I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey (12 page)

Then there was the weird man who wore a bicycle helmet covered in little multicoloured fairy lights. This mad genius had actually rigged his bicycle with a generator that powered the lights when he pedalled. I thought he looked very festive, like a kind of homeless Father Christmas. Except he didn't have any presents to speak of except for a can of Special Brew and a mangy dog on a rope and you definitely wouldn't want to sit on his knee.

The White Lady was a pretty amazing sight to see. She was in fact a totally respectable black woman, but the odd thing about her was that she wrapped her entire body from top to toe in glisteningly clean white cloth and she bound her hair in the same white material. Not only that but she painted her face and hands with white make-up. What surprised me was the fact that she seemed to have plenty of friends who'd stop and chat to her completely normally and without saying things like ‘Are you mental or what?' She looked like a tall, slender, very much alive Egyptian mummy.

The White Lady originally hailed from Nigeria and so, in spite of her odd looks, Mum got to know her very well. Also Mum was working as an Avon lady at the time and so it made sense for her to get to know this woman who clearly had a need to buy large amounts of make-up. Apparently something had happened to her during the Biafran civil war in Nigeria that had badly damaged her and she'd fled to London. I could always tell when the White Lady was visiting because Mum would put an extra layer of protective plastic sheeting on all the furniture (she put protective covers on everything anyway as a matter of course). Nobody would ever accuse Mum of being overly sentimental and when the White Lady left our flat she would say that it was a shame to see a young woman end up this way but ‘How can she have enough time on her hands to be able to get ready like that every morning? That sista is of
one kind
(odd). It's because she has no issue! And think of the cleaning bills!'

I think it's possible there was some chemical in the water supply in Tooting that was making people act strangely and it was no surprise to me that the biggest mental institution in South London was at the top of a big leafy hill round the corner from where we lived. A mental institution with a big outpatient clinic. The local shopkeepers were used to people with bad Tourette's coming into the shops to buy a bunch of bananas while barking at them like a dog. Some of these characters were probably patients out for a stroll but the rest of them just felt at home in this environment and gravitated towards the area. This was care in the community before there was a government policy on care in the community.

There was one old Caribbean guy who was my favourite of the whole mad lot. He was teetering somewhere between insane, eccentric and just plain old. Mad Marvin or Marvin the Menace, as the local kids called him. He would always wear the same tattered old jumper and raggedy shorts even in the dead of winter and you'd see him out all the time because he had about a hundred dogs. He'd walk them in the local park a dozen at a time. They were completely wild and would try and chase after the boys as they rode their bikes shouting, ‘Oi! Marvin the Menace!' The kids didn't have much to worry about as most of the dogs had only three legs. He had come to live in London in the fities because his dad had fought for the British in World War II. If I thought things were tough for black people in the seventies and eighties, it was nothing compared to the abuse he'd suffered and it had unhinged him pretty badly.

He was funny and he did funny things. Like one time he was arrested on the open-air top deck of a double-decker bus for lighting a Bunsen burner. When the police got him he said, ‘All me want is a cup of tea a' door', before presenting them with a tea bag, mug and billycan. He told me later, ‘Stephen, the judge was a fair man. He said “Sir, nex' time you want a drink o' tea on a bus make some before you go out and keep it in a Thermos”, before he show me his Thermos that he keep himself behind the judge's desk! An' they let me off wit' a warning. Ha!'

Marvin didn't have much, but he did live in a big house at the bottom of the hill, which he said his mum and dad had left him when they died. Whether that was true or not was highly debatable because Dad told me that all the houses in that row were squats and that I shouldn't hang around down there. Marvin was always worried that the authorities would take his house away from him. He'd say: ‘I'm getting to be ageable. Them dogheart man wait till I lose the last marble in my head and I'll end up in that hospital up the road with the rest of them.'

