I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey Read online

  What happened next confirmed my suspicion that Sarah was a bit unhinged herself. She let out a hateful scream and sprinted across the room to Keith where she began to beat him with closed fists. It took the teacher to pull Sarah off of Keith as she pulled his hair, yanking his head from side to side. And I mean the teacher literally pulled Sarah into the air with a fistful of Keith’s black hair in her fist.

  Once free, Keith was clearly dazed and bruised around the temples. He staggered around a bit and cradled his neck, trying to make sure his head was in fact still attached to his body. He saw the whole class looking at him with total hate. Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I was definitely giving him the evil eye. He did what all cowardly bullies do. He lied straight through his teeth. ‘It wasn’t me! Stop looking at me like that! I didn’t do anything! I don’t know how that rat got in her desk!’ Maybe the beating he’d sustained had knocked his senses out of whack – if he ever had any to start with. He could see that the whole class was against him.

  Forget potato printing. That day I learned a lesson in how the line blurs between doing mischief and doing something really really bad. It was a line that he would go on to cross plenty of times in later life I was sure. I could see his face harden then and there and he went from being a naughty kid to being a criminal-minded bastard. He’d killed a defenceless little creature and whatever light of innocence he had went out in his eyes. I could see straight through his head as he stared down the class of horrified nine-year-olds. His little reptile brain was working away but there was nothing good left in there. I mean the wheel was turning, but the hamster was truly dead.

  Keith may have been trying to play a joke but had ended up murdering Penfold and sending Sarah right over the edge. When you are grown up and run into people you went to school with everyone probes around a bit to try and find out how everyone changed. Nowadays, with things like Facebook, it’s even easier, and even I’ve been known to lurk around to see what people got up to. Ugly kids got married and had children. Bullied kids got jobs and went on to be happy. Quiet kids moved abroad. Nobody knows what Keith is up to now because he doesn’t have a Facebook page. Well, you’re not allowed to have one in prison.

  2

  BACK IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES there were only a handful of black kids around, and two of them were me and my twin sister. It would be a few years until the younger siblings would be able to join us, and my brother Albert, who was three years older, was already at a secondary grammar school. So we had to come up with survival strategies to get by in those first few shaky years. The best tactic was to meet up in break and talk about who had been really horrible, then my sister would crouch behind them and I’d push them over her. It was hilarious and it always worked. It was at primary school that I first started to become the typical class clown. Well, you have to see the funny side when kids were coming up to you and saying things like ‘Do black people wash their hair?’ My answer: ‘Why no! We stand outside and wait for it to rain.’

  And the teachers weren’t much better. When I did my 11-plus exam, I got good enough grades to make it to a grammar school. But when I had a conversation with my careers advisor, he said, ‘Hmmm, you could be a bus conductor, a chef? How about a runner? You people run, don’t you? Run! Run!’ These were the kind of teachers who if Barack Obama had said that he wanted to be the world’s top politician, he’d have been told, ‘Hmm, well I can definitely see you on a campaign bus, but only if you’re driving it.’

  I was very pleased to take my 11-plus and leave that particular primary school behind. It was expected that most of the kids would go on to the local secondary modern school or, more likely, borstal. The only reason I passed the exam was because of my sister. She had studied hard and never taken any notice of the other kids at school. All the teachers thought that she’d get into the local grammar school easily, but she desperately wanted me to get in too so that she wouldn’t be alone in class.

  So she tried to tutor me. Now, if I don’t pay attention in class with an adult at the front harassing me to learn my nine times table then I definitely wasn’t going to perform any better for Stella. After a while she realized that it was going to be impossible for me to get up to date with the curriculum. I literally knew nothing. She asked me to my face how it was that I hadn’t picked up on anything in class. Then she asked me who was tying my shoelaces every morning because apart from in reading and writing I displayed the knowledge of a five-year-old.

  ‘Stephen, what is hard water?’

  ‘Ice.’

  ‘What do you need for photosynthesis?’

  ‘A darkroom.’

  ‘Where do you find chlorophyll?’

  ‘Swimming pools.’

  ‘Stephen, describe this graph.’

  ‘It’s very pretty.’

  ‘What’s pi for?’

  ‘Dinner.’

  ‘Stephen, do you know the name of our teacher?’

  ‘Yes. Miss Robbins.’

  ‘So you have been in the class, but Stephen, how have you managed not to fail every single test we’ve ever been set?’

  So I told her my secret. The way I’d been getting the answers in school tests was this: I had been cheating. I used to look at the back of the other kids’ pencils and work out what they were writing from the squiggles and loops they made in the air. I thought she was going to lay into me for being a cheater but she actually looked impressed.

  ‘Stephen, you should work for the secret service or something because that is wicked. Do you ever look at my pencil?’ I felt guilty telling Stella that she was my number one copy buddy and she didn’t even know it. Stella was never in trouble with any teachers, but because we were twins the teachers separated us for tests. They used to say that we were ‘thick as thieves’ even though we were not up to any mischief (at least Stella wasn’t). In fact it was easier to clock the back of someone’s pencil if they were a few rows away than if they were right next to you. So using this technique I managed to pass the 11-plus with flying colours and we expected to go to the same school the next year. Which we did, but not in the way we expected to.

