I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey (6 page)

‘It go better now your daddy's here! I'll see you.' Yomi waved as we drove off into the Lagos streets.

Dad was full of curses as he tried to manage driving around the city for the first time in twenty years. He seemed to know where he was going, which was good, but he kept complaining that the roads were so much busier than they used to be.

‘These ugly
were
drivers! Are they trying to kill us? With so many cars on the road there is nobody even (HONK!) paying attention to where they are going.'

We wound around the city on the big multi-lane highways freely changing from one lane to another. Dad watched in horror as other drivers simply drove on the wrong side of the road to avoid a traffic queue or a pothole. We had just gotten used to it over the last fortnight and so laughed at Dad who seemed to be so maddened by the whole thing. He didn't laugh at all and glared at us so we shut up pretty quickly.

He finally stopped the car about halfway down a dusty side road that branched off a huge highway. This was no private gate and there was no smartly dressed security guard to greet us as we got out of the rusty old van, which he had parked in front of a two-storey stone house that looked like it had seen better days. This was an odd move on Dad's part and it wasn't lost on Albert, Stella and me. On the way here, we'd wondered if he was driving us to a hotel or to another relative or to a storage place. Instead he'd brought us to an unfurnished house with a well in the back and no TV.

It was in a suburb called Orile Iganmu and it felt very far from Ikeja. It looked like there weren't going to be a lot of sound system parties in this drab part of town. It did not seem like a good place to take a holiday at all, but we didn't have time to dwell on it too much as box after box was thrust into our hands and we set about unpacking. It took all day to get all the boxes unpacked with Mum rushing around, sweeping the floors, opening the windows and trying to air out the house. By the end of the day, the place was beginning to look a bit more like home. Not home in the ‘There's no place like home' Dorothy kind of way. I mean it began to look like our home in London as in cluttered and chaotic. Mum fetched water from the well and fed us all bowls of
garri
and spiced stew for dinner and we ate it quickly and quietly before bedding down for the night.

The next day, Albert, Stella and I had to get out of bed early and dress up in nice clothes. It was a Monday morning and so we knew we weren't going to visit friends or head to church. The penny really dropped when Dad took us out in the now empty but still rusty van and stopped outside a school. As Dad ushered the three of us out of the van and into the school reception, a crowd of uniformed school kids appeared and curiously stared at us. Stella was the first to figure out what was going on and burst into tears. Dad started to sign a lot of papers and we realized that we were not going to be heading back to England any time soon. All the hard work that she'd put into getting good grades in her 11-plus, and even in getting me to pass the exam, seemed to have been totally in vain. Even the secondary comprehensive was preferable to this. However, it looked like she would at least get her wish of having us go to the same school when term started.

M
ANY THOUGHTS WERE GOING
around inside my head. Nigeria. Naija. Niajaland. Yoruba. Hausa. Igbo. Jai! Shut up you dirty stinking mout' that you've never washed since the day you were born in the gutter! Don't tell me that I have to live here!

Stella, Albert and I sat together that night and we couldn't believe that Mum and Dad had taken us to live here without even telling us. Why did we get no warning? If I had known I may have tried to run away again. I had already tried it once in London. Well, I walked. The phrase ‘run away' implies that there was someone running behind me shouting, ‘Come back, come back! I love you!' which there wasn't. I went back home after it got dark and nobody had even noticed that I had left. You don't know what its like growing up with seven people sitting around the dinner table and your mum asks your brother while pointing to you, ‘Hey, who's your friend?' In a big family your parents can neglect you all and call it economy of scale.

So we'd gone from Londoners to Lagosians overnight. We didn't have any time to get adjusted to anything because a week after Dad enrolled us in school we had to start. The Nigerian school year runs from January to December, so we were going straight into the second term. Stella and I would be in the same secondary entry-level class and Albert was going into the more senior class three years ahead of us. So to add insult to injury, we were going to miss out on our summer holidays altogether. We were given bolts of cloth in the school colours and we had to pay someone to make our uniforms. It was like a condemned man being made to pay for his own bullet. That first day was a horrible experience, and the heat on the mile-long walk to school produced more sweat than I'd ever known.