With all of these unique individuals in the neighbourhood there was always someone to pass the time of day with. You couldn't leave your doors unlocked or anything, but there was a sort of community spirit and so people noticed when, one day, a truly weird and highly scratty white man turned up and started to hang around with Marvin. This guy scared all the kids because, bizarrely, he had no lower jawbone at all. I don't know if he'd lost it in an accident or was born that way but he looked very strange and when he talked his lower lip vibrated weirdly and he spat. He was always hanging around Marvin and so everyone began to avoid both of them in the park.

Marvin didn't seem happy to have this new companion and after a while even my dad noticed that he was looking very down and so one day we finally asked him what was going on. He cried out to us, ‘That man jus' won't leave me alone! Him say that it be his house that I've been living in all these years. He took me front door key, copied it and now he won' go away.' He looked up to my dad and quietly added, ‘An' him kick the dogs.' Dad, being Nigerian, had a lot of respect for his elders and even though Marvin wasn't playing with a full deck of cards it broke Dad's heart to see him brought so low.

Since moving back from Nigeria some subtle changes had come over my whole family. The challenges that we'd faced there made any difficulties we encountered here in the UK seem much more manageable. Stella and I had become a lot more confident in dealing with the other kids at school and Dad had relaunched his construction business in London with gusto. We were still living with far too many kids (and Mum was pregnant again!) in a small flat, but money wasn't as tight as it had been in Africa. Dad's hard work was paying off and his self-esteem rose in line with his earnings. In the past he would have just stayed well out of the affairs of local people but now he confronted this jawless white man in the park that same day.

‘What are you doing tormenting an old man? You should be ashamed of yourself. Why don't you take yourself away from here before I call the police?'

Although the interloper cringed visibly at being challenged by Dad, he frothily lisped back, ‘Call the polithe then. What will they do, ey? I can live here ith I want to. Mind your own buthineth. That house ith too big thor an old man anyway. He jutht wants it thor himself. He shouldn't be there. He thtole it.'

To which Marvin cried, ‘No! You vex me now. Me know meself. Me no tief. Don' accuse me!' He was clearly getting very upset and feeling very helpless in light of this scary-looking white man.

‘Well pwoove it then. You can't!' And Jawless went back to the big house trying to act as if nothing had happened, leaving poor Marvin sitting on the park bench taking comfort from the six or seven dogs he'd brought with him that day.

That evening my dad complained to Mum. ‘It's just not right for Marvin to have to put up with this greedy intruder. He's too old to handle this himself.'

‘If it's his house why doesn't he just call the police and be done with it?' Mum was always reasonable in a crisis.

‘Most of those houses down there at the bottom of the hill are just squats. Who knows who really owns them? If Marvin ever had any documents to prove it's his I'm sure he's lost them by now. And if he calls the police or the council they'll probably repossess the whole lot anyway and he'll be totally homeless.'

‘Why are you getting involved in his business anyway? He's a grown man. And a Caribbean at that,' piped up the White Lady who was pawing through a catalogue of Crystal White cosmetics my mum had laid out for her. ‘Can't he act for his own best interests?'

‘He must be seventy years old and you know he's not all there upstairs. No! An old man is there to talk. His days for action are long passed. What muscles can he flex around this bully? Imagine spending your final years being pushed around by a jawless white man. Something must be done.'

And so Mum put on a pot of coffee and the three of them set to it. ‘So, we can't call the police or the council?' said the White Lady. ‘And we can't just magic this white man away. Maybe I should sneak up behind him and say boo! Give him the fright of his life!' She cackled and everyone in the room turned to her at once. If she hadn't been sitting on the sofa in our living room with a cup of coffee on her white-painted hands it might have been quite frightening. This apparition in white did indeed cut a ghostly figure.

‘This man is a coward of the worst kind. Abusing a defenceless old man. His fear can be his undoing,' said Dad as he sipped his coffee. ‘Let us find out a little more about our unwanted neighbour and see if we can't spook him right out of the borough.'

