Small Island by Andrea Levy
‘Don’t expect your rice and peas or spicy things or grub like you had in America in England,’ he warned us. That I did know and was not pleased to be reminded. ‘You’re off to a war zone.’
I was yawning now.
‘Britain’s been at war for a long time, everyone’s tired out. There’s shortages. You’ll have to get used to ’em. You can kiss the idea of a banana goodbye,’ he informed us, with uncharacteristic mirth. Then suddenly, without warning, we West Indian RAF volunteers destined for England felt something like an explosion. I was not the only one on my feet ready to fight when I caught its blast. Not the only one with fists clenched willing to kill, when the renk and feisty fool-fool ras-clot Corporal Baxter, belittling us once more with his ‘colony troops’, told all us boys, ‘And don’t think you lot are going there to paint the town red. No white women there will consort with the likes of you.’
Twelve
Gilbert
‘Wakey, wakey, wakey – let go your cocks and grab your socks.’ The man who shouted those oh-so-funny words at six o’clock every morning to awaken we West Indian RAF volunteers was called Flight Sergeant Thwaites. The hair at the front of this sergeant’s head was receding. Under the frugal, carefully combed hair that remained, an angry red birthmark blazed on his scalp, which formed the unmistakable shape of a letter B. We all knew, we other ranks, that one day when this sergeant lost all his remaining hair to gravity and the wind, the word ‘bastard’ would be revealed written over the top of his bald head in that blushing stain. It was the devil who scorched that word on to his skull in case there was ever any doubt as to the character of this puff-up, dogheart man.
We were billeted four to a chalet at the training camp in Filey in the county of Yorkshire. Pure imagination was needed to see how in peacetime English families could actually enjoy a holiday at this woebegone place. Hubert, Fulton, James and I huddled round the hot pipes after every day of indispensable regimen – like running through freezing fields with nothing to keep out the biting sea wind but vest, pants and the order to ‘Keep moving, keep moving,’ searing from the mouth of Sergeant Bastard. We blocked up the door of this little holiday home with spare clothes, sealed up the gaps in the windows with old newspaper. Every evening we sat close as nesting birds drinking in the heat that wafted from the pipes. Once James took off his scarf but he was the only one. Could this misery be a portrait of an English holiday? One night that bastard sergeant flew open our door and yelled, ‘Blimey, it’s like the tropics in here. Get those windows open.’
There was no protest we coloured troops could make that would appear to this man as reason. From the first time Oscar Tulloch from Antigua met the sergeant’s order to move at the double with an inane gape – provoking the sergeant to moan, ‘What the bloody ’ell have they sent me?’ – every action we took confirmed to this man that all West Indian RAF volunteers were thoroughly stupid. Eating, sleeping, breathing in and out! Cor blimey, all the daft things we darkies did. We did not know that answering the question ‘What is it, Airman, kill or be killed?’ with the answer, ‘I would prefer to kill you, Flight Sergeant,’ would see you up to your neck in bother. And that insolent, annoying Jamaican habit of sucking teeth – so frequent did the custom ring in his ears that Sergeant Bastard ordered that particular noise to be seen as an act of insubordination and treated accordingly. Now ask an Englishman not to suck his teeth and see him shrug. Tell a Jamaican and see his face contort with the agony of denied self-expression. Oh, we were all, every one of us, by virtue of being born in the sun, founder members of this man’s ‘awkward squad’.
‘Warm air ain’t good for you,’ he shouted. ‘It makes you soft. Cold air keeps you alert.’ Once all the windows were opened and we were again a group of cold and pitiable black men, he eyed us with scorn before leaving the chalet saying, ‘I bet you lot regret volunteering now.’ With a good long suck of teeth no longer available to us, we four saluted his back with the silent two-fingered symbol favoured by Churchill but, let me assure you, with its more vulgar meaning.