A kid going into the school class halfway through the year is already social suicide. But we weren't just new; we were foreign to the other kids and to the teachers too. My Nigerian roots are important to me, but simply having black skin does not qualify you for fitting perfectly in to a foreign culture with its fair share of bullies. They taught in English but they mainly spoke Pidgin English and Yoruba in break and at lunch and we could barely understand them. With our English accents we did not fit in any better here than we had back home in South London.

By the time we had been in Orile Iganmu for a month our home was quite comfortable. We had electricity when NEPA hadn't taken the light, and we had clean water from the well, a TV and radio, a cooker and beds. But the school was a complete eye-opener, with no windows and just a door-sized hole where a door should have been as an entrance. There was no power and so no air conditioning or fans and because the tropical heat of the day ran from six thirty in the morning until two in the afternoon. We had to leave every day at first light, which is the only option as there is barely any street lighting in Lagos but there are a lot of very deep potholes. And the food from the school kitchen was so bad that we had to go out and buy
suya
from the local
suya
spot for lunch every day.

We thought that with our English education we would at least be at the top of the class, but we were wrong. They were not only at a higher level than us in science and maths but they also had classes in subjects that we had never encountered before – like agriculture. By which I mean we had to actually plough the land and plant seeds. With the teachers barking at us for getting it wrong and sweating in our uncomfortable uniforms, Stella and I felt like we were on a chain gang. And the religious education was not like I'd experienced it in the UK. It wasn't a philosophical debate class or even a history of the Bible. It was just a prayer group led by a local preacher. First, we had to read the Bible for half an hour, then we had to pray to the Lord while shaking our heads from side to side like possessed people. This is supposed to shake out the bad thoughts! To me this seemed odd. At school I didn't cry for three days because I thought I was having a nightmare.

Back home in London, the other kids and the teachers had been the major problem for me, but here it was the schoolmasters. Nigeria has rejected so much of British culture but has kept some strange archaic bits and pieces almost at random. The schoolmaster is one of these. They aren't teachers, more like school housemasters and administrators, and they look after the boarding houses. A lot of Nigerian schools have boarding houses attached to them because so many families live in rural areas and need to send their children to cities and towns for education.

In most ways, boarding-school pupils in Nigeria are not like the English equivalent at all. The kids are not aristocratic, rich and pampered. It is completely the opposite. The kids in the boarding houses are the poorer kids and they make fun of the day students as being a bunch of soft, indulged
ajebo or ajebutta
(butter eaters). However, in other ways, the boarding house regime is a lot like that found in English boarding schools. As in the experience is a living hell for the kids who live there.

Everyone is terrified of the housemasters because they are liberal users of corporal punishment and they use sticks, cowhide and
kobokos
(whips) to flog the students. Even the other teachers were completely terrified of them. So much so that I guessed that some of the junior teachers were being regularly flogged by these grotesque creatures. Going to school in Nigeria is really like something out of a Roald Dahl book.

Soon after we moved to Orile Iganmu, my dad's mother, Mama Bunmi, came to stay with us. Her family were from all over West Africa, which meant that she could speak a dozen languages and was such easy company that everyone in the area seemed to know her. I remember the day she arrived very well because Dad stood outside waiting for her for over an hour and cried when she arrived. She came on foot, which was strange because we basically lived off a highway, but she must have come via a market because her bag was brimming with fruit for all of us kids. Mum's family are all tall and rangy and there are a lot of them (all of the relatives who'd come to meet us at the airport were from her side), but Dad's side are shorter, broader and quick to smile. When we started to prostrate before her, she grabbed us up before we hit the ground and hugged us all at once.

