is getting stronger’).

  But I’d seen enough to know that Dad was up to something and had been out getting a surprise present for Mum. I knew it would be a disaster at that moment, but I had no idea what kind of disaster it would turn out to be. He often surprised Mum with ‘presents’. You see Dad is a serial hoarder. Collecting stamps, coins or even dolls, I understand. I appreciate that different objects mean different things to different people, but there is a fine line between stuff and rubbish. Things any normal person would describe as rubbish. He is the kind of guy who if he drove past a hedge with an old TV in it would stop the car and put the TV in the boot, talking about how he was going to fix it up for the front room. So I knew that he’d have something ‘interesting’ to give to my mum later on in the day and then we’d have a fun hour of Dad trying to explain to her why an old Amstrad computer system reclaimed from a skip was going to revolutionize the world. The scars must have remained because even today Mum still doesn’t use a computer and back then, well, no one did, so it really was a lost cause.

  Years later, when I moved out of home, my old bedroom instantly turned into a scene out of Steptoe and Son. If you want three broken Betamaxes or an Etch-a-Sketch with a cracked screen, go and see my dad. He just can’t throw anything away. Last time I checked there was a box full of hopelessly entangled Slinkies and even a deflated old Spacehopper in there. Remember the Spacehopper? Never has a product promised so much but delivered so little – except for maybe edible underwear, or the Skoda Superb.

  At that moment Mum came sailing out of the kitchen with plates and plates of steaming breakfast. The mouth-watering smells of fried bacon, fried sausage, fried egg, crisp fried bread, charred tomato, thick sliced gammon and delicious potato filled the room and everyone went for it with gusto. In the Amos household you had to eat quick unless you wanted your neighbour’s poaching fork to spear a tasty morsel.

  Mum and Dad worked so much that as a kid I learned to cook from a very young age. I must have been the only ten year-old on the block who knew how to use a deep fat fryer. It was probably quite a dangerous situation, but we’re talking about the eighties when health and safety rules didn’t apply. To this day food for me is a very important barometer for happiness. I like to sit and have lunch with friends and talk about what we might have for dinner. I like to eat steak and think about what flavour ice cream I can have for dessert. Asking around, I’ve noticed that anyone who grew up with lots of brothers and sisters has this same attitude. It comes from the regular habit of hungry siblings trying to steal your food.

  Contented gurglings gave way to loud slurpings of sweet milky tea as Cordelia, only six years old, gathered the yolk-streaked plates into the kitchen. Already excited by what was to come my dad made his announcement.

  ‘Today is your mother’s birthday!’ Well, that was news to us. This was the first time I’d ever heard Dad announce a birthday like that. Before you start crying on about what terrible children we were for not knowing it was our own mother’s birthday, you have to understand that in the Amos family we were discouraged from making a big fuss or spending good money on any occasion. I can’t tell you the amount of Old Spice deodorant gift packs I received for my birthday between the ages of five and eighteen, by which time they deemed me old enough not to receive anything at all. The answer is thirteen. And I think the only reason I got a present was because I was born a twin and so the date was etched on my mum’s brain to such an extent that she couldn’t forget it. But being a twin meant that my sister and I even had to share presents. It was my school PE teacher who had to come up to me and explain that there really was no such thing as a unisex training bra. I once asked my mum what it was like having twins. She said, ‘Ah Stephen! It was all the joy of having one child … but totally ruined.’

  It wasn’t just birthdays that were downplayed. We never did much for Mother’s Day or Father’s Day and I don’t think Mum and Dad even remembered when their wedding anniversary was. I reckon Dad would’ve been quite happy telling us we were Jehovah’s Witnesses if he thought the kids would believe him and let him get away with cancelling Christmas. Mum wasn’t very keen on Christmas either because for several years she worked for the postal service and had to spend that cold December morning delivering cards to other people’s houses – normally while heavily pregnant. New Years Day would come and go but the only reason we knew anything had happened was because the date changed. Dad’s philosophy was simple: if you don’t have to go to work or school on a public holiday then that is enough of a reward – there’s no need to make a big song and dance over everything. So it was very surprising to us kids when we heard him announce:

  ‘So I said to myself, what to get the love of your life for her birthday?’ Mum wasn’t buying into this, and was pulling a nonchalant face with crossed legs and an air of ‘What the hell is he going to give me next? I’m already using the Amstrad as a very big paperweight,’ but he continued.

  ‘Flowers? Chocolates? No! No! A simple declaration of love is what the doctor ordered! Come out to the courtyard and you’ll see!’

  We lived in a block with a communal courtyard-cum-car park and although we lived on the ground floor, the block stretched three storeys high. We knew some of our neighbours, but with so many kids screeching around you can bet they all knew who we were. We all wen
t out of the back door to see what Dad had got up to. Dad was ushering Mum at the front of the pack with Jonny, Natalie and Maxine dragging the five of us kids behind them. Stella was still dancing, though, and so she glided out of her own accord.

  As we proceeded into the courtyard we could see Mum and Dad’s faces first of all. And their mouths were hanging open. I guess Dad had set this all up beforehand because there, standing in the middle of the car park, was a beautiful new-ish car. A rusty off-white Citroen BX GT.

  Stella, being a typical girl, couldn’t care less, and after a brief glance at the car carried on dancing to the music in her head. But both my older brother Albert and I ran up to it and danced around the new car with Albert shouting out, ‘Yo! I got a car! Take that!’ Why was Dad showing off? I wondered. Maybe he’d done something really bad, like had an affair or gambled all of our little money away on the horses. Maybe it was Jonny and Natalie who had put him up to making this grand gesture, which was so unlike him.

  It was only then that we noticed that Mum and Dad’s faces hadn’t changed. Dad slowly closed his mouth but instead of a smile I could see a thousand words playing themselves across his lips, jumbled frantically. I followed his gaze and saw something in the bottom right corner of the bonnet that looked ugly and out of place. Someone had defaced the car with smeared black paint. They’d printed a special message for us on the nearly new Amos-mobile. The message read: ‘No Blacks. No Irish. No Dogs.’

  Ashen, I could see those six words painfully stamped on my dad’s consciousness. There was a heartbeat when I thought that anything could happen and for the first time in my life I was afraid of my father. I was afraid of what he might do or say as his proud gesture of love had been hijacked so ignorantly in his own home by a stranger.

  Natalie and Jonny looked like they were about to explode with rage as well, but it was Maxine who was first out with a piercing ‘BASTARDS! YOU IGNORANT BASTARDS! HOW COULD YOU? HOW COULD YOU? YOU COWARDS!’ The worst part was that I had a hunch as to who was responsible. It was the neighbouring family on the other side who had never said a word to us, ever, since we moved in, and whose kids avoided us in the courtyard.