  About two weeks into the summer holidays Dad announced that we were going to take our first ever family holiday. We assumed that this meant we were going to Peterborough to see some distant cousin of Dad’s, but actually it turned out that we were going to get on an aeroplane and fly off to another country. And that country was going to be Nigeria.

  Now this news was met with quite a lukewarm reception on our part. It’s odd trying to find your identity when you have dual heritage and we never knew exactly what to make of the West African country they had hailed from. All our lives we’d been told we were Nigerian first and British second. But when we asked why we had to live in England, where we were often the subjects of racial abuse, Mum and Dad told us that it was worth it to live in the UK. So we had figured that Nigeria must be really really bad if this was the best option.

  All we really knew about Nigeria was that it was hot, that everyone there was black, that it used to be British and that there had been a war there. Mum and Dad had purposefully not taught us the Yoruba language, which they spoke privately to each other when they thought we were out of earshot. Both Stella and I had actually picked some of it up and we realized that when they were speaking it there were normally money worries or children worries under discussion. Those subjects were normally linked together.

  ‘Do not talk like me or your mother or you will never get anywhere in this country,’ Dad used to say to us. And so we had grown up on a strict diet of Trevor McDonald, which meant we picked up his accent and also some of his phrases and mannerisms. I would come home from school and say, ‘Reports are in. Stephen was late with his homework. Sources suggest he will be in detention next week. My sister has more.’

  So the idea of going to this foreign country was both exciting and frightening. I thought that perhaps finally I would fit in. My sister was worried about eating foreign food. Albert hoped that he
might meet a nice girl, and the younger kids, Cordelia and Chris, were only four and five years old and so they didn’t really understand what was going on.

  It was enough of a hassle to actually get there. At the time Nigeria may have been on the British Airways radar but we couldn’t afford the UK’s national carrier. It came down to a choice between West African Airways or, bizarrely, Aeroflot, the national carrier of Russia. Aeroflot is well known as the death trap of the skies but it actually had a better safety record than West African Airways. However, since Aeroflot meant you had to transfer through Moscow it was decided by Dad that we should go with West African Airways.

  We went in two groups. Mum went first with me, Stella and Albert, and Dad was to follow a couple of weeks later with the youngest kids. We were all excited by the idea of getting onto an aeroplane but the actual experience itself seemed a bit strange to me. When we were on board, the safety announcement said that you would find your life jacket under your seat. Your lifejacket under your seat?! All I could think of was, life jacket? Who needs a life jacket on an aeroplane? If this thing’s going down I want a parachute. Have they messed up and given all of our parachutes to P&O Cruises? Heads are going to roll if there’s an incident, and we don’t plunge headlong into the sea.

  Thoughts like these were floating around my head when we were strapped in and taking off. And the flight was pretty scary. This was in the days before people hopped on planes for stag nights and a lot of the passengers on the flight were probably flying for the first time. But for me it was very cool. I’ve always loved cars, trains and, of course, planes. Anything that has a big engine goes fast and makes a noise like ‘vroom’, I am a fan of.

  This plane was not a jumbo jet. It was a small plane. ‘A flying coffin’, as my mother put it. There was not a lot of room on board and there was a chemical toilet at the back. The on-board meal for us kids consisted of a biscuit and a cup of milk. I’ve been lucky enough to travel quite a lot as a comedian and I know that proper jet planes ought to go very high. This one flew pretty close to the ground and we could actually see the view of roads and fields as they passed beneath us. The whole country below looked like a patchwork quilt as we flew south towards Africa.

  There was a lot of turbulence and before long Stella, Mum and Albert were all being sick into bags. I thought this was pretty funny because Mum had insisted that we all dressed up in our best clothes only for us to be sick all over them. This flight sickness was probably the reason why the airline chose not to give the passengers much to eat once they were on board. Although I reckon Mum’s sickness had more to do with her being terrified than the bumpy ride as she kept shouting to no one in particular, ‘Fly above the clouds! Fool!’ You have to remember that this is a woman whose idea of adventure up until then had been to open the curtains back home and say, ‘Look!’ before closing them again.

  There was no in-flight entertainment except when one Nigerian family began arguing with the stewardess. Now these stewardesses were not the Virgin Atlantic supermodel types. No. They looked like they had rolled out of bed, opened a make-up bag and just dunked their heads into it up to their necks. Customer service is not an idea that has fully percolated down to Africa, and the stewardess gave as good as she got. As I’ve said, Nigerian people are quick to raise their voices when they are just having a nice chat but when a real argument is in full swing things can get out of hand fast. The captain himself came back at one point and calmed everyone down. ‘Abeg, make I hear word!’ which is Pidgin English and roughly translates as ‘Please stop arguing or I’ll crash the plane.’

