I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey (2 page)

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 went 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.

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.)

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 discovery 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.'