She had come to our home to help look after the youngest kids, but she would often come and pick us up from school and accompany us home. When Mama Bunmi saw the kind of food that the school kitchen served she was appalled and made friends with the local
suya
seller, who agreed to give us food and water whenever we were hungry. Granny agreed to settle the bill at the end of each month because she was a much better haggler than we were. Everything in Nigeria is about haggling and she told us the secret. ‘In this city you can pay in money or in talk-time. I am an old woman and have a lot of time on my hands. The longer you talk the lower the price!'

Things were not going that well at home. Mum and Dad were not rich by Nigerian standards at all. We didn't have a private road like Auntie Yomi, or houseboys and security guards. Mum and Dad still had to work hard. Dad was working in construction and Mum was doing secretarial work for him. We wondered what had happened to our home in South London and whether Dad had sold it. It just didn't make any sense to us why we'd gone from struggling in London to struggling in Lagos. However, in my family you didn't ask questions about money without being told to mind your own business. Which was weird because in this case it certainly seemed like it was our business.

Back at school, hardly any kids spoke to us for the first few weeks. Then one day another boy called us over. ‘Hello dear!' he said to us. ‘
How you dey?
Come on! Come on! Do you know ten-ten?' We didn't know what he was talking about. ‘Ah! What do they teach you in England if you don't know ten-ten? Here. I will teach you.'

Ten-ten is a simple hand-clapping game that everyone in Nigeria can play. It's basically a kind of superfast version of Pat-a-Cake. We'd noticed that all the students, both male and female, right the way up to the final year, played it all the time in classrooms and in the scrub outside that served as a playground. Stella and I had laughed to ourselves to see all these big bad Yoruba teenagers playing a game that, in my opinion, was reserved for little girls. This kid was called Sunday and when he offered to show us how to play the game we jumped at it.

He took us under his wing and it has to be said that Stella and I became the best at ten-ten in the whole year in no time at all. ‘Ay! Ten-ten
balogun!
(Ten-ten warrior!)' shouted Sunday when we were going strong. Maybe it was because we were twins and in tune with each other but we could move our hands so fast that they were a blur to see. Ten-ten is a lot more complicated than Pat-a-Cake and you can play with two, three or more people and there are special hand signals that you can use to mean that you have to change players, touch the ground or freeze for a second. The trick is to make all the moves totally fluidly and you only lose if you miss a clap. Then you're out. The older kids even used to bet on this game.

Sunday was one of the unfortunate kids who had to stay in the boarding house all year long and he said, ‘Stephen. It is a Godforsaken place. We have to get up at five o'clock to do chores. Sometimes they wake you with bells and sometimes they wake you with belts.' And of all the things that Nigerians could have kept up from the British, like healthcare or roads without potholes, they chose to keep prefects! Sunday would say, ‘I miss my mummy and daddy. When they left me here I ran after them with tears in my eyes. “Please take me with you!” I shouted. Then last term, God bless them! They came to school and they showed off. Ah too much! They brought me pocket money but they put it in public eye. The prefects! They take my money.'

I'd never experienced the so-called Developing World and it was a shock to me that in some parts of Lagos there was no running water. However, when we told Sunday that we had a well in the back yard he was actually impressed! He asked us if he could come to our house to get water in the morning, as the public fountain was more than three miles away. When he came around, I brought him a bucket of water and he laughed at me because I carried it in front of me. ‘Stephen! You need to learn bucket skills. You carry water like
oyimbo
(Westerner) and all the water is slopping out. Here, put it on your head like this.' And he grabbed the bucket and balanced it on his head, moving skilfully from side to side to show me how it is done.

Next he showed me how to use a bowl to wash. ‘First you put water, then you rub soap, then you rinse. In the boarding house, if you leave the water and go back to sleep, when you wake up, the water is gone. Then all you can do is rub and shine with Vaseline. You put on knees, elbows and lips to stop chaff.' As a kid from South London I'd only ever had to carry a bucket to mop the floor and Vaseline did not serve as a substitute for a hot shower in the mornings.