I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey Read online

  My little brother Chris, who was seven at the time, came up to me and asked innocently, ‘Are there wild, black, Irish dogs around the neighbourhood?’

  Maxine shook her fist lamely and ran to the racist neighbour in question’s communal front door and started hammering at it wildly. ‘COME OUT AND SHOW YOURSELVES!’ A little old lady battering someone’s front door like a madwoman! I’d never seen a white person act like that before. It was frightening to see so much anger and passion stirred up in Maxine’s slight frame. So it looked like white people could be terrifying too. Seeing Maxine like that dampened the anger in my dad’s face. My mother went up to her, took her by the hand and said, ‘Come back into the house. Don’t waste your breath on these cowardly people. They simply want to frighten us without showing their faces. As we say in Nigeria, “When the mouse laughs at the cat, there is a hole nearby.”’

  ‘You know they’re SCUM.’ Maxine aimed that last word squarely at the front door, which remained closed. ‘We’re not all like that.’

  ‘Ah! We’re not upset. Come inside.’ Mum put her arm over Maxine’s shoulder and gave it a tight squeeze as she led her back to the flat. Then I saw Mum pass Dad a furtive glance and, as their eyes met, although they said nothing the silence spoke volumes. Were they really going to have to spend their lives moving from one place to another and never find any kind of peace? Nowhere where they could just live happily and fit in?

  Once we were inside Dad and Jonny went about cleaning the paint off the car bonnet as surely as if they were cleaning a blocked sewer or bursting a canker sore. A dirty job to be completed quickly and without comment. By the time they came back in the front room, Stella and Natalie had resumed their impromptu 5 Star sing-along. They weren’t subdued and if anything they were singing even louder than before. We were all trying to act as if nothing had happened. Mum served us all tea sweetened with condensed milk. But old Maxine was drinking coffee, black and bitter. She sat on a chair in a corner and looked so sad and really ashamed. It was clear that seeing this episode first-hand and in front of a black family who she considered friends had had a profound effect on her. Being of a different generation, perhaps she was remembering the number of times she’d seen signs like that on front doors of hotels and shops and thought nothing of it. Who knows? Ten years before she might have even shared those views or hung a sign like that herself. But Stella danced on.

  (‘So here’s the answer to your queeeeeeestion. I want you ALL to myself. Cos I’m … ooooh, so go-od. GOOD for you. No! One! Else! Will! Ever! Do-o.)

  1

  I REMEMBER MY FIRST DAY at school, when I was only five years old. It was a primary school in Hammersmith right next door to where we were living at the time. I ran into the classroom and then ran straight home and said, ‘Mum, Mum! Apparently there’s a black boy in my class! And I can’t find him anywhere.’

  She sat me down and said, ‘Stephen! It is you!’

  Mum didn’t send me back to that school, but I couldn’t keep moving primaries every time someone said something nasty. If I’d done that I’d have been to more schools than there are in London by the time I was ten. Over the next few years I did, in fact, go to half a dozen different primary schools anyway because Dad was constantly uprooting the family and moving us around West London. He fancied himself as a property developer but I thought we were in the Witness Relocation Programme.

  Education is very important to my parents. It’s the main reason why they chose to leave a good life in Nigeria and relocate to England (the Biafran war might have had something to do with it too). Coming from West Africa to live in Europe was a pretty gutsy move for a young black couple in the late sixties and it must have been a huge culture shock. Although they grew up in the same town in south-west Nigeria, they didn’t actually meet until they were in their twenties and living in Lagos, the capital at the time. The Brits only left Nigeria in 1960 and back then Lagos was a pretty funky place. I’ve seen photos of them before they emigrated and Dad was wearing hipster flares while Mum sported a paisley print dress and massive stilettos. They both looked incredibly skinny and had afro hair. Huge afro hair. After independence, Nigeria was very unstable and Mum and Dad wanted any kids they’d have to enjoy the best future possible, and so they upped sticks and settled here. They used to say that Caribbeans were invited to England for work but Africans were not. We come here for education, so there was no chance of me missing even a day of school no matter what. I never knew what Mum and Dad meant by this anyway, because all the black folks were working as far as I could tell.