Now tell me, have you ever seen a dog with a gecko? We had a dog at home – Blackie – my boyhood friend. Wrestling Blackie from the smothering arms of my sisters, removing the baby’s hat from his head, the mittens from his back paws and returning to him his scruffy canine dignity, I would find one of those little lizards to deliberately place in Blackie’s path. A gecko sensing a dog remains as still as death. Blackie seeing a gecko is suddenly caught by passionate curiosity. Up with his ears, his eyes popping wide. Fearing the unexpected he moves stealthily round the creature, never – even for a second – taking his gaze from it. Carefully, closer, pat the air above it with a paw and jump back. Circling round. Sniff the air. Closer, closer. Skip forward, leap back, wait. That gecko could not even move one of its prehistoric eyes without that dog’s awareness. This could go on nearly all day until eventually Blackie would pluck up the courage to slowly crouch down low, wiggle his back end, and pounce at the gecko. Sometimes he almost caught it but usually the gecko ran away, being skilful and faster than my silly dog.
You might want to know why I am telling you this. But patience. Now see this, a fine day: a weak, heatless sun resting in a blue sky. We are out of the camp for the first time, six maybe seven of the boys and me. Walking in our RAF blue through the English village of Hunmanby. No order to follow, no command to hear, just us boys. We are remarking on the pretty neatness of the gardens – a flower still in bloom, which someone, I forget who, insists they know the name of. Shutting his eye and biting his lip he tries to recall it. ‘A rose,’ he says.
‘Cha, that is not a rose,’ someone else says. ‘Every flower is rose to you.’
‘That is a rose.’
‘It is not a rose.’
This argument is going on as we walk on past the post office and shop. The display in the window, piled up high with tins and boxes, still manages to proclaim that there is a lot of nothing to buy inside. Hubert is trying to persuade James, a strict Presbyterian and teetotal, to come into the pub. ‘You think one little beer gonna keep you outta heaven?’
It was I who first noticed. Leaning urgently into our group I whispered, ‘Man, everyone looking at us.’
The entire village had come out to play dog with gecko. Staring out from dusty windows, gawping from shop doors, gaping at the edge of the pavement, craning at gates and peering round corners. The villagers kept their distance but held that gaze of curious trepidation firmly on weWest Indian RAF volunteers. Under this scrutiny we darkies moved with the awkwardness of thieves caught in a sunbeam.
‘Gilbert, ask them what the problem,’ Hubert told me.
From every point of the compass eyes were on us. ‘You have a megaphone for me, man?’ I said. When I scratched my head the whole village knew. If any one of those people had a stick long enough, I swear they would have poked us with it.
It was some while before the more daring among them took cautious steps toward us, the unfamiliar. A young woman – curling brunette hair, dark eyes, pretty and plump at the hips – finally stood within an arm’s distance to ask, ‘Are you lot American?’ She had her mind on feeling some nylon stockings on her graceful leg. Which, as she stood pert and feminine before us, every one of us boys had our mind on too.
‘No, we are from Jamaica,’ I told her.
‘The West Indies,’ the Trinidadian among us corrected.
Like a chink in a dam, a trickle of villagers approached us. Most merely nodded as they passed. An old man with a face as cracked as a dry riverbed shook us all hearty by the hand in turn saying, ‘We’re all in this together, lad. We’re glad to have you here – glad to have ya.’
An elderly couple tapping on James’s shoulder asked, ‘Would you mind, duck – would you mind saying something? Only my husband here says it’s not English you’re speaking.’
When James replied, ‘Certainly, madam, but please tell me what you require me to say,’ her husband shouted, ‘Bloody hell, Norma, you’re rig
As Norma concluded: ‘There, I told you. They speak it just like us, only funnier. Ta, ducks, sorry to bother ya.’
A middle-aged man, not in uniform, kept his hands resolutely in his pockets before addressing me. Eyeing intently the young woman, who was by now getting on very nicely with a lucky Fulton – consorting with him as we had been assured no white woman would – this man, not looking on my face as he spoke, asked me, ‘Why would you leave a nice sunny place to come here if you didn’t have to?’
When I said, ‘To fight for my country, sir,’ his eyebrows jumped like two caterpillars in a polka.
‘Humph. Your country?’ he asked without need of an answer. He then took the young woman’s arm, guiding her, reluctant as she was, away from Fulton and our group.