The White Lady smiled back at him and said, ‘I suppose I can make some enquiries.'

So over the next couple of weeks, the White Lady launched a surreptitious investigation into the troublesome intruder. I often saw her chatting away to the neighbourhood eccentrics who, though a little on the weird side (to put it mildly), were best placed to see his comings and goings. It's true to say that it's the street spooks who are the experts on the local community. They know which marriages are failing. They know which kids are out buying drugs on street corners. They know who's going out of business. All the life that we ignore as we're rushing about living our lives is noticed by these people and they took a special interest in Marvin; he was one of them, after all.

To no one's surprise, the White Lady found out that Jawless was without any friends and was a total lowlife sponger. He never bought food and always took half of Marvin's sandwiches when they were in the park together. He was afraid of the dogs and would have got rid of them if Marvin hadn't defended them like they were his own children. And Dad learned that he liked to drink in the local pub every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, where he would sip his beer disgustingly through a straw in the corner. Dad came home and tried to mime this to us by pulling a hilarious face and using many horrible slurping sounds. Mum said that he was mad to get involved in the business of a
were
but she couldn't help laughing a little bit too.

One Saturday morning not long afterwards, Dad and I were in the park when the White Lady came up to us and whispered something to Dad that made him laugh heartily. He followed her to a bush where he talked with Marvin and the bicycle-helmeted man (complete with dog on rope). The bush they stood next to would give the occasional shake and so I figured the bush woman was involved in the conversation too. When Dad came back to where I was playing, he smiled and said, ‘Stephen! You just watch. Tomorrow we will put that evil interloper under heavy manners!'

The next day Dad was strangely excited and at about ten o'clock at night Marvin came around to the back of the flat with two of his least mangy dogs. In fact they were pretty energetic and were barking all over the place. When Mum heard all the commotion she came out the back and screamed, ‘Get those dogs away from here.'

‘Hello, Mrs Amos,' said Marvin with a nervous smile.

‘
Ifemi
, I told you Marvin was coming around.'

‘He'd better not leave them here. Don't call me
ifemi
! You are mad if you think this will work!
Were
! When is this all going to be over?'

‘Shortly my dear,' said Dad. ‘Stephen and I will take these animals for a walk. Come on! Come on!' He turned to me. ‘
Put leg for road
.'

‘Don't be long! Stephen has to be in school tomorrow morning and you need to work unless you want to lose your job and join those
were
people in the park for good!'

Dad gave me both of the dog leads and we walked back towards the park with Marvin hurrying ahead to his house. I have always loved animals but these two were quite a handful to control and when we got to the park I asked Dad, ‘What's going on?'

‘Quiet, Stephen. It's on a strictly need-to-know basis.' The park ran the whole way down the hill and from the entrance nearest the bottom we could just make out the entrance to Marvin's house.

Even though it was a squat it was one of those very dilapidated old Georgian townhouses that you used to find all over South London. You could tell that it had once been a very posh building and it was four storeys tall, with a gate leading through a wildly overgrown front garden to a grand old porch, complete with porch light. I had been inside before and it totally stank of dog, was falling down and only had an outside toilet, but it would probably be worth about a million pounds today.

At just after 10.30 we saw the jawless wonder staggering down the hill a bit the worse for wear towards Marvin's front gate. Dad ushered me towards the park entrance and said to me, ‘When I give the word, let go of the dogs.' Jawless fumbled for the latch and, as he was going through the gate, Marvin flipped the switch that turned his front porch light on. The shock of seeing the wild and overgrown front garden flooded with light almost knocked Jawless off his feet. But that was nothing, because just at that moment the White Lady appeared from her hiding place behind a massive shrub. She looked resplendent with her most glisteningly white garb shining under the bright light. She hissed, then lunged at him, her long slender brilliant white fingers reaching towards him. Then she screeched and let out an almighty cackle, her African features beaming terror into his pathetic little heart. His jaw would have dropped, if he had one.