  When I was eight, Mum and Dad moved south of the river to Wandsworth and I ended up at a primary in Balham, today a nice suburb of London, but back then it had no such glory. In fact, one of the main thoroughfares was and still is Bedford Hill, a tree-lined street that attracted a hell of a lot of traffic due to the fact that it was a neat short cut, was in close proximity to the Common, and boasted more ladies working at night than a northern sausage factory. I stayed at this rowdy primary school until I sat the 11-plus exam and it was there that I had my first real taste of the wild feral children of south London – they made the kids back in Hammersmith look like pussy cats.

  Even though we were still at the age to get free cartons of milk in break times there wasn’t an innocent angel among us. We used to go through a lot of teachers even then. Normally on the first day of term they would come into class well dressed and wearing make-up, full of smiles, enthusiasm and encouragement for us pupils. By the third or fourth week you’d see them hiding in their cars at 8.30 in the morning and chain smoking. Their hair would be dishevelled and they’d have stopped washing their clothes and started talking to themselves in the corridors.

  But when it became clear that we were a failing state primary a new teacher was drafted in and put in personal charge of our class, which was the worst behaved. Miss Robbins was strict, fierce and she didn’t like me at all (because even at the age of nine I wouldn’t be quiet and pay attention), but she did one thing that I really appreciated and that surprised everyone. One day she turned up to school carrying a cage containing a hamster and installed him at the back of the classroom. She told us it was up to the students to clean the cage, feed and water the hamster every day. She even let us all vote to give him a name – we voted on Penfold, after the Danger Mouse character.

  When I told Mum that our class had adopted a cute hamster called Penfold she reacted as if I had told her we’d invited a flea farm to come to school. She acted as if there was a nit time bomb ensconced at the back of the classroom ready to infect us all and I had to beg her not to call the school and embarrass me. Instead of calling the headmistress she resolved to just comb my sister’s and my hair more mercilessly than usual, claiming to look for lice.

  Coming from a country where animals give you malaria, rabies or just bite your head off if you go wandering into the wrong corner of town, it’s not surprising that many Nigerians just aren’t into keeping animals as pets. I don’t want to speak for all Nigerian people; some people keep dogs for guarding their houses or hunting, but if you like dogs because they can bite strangers on sight and hunt down prey in the African wilds you’re still a world away from Paris Hilton’s handbag Chihuahua.

  The European attitude to animals is totally different from the African point of view, says my dad, and perhaps it’s a little bit weird. White people seem to love big, angry, dangerous animals and really want to seize them out of the bush and stick them in freezing cold, drab zoos or maybe make them dance around in circuses. A smart man knows that the best place for a tiger is somewhere very far away. I’m yet to see a Nigerian version of Siegfried and Roy.

  Most Africans like to have harmony with the environment, but it takes a colonialist to want to master every last corner of it. Everyone knows that this mad Englishman Charles Darwin went halfway around the world to find lots of new species on a boat called the Beagle. What a pioneer! Not everyone knows that he only went on this great voyage of discov
ery so that he could eat one of every animal that he found. That’s just disgusting. It sounds like someone offered him a drunken bet that he took too seriously. He was a bit like an olden days version of Danny Wallace. Go on Darwin! Eat that ugly tortoise! It took a white person to set up the first protected nature reserves in Africa. But what did people do all day in these early reserves? Well, they shot animals while speeding around on pick-up trucks, drinking beer and acting like they own the place. Barbaric! Although not totally unexpected.

  But I love animals a lot and I would dearly have loved to own a pet when I was growing up. However with Mum and Dad around there was no chance of that happening. Whenever we moved house, Mum was constantly fighting a battle to make sure that any kind of rat, mouse, cockroach or anything else that crawled on four legs (apart from my youngest sister) moved out of the house as soon as we moved in. The idea of actually inviting an animal into the house was a bad joke to her. ‘If you want to clean up after an animal or feed a mewling, dribbling, hungry mouth, then here! Just look after your sister for an hour.’