Let me ask you to imagine this. Living far from you is a beloved relation whom you have never met. Yet this relation is so dear a kin she is known as Mother. Your own mummy talks of Mother all the time. ‘Oh, Mother is a beautiful woman – refined, mannerly and cultured.’ Your daddy tells you, ‘Mother thinks of you as her children; like the Lord above she takes care of you from afar.’ There are many valorous stories told of her, which enthral grown men as well as children. Her photographs are cherished, pinned in your own family album to be admired over and over. Your finest, your best, everything you have that is worthy is sent to Mother as gifts. And on her birthday you sing-song and party.
Then one day you hear Mother calling – she is troubled, she need your help. Your mummy, your daddy say go. Leave home, leave familiar, leave love. Travel seas with waves that swell about you as substantial as concrete buildings. Shiver, tire, hunger – for no sacrifice is too much to see you at Mother’s needy side. This surely is adventure. After all you have heard, can you imagine, can you believe, soon, soon you will meet Mother?
The filthy tramp that eventually greets you is she. Ragged, old and dusty as the long dead. Mother has a blackened eye, bad breath and one lone tooth that waves in her head when she speaks. Can this be that fabled relation you heard so much of? This twisted-crooked weary woman. This stinking cantankerous hag. She offers you no comfort after your journey. No smile. No welcome. Yet she looks down at you through lordly eyes and says, ‘Who the bloody hell are you?’
‘Okay, Gilbert, you have gone too far,’ I can hear you say. You know I am talking of England – you know I am speaking of the Mother Country. But Britain was at war, you might want to tell me, of course she would not be at her best.
Some of the boys shook their heads, sucking their teeth with their first long look at England. Not disappointment – it was the squalid shambles that made them frown so. There was a pained gasp at every broken-down scene they encountered. The wreckage of this bombed and ruined place stumbled along streets like a devil’s windfall. Other boys looking to the gloomy, sunless sky, their teeth chattering uncontrolled, gooseflesh rising on their naked arms, questioned if this was the only warmth to be felt from an English summer. Small islanders gaped like simpletons at white women who worked hard on the railway swinging their hammers and picks like the strongest man. Women who sent as much cheek back to those whistling boys as they received themselves. While even smaller islanders – boys unused to polite association with white people – lowered their eyes, bit their lips and looked round them for confirmation when first confronted with a white woman serving them. ‘What can I get you, young man?’ Yes, serving them with a cup of tea and a bun. A college-educated Lenval wanted to know how so many white people come to speak so bad – low class and coarse as cane cutters. While Hubert perusing the countryside with a gentle smile said, ‘But look, man, it just like home,’ to boys who yearned to see the comparison – green hills that might resemble the verdant Cockpit country, flowers that might delight as much as a dainty crowd of pink hibiscus, rivers that could fall with the same astounding spectacle of Dunn’s river. And let me not forget James, perplexed as a newborn, standing with military bearing surrounded by English children – white urchin faces blackened with dirt, dryed snot flaking on their mouths – who yelled up at him, ‘Oi, darkie, show us yer tail.’
But for me I had just one question – let me ask the Mother Country just this one simple question: how come England did not know me?
On our first day in England, as our train puffed and grunted us through countryside and city, we played a game, us colony troops. Look to a hoarding and be the first to tell everyone where in England the product is made. Apart from a little argument over whether Ford made their cars at Oxford or Dagenham, we knew.
See me now – a small boy, dressed in a uniform of navy blue, a white shirt, a tie, short trousers and long white socks. I am standing up in my classroom; the bright sunlight through the shutters draws lines across the room. My classmates, my teacher all look to me, waiting. My chest is puffed like a major on parade, chin high, arms low. Hear me now – a loud clear voice that pronounces every p and q and all the letters in between. I begin to recite the canals of England: the Bridgewater canal, the Manchester-to-Liverpool canal, the Grand Trunk canal used by the china firms of Stoke-on-Trent. I could have been telling you of the railways, the roadways, the ports or the docks. I might have been exclaiming on the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster – her two chambers, the Commons and the Lords. If I was given a date I could stand even taller to tell you some of the greatest laws that were debated and passed there. And not just me. Ask any of us West Indian RAF volunteers – ask any of us colony troops where in Britain are ships built, where is cotton woven, steel forged, cars made, jam boiled, cups shaped, lace knotted, glass blown, tin mined, whisky distilled? Ask. Then sit back and learn your lesson.