  When we touched down in Lagos, Nigeria, everyone clapped and few people shouted ‘Praise God and oluwasegun’ (‘God has been victorious’ in Yoruba). I thought it was pretty strange that they applauded the pilot when he got us safely to our destination. What would they have done if we had crashed? Probably shouted, ‘Boo! Hiss!’ while reaching for their life jackets.

  If you’ve never been to Nigeria then the first thing you notice is the heat. It’s not like English heat at all. It’s like sitting in a sauna. In tropical countries, you feel the heat in your lungs when you breathe in. It’s like inhaling something solid and hot. Like a cup of tea going down the wrong way. You even feel like you’re going to choke a little bit at first. And this hot, humid, muggy air captures the surrounding smells more strongly than a dry heat. Suddenly, you are aware of the distant smells of cooking and cooking fires and even the smells of the people you’re standing next to. It takes some getting used to at first.

  The immigration queue was massive and totally out of control, with most of the passengers shouting at each other and at the security guards. These poor guards could hardly control anyone since back then procedure took a back seat to favours, and it wasn’t what you knew but who you knew. Everyone in that queue claimed to know someone in authority to ease them into the country, but Mum had a real connection. Her voice rose above the surrounding clamour and one of these guys wearing neat and tidy white uniforms escorted us to the top of the queue. When we got to the border control she took out two passports for each of us. A green Nigerian one and a black British one. She handed the Nigerian passports to the officer and he waved us through, looking wearily at the angry people we’d pushed in front of.

  Later Mum told me, ‘Remember your roots, Stephen. You are Nigerian first and British second. Except when you are going into Heathrow Airport. Then use the black passport.’

  The second thing you notice about Lagos is the amount of people. Even at the airport there were thousands of people getting up to some business or other. There were people cooking barbecued meat and corn. There were people selling beer, water and cola. You could come directly off the plane and immediately buy sandals and African wraps that were more appropriate for the African climate. But by far and away the majority of the people were there to greet arriving relatives by the dozen. As soon as we had our bags in our hands and were out of the terminal, Mum’s sister Yomi rushed forward and embraced us each in turn saying, ‘God be praised! You have arrived back home at last!’

  She bundled us towards the car park where four different cars all packed with different uncles, aunties and cousins were waiting for us. By the time we’d greeted them all another hour had passed. Those who didn’t grab us and hug us were the older members of the family and when we offered our hands to them Mum pushed us in the back and said, ‘Why don’t you prostrate?’ And so there, on the car park’s dirty muddy ground we had to get down on our hands and knees and prostrate towards these people who I’d never even heard of before. I wasn’t sure if I was going to like doing this to everyone I met. But I at least had a good opportunity to muck up my posh clothes.

  As we drove away, Albert and I were excited but I could see Stella looking longingly back towards the airport. She was obviously not sure if this was going to be the best holiday after all and she’d have been happier in the UK dreaming of going to big school in the autumn. Things seemed ominous to Stella. She said to me, ‘Why did they say welcome home? This place isn’t my home at all.’

  By the time we were all safely packed into the cars and on the move it was evening and the roads were crowded with people milling around and all different kinds of cars were blaring their horns at each other. It was pitch black and there weren’t any streetlights working. The road could only be discerned because of the virtually gridlocked traffic that jammed it up. Without any clear idea of where the kerb and the road met it was pretty obvious that a lot of the cars were just trying to go around the outside and create their own personal hard shoulders. The fires that people had lit by the sides of the road to cook by were the only signs anyone had of where it was safe to go. It was a world away from the A24.

  We travelled to a suburb of Lagos called Ikeja where we were to stay with Auntie Yomi. She was Mum’s little sister and we’d seen her in a mouldy old photograph that Mum had shown us back in England. She looked just like a young version of Mum and she was full of energy. Most of the
other newfound relatives that we’d just met hadn’t seemed too friendly and had barely uttered a word when we greeted them, but Yomi went out of her way to talk to us and make us feel comfortable. Even Nigerians know that Lagos can make your head spin and Yomi appreciated how shocking it might seem to kids who’d grown up thousands of miles away.

  As we came into the populated areas we saw how people lived. It was sort of like how you’d live in London if it were 45°C and 100 per cent humidity every day of the year. There were lots of medium-rise city blocks of about six or seven storeys. There might have been enclosed living spaces at the back but all you could see were massive balconies, which were really more like multistorey terraced verandas. People were cooking and washing and talking and drying their clothes in the almost open air. You could see families hanging over the balconies on their verandas calling up and down to each other.

  Stella, Albert and I looked out of the window at this vibrant night-time atmosphere, thick with noise and smells, with a kind of excited terror. It was Albert though who first noticed the music. Almost everyone was playing something and the tinny twang of radios and boom boxes competed with people playing guitars and horns. We learned later that Ikeja was the heart of an Afrobeat revolution that was sweeping Nigeria and that had started with the famous Fela Kuti. Immediately, we felt soothed by the rhythm and even Mum, stressed from lugging herself and her kids across a continent, began to relax. By the time we arrived at our auntie’s home, everyone in the car was talking and hoping that maybe we’d get a taste of the barbecued meat, called suya, that we could smell everywhere.