  By getting a hamster for the class I think the teacher was trying to teach us responsibility. Looking back, I’m amazed that she actually allowed us to look after a living animal, since we spent most of the rest of the time fighting amongst ourselves and pulling chairs out from underneath each other. Let’s just say hangman wasn’t a word-building game in our school, unless the vocabulary you are building is ‘Quick the teacher’s coming! Get him down! Get him down! Stop crying, Stephen! You better not tell anyone about this or you’re dead meat!’

  I remember one girl, Sarah, who was easily the most annoying person in the class, with a whiny voice and bipolar temperament. Even at the tender age of nine, it was clear to see that she’d end up with a few failed marriages and an addiction. She asked one morning:

  ‘Miss, why do we do finger painting? It’s dirty and stupid.’

  ‘Why?’ enquired Miss Robbins, trying to conceal her frustration at yet another precocious question. ‘It’s so we can have a record of all your fingerprints … early!’

  This funny little quip was probably not lost on most of the kids in school. I was definitely in the minority having both of my parents married, still together and neither of them in Wandsworth Prison.

  There was one nasty little criminal in the making called Keith whose fingerprints and DNA were destined to be taken many times in his life. Keith was a bully. He was strong. He was dumb. He was ugly. He was horrible to everyone and commanded fear in most of the rest of the kids. He was the best at hiding itching powder in your jacket. He was good at going through your coat pockets where they hung up by the door looking for sweets or money. He used to hang up my coat from the hook by the door … Not very nice, because I was still in it at the time.

  In spite of the challenging environment the little hamster was well cared for by the pupils. Everyone gave him little scraps of food from their packed lunches and when he started to get too fat we clubbed together and bought a little hamster wheel and put it in his cage.

  Apart from his generally furry innocence and friendly character, the very best thing about Penfold was that it turned out bipolar Sarah was allergic to him. If she got a whiff of his rodenty behind she’d start sneezing uncontrollably and her eyes would water and go red. The upshot of this was that she wouldn’t come within ten feet of the back of the classroom, where I sat. So not only was he a little ball of fun at the back of the classroom, whirling around on his squeaky wheel, but he was also a four-legged snub-nosed Sarah repellent.

  Because I always sat at the back, Penfold and I got to know each other very well during this time. I was fascinated by how he used to eat crumbs and seeds by scooping them in front of his pink twitching nose with his little paws before gobbling them down. He’d always try and burrow under his newspaper bed when we had maths, the most boring class. But when we had art and all the kids were busy with paints, glue, dried pasta and crumpled-up bits of tracing paper he’d come out of hiding and go whizzing round on his squeaky wheel. Even though he was small, he was a very sensitive animal and he could pick up exactly on the mood in the class and join in.

  The only kid apart from Sarah who didn’t like Penfold was Keith. He was a sadist and was always trying to poke the hamster with a pencil or scoop him out of the cage for some evil purpose. Stella and I were normally on hand to stop him from doing any lasting damage. When it became clear that Sarah was allergic to Penfold, I could see Keith’s slug-like brain behind his beady little eyes trying to squeeze out a horrible way to take advantage of this fact. Sarah may have been whiny and a bit wheezy if she got too close to Penfold, but Keith was a much worse character.

  One morning I should have realized something was up when halfway through the first lesson Sarah’s nose started to drip uncontrollably. By the end of the lesson, she was sneezing every thirty seconds and her eyes were bright red. Miss Robbins decided to take Penfold to the staff room for the rest of the day, much to my distress. I never liked to let him out of my sight when I was in school. But far from improving, Sarah got worse all day until no one could do any work without the ah-ah-ah-tishoo sound punctuated by the slurp of a really disgusting snot-filled sniff. By lunchtime, she was in such a bad state that she had to be sent to the nurse. The teacher went over to Sarah’s desk and opened it up only to find handfuls of scrunched-up newspaper taken from Penfold’s cage buried under her books at the bottom.