Now see this. An English soldier, a Tommy called Tommy Atkins. Skin as pale as soap, hair slicked with oil and shinier than his boots. See him sitting in a pub sipping a glass of warming rum and rolling a cigarette from a tin. Ask him, ‘Tommy, tell me nah, where is Jamaica?’
And hear him reply, ‘Well, dunno. Africa, ain’t it?’
See that woman in a green cotton frock standing by her kitchen table with two children looking up at her with lip-licking anticipation. Look how carefully she spoons the rationed sugar into the cups of chocolate drink. Ask her what she knows of Jamaica. ‘Jam– where? What did you say it was called again. Jam– what?’
And here is Lady Havealot, living in her big house with her ancestors’ pictures crowding the walls. See her having a coffee morning with her friends. Ask her to tell you about the people of Jamaica. Does she see that small boy standing tall in a classroom where sunlight draws lines across the room, speaking of England – of canals, of Parliament and the greatest laws ever passed? Or might she, with some authority, from a friend she knew or a book she’d read, tell you of savages, jungles and swinging through trees?
It was inconceivable that we Jamaicans, we West Indians, we members of the British Empire would not fly to the Mother Country’s defence when there was threat. But, tell me, if Jamaica was in trouble, is there any major, any general, any sergeant who would have been able to find that dear island? Give me a map, let me see if Tommy Atkins or Lady Havealot can point to Jamaica. Let us watch them turning the page round, screwing up their eyes to look, turning it over to see if perhaps the region was lost on the back, before shrugging defeat. But give me that map, blindfold me, spin me round three times and I, dizzy and dazed, would still place my finger squarely on the Mother Country.
Thirteen
Gilbert
‘A little birdie tells me you can drive a car, Joseph,’ Sergeant Bastard said to me.
‘No, sir,’ I replied.
You think it would have pleased me to be able to look this man in the eye and say, ‘Yes, that little bird was right.’ To watch his amazed features assessing this information, to see him gazing upon the heavens puzzling: ‘Could it be that not all darkies are daft?’ But I had no time for this brotherly generosity. This was a private conflict. It was a desperate liar who said, ‘No, Flight Sergeant, I cannot drive.’
Come, let me explain. Louise Joseph, my mother, realising that the husband she married only provided bread for his family when he was sober (which was generally no more than three days out of seven), determined that her nine children would eat cake instead. A business was born. Conceived and nurtured by my mother and her sister, Auntie May. Be it a light sponge or laden with rum and fruit, my mother and her sister made the finest cakes in Jamaica. Only Jamaica? No, probably the Caribbean, even the world. Cakes for all occasions – Christmas, Easter, weddings, birthdays, christenings, anniversaries, and one time, delivered to the governor’s house, a cake for the death of a dog.
In front of my sober father, my mother insisted her cake baking was just a hobby. She told him, ‘No problem. I just fix up a cake in the kitchen, earn me a little for extras.’ Behind his drunken back my mother and Auntie May ran a serious business, with orders, deliveries, overheads, shortages, labour disputes and taxable income carefully assessed. It was a secret that everyone but my intoxicated father knew – that cake business earned more for her family than her husband ever could. And my Auntie May always laughed that my resourceful mother had even bred her own workers. Seven sisters – bickering, shoving and giggling in the kitchens – would mix, bake, ice and pack. And we two boys, Lester and me, were her trusted deliverymen.
I could drive from the age of ten.
‘Been driving since you were ten, that’s what I’ve heard,’ the bastard went on.
‘No, Flight Sergeant. That is someone else.’
It was cake that sent Lester and me to the private school, St John’s College, at the age of fifteen. Cake that saw us educated beyond thinking driving and delivering was any sort of suitable work for a scholarly man. Opportunity called Lester to America, which left me, a frustrated prisoner, behind a wheel. I had dreams of attending a university, studying the law and acquiring a degree. But my station was lowly – my ideas soared so high above it I could see them lamenting and waving goodbye.