  No one admitted to it, but I knew it was Keith who had done it. He mercilessly teased Sarah about her big panda eyes when she came back to class and for the rest of the week he kept doing fake sneezes and sniffles to get under her skin. Bipolar Sarah was not called bipolar Sarah for no reason. She rose to the bait in a big way. She would start crying when Keith provoked her. Or she’d call on the teacher when he threw some balled-up paper at her. Or she’d throw a tantrum when he blew his nose extra theatrically. It got to the point where no one in the class could make even the smallest sound without Sarah thinking someone was making fun of her.

  It wasn’t funny at all to see a nine-year-old have a mini nervous breakdown whenever someone scraped their chair or coughed. If someone whispered to their neighbour asking to borrow a pencil she’d glare at them with real hatred in her eyes. Sarah was so paranoid that she thought the whole class and even the teacher were against her. When Miss Robbins got some chalk dust up her nose and sneezed, Sarah jumped right up and screamed, ‘I hate that hamster,’ before pelting out of the room in tears.

  By Thursday, the teacher said that she was going to take Penfold home at the weekend and not bring him back because he was causing so much grief in class. I was heartbroken because I swear we had grown to be friends during those long boring lessons in maths, geography and English. I hated Keith at that point; because of him I was going to lose my best distraction and I’d have to go back to counting the ceiling tiles and staring blankly at the clock on the wall.

  I resolved to make the most of the rest of the week by playing with Penfold at every opportunity. I even broke the golden rule of class by letting him out of his cage at break time on Friday and cradling him in my arms along with a few of the other kids. Passing him from hand to hand; giving his tummy a rub; feeling his tiny heart thumping a mile a minute; feeding him bits of sandwich. That little critter had never had so much attention its life. In the corner of the classroom, however, far away from the rest of us playing around with Penfold, sat Keith staring at us and biting his nails. He used to bite them right down to the skin. It was disgusting.

  After lunch on Friday we had double art, which was always a nice way to see us off into the weekend. We were all given a set of paints and a blank piece of paper and told to do self-portraits. This was more Miss Robbins’s doing. Before she had turned up, art classes consisted of the serious job of cutting a potato in half and making prints on coloured card (teachers in those days really didn’t have to be much more clued up than the kids they were teaching). I was making a mess of things and produci
ng something that Picasso would not have been proud of when I noticed that there was something missing. Where was the usual squeak, squeak, squeak of the hamster wheel? Where was Penfold? I turned and went over to the cage but he was nowhere to be seen. He wasn’t on his wheel. He wasn’t hiding under the newspaper. He was gone!

  ‘Miss! Miss! Penfold’s gone! Where’s Penfold?’

  Miss Robbins came to the back of the room and looked worriedly at the empty cage. ‘He must have got out. Can anyone see him?’

  Of course all the kids started running around the classroom like headless chickens calling out, ‘Penfold! Penfold!’ and generally revelling in the distraction. All except for Sarah who definitely didn’t care about the hamster and who, after a week of suffering persecutions (some imaginary, some real – she really was very annoying), was beginning to look a lot like Private Pile out of Full Metal Jacket just before he loses it and goes on a killing spree.

  ‘Get back to your desks this minute,’ commanded Miss Robbins, trying to regain control of a bunch of overexcited and delinquent children.

  ‘Maybe Stephen’s got him inside his desk. We all know that Stephen’s gay for Penfold,’ spat Keith.

  ‘Am not, miss! Take that back.’ I was only nine years old.

  ‘Be quiet, Keith. Everyone check inside your desks.’ An unholy racket of desks slamming open and shut ensued for a few minutes as all the kids took advantage of the chance to further disrupt the class.

  When the teacher finally regained control, Keith said slyly, ‘Miss Robbins, Sarah’s not checked her desk yet.’

  ‘Sarah! Just look inside!’ cried an exasperated Miss Robbins. Sarah opened her hinged wooden desktop and uttered a piercing scream as poor Penfold’s nose gently emerged from the lip of her desk. He must have been terrified in the dark wooden desk with all the noise in the room and, as he tried to escape, Sarah threw the desk lid down on top of him and we all heard a horrible crunch. A red wet matted patch of fur was crushed under the lid and everyone fell silent in shock. Everyone except for Keith who cackled with laughter, slamming his desk top up and down and pointing at Sarah, who was completely horrified.