Photo: eboat.org: Slipway from East St Helen's Street
When we came to England everything changed, but not necessarily for the worse. It was just different. The weather was different. It always seemed to be cloudy and it was never warm enough for a white African.
What struck me most, coming from Kenya, were the autumn colours. I fell in love with autumn when it eventually came.
We lived in an old five storey house at 61 East St Helen's Street in Abingdon. It was narrow. It had one room on each floor, a damp brick basement and one afternoon the ceiling fell in leaving a black hole.
Our teacher at primary school was Mrs Burt. She was about 60. She had triangulated bombs for the RAF. As we sat in the classroom we heard, and sometimes saw, the twin-fuselage aeroplanes maneuver in the sky - Mosquitoes, I think. Mrs Burt lost her temper quickly and once clonked me on the head with a heavy textbook because I couldn't focus. I can still remember the quick jerk at the base of my neck. The playground was covered in tarmac and anyone who fell off the climbing frame was grazed or cut.
There were always a few child psychopaths in English schools in those days and one of them was pug ugly and very short. He smoked at the age of nine and looked and smelled like a shriveled dwarf. He had wiry black hair and apparently he didn't like me. We didn't speak to each other, but by way of introduction he grabbed my balls and squeezed until I screamed. I hope life has done the same to him.
We had a blue-grey Morris Minor. We wore shorts in winter and once horizontal sleet stung the backs of our legs as we walked home. We paid for things in the odd money of the time. It was just before decimalisation. 12 pennies to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pound. There were farthings, threepenny bits and sixpences. Next to the bridge there was a shop where we bought orange ice cream cones and sweets, but the vending machines only sold packets of milk and diluted orange squash.
The lady next door was 90 years old and she was born in 1879 and she enjoyed our visits. At Easter, the mayor went to the top of the town hall in the square and threw hot cross buns down onto the mob of people below. We got trampled of course. They even had a 300 year old hot cross bun in the museum - dried and lacy-white inside.
Then we moved to 16 East St Helen's Street. We were closer to the river with its boats, and the bells in the church were now 30 yards away and they were raucously loud. They rang and rang on Sunday, while my parents tried to read the Sunday papers, and of course my mom, probably like many in Britain at that time, would look up from her paper and say: "The bells, the bells" and smile ruefully.
I was 9 years old and spent a lot of my free time exploring the river in a small blue and orange rubber dingy. The furthest up I could go was the weir and lock, just upstream from the river, but I could row quite far downstream. I explored and landed on peoples lawns, rowed up little streams and discovered abandoned water mills. I narrowly avoided being run over on several occasions, by the big river launches.
Near our house a floating car would drive off a ramp into the Thames and boil its way around in the water for 15 minutes before driving back out again.
We would fish for mussels with our toes in the slime of the river bottom near the Abbey meadows; open the resisting shellfish, look at their pulsing orange insides hungrily, but then throw them back into the water, uneaten because they didn't smell of the sea, they smelt musky. Occasionally, a tin can or a piece of glass buried in the slime would cut our feet.
Every so often my grandparents would send us packages of food from France. There would always be Herbes de Provence, marron glace and dried cepes. My mother loved marron glace, but later on didn't understand why. I think it was because of its richness, set against our relative austerity.
She would make us good meals from simple ingredients and on special occasions and Sundays we would have roast chicken and then creme caramel for desert. I can still taste the bitter caramel carapace of the desert.
Occasionally we went into Oxford, where dad worked for Oxfam. It seemed rather dour to us. Now it reminds me of Edinburgh. High stone walls for a child. We went to the Oxford market and I bought a puppy there one winter. We called her Whizzy II.
My father's parents, his father and stepmother, were keen for us to settle permanently in the UK and would arrive in summer and we would go on visits to pubs and to see the English countryside and they always bought fish and chips for us when they came from the Lemon Plaice and raved unnecessarily about how delicious it was.
We had visits from other people, from the Levys and the Turoks. Once Ivan, Ben and Neil babysat us while mom and dad went out with Mary and Ben. Our American cousins came from California and turned their noses up at everything and my mom was not amused at all. They were fussy, they had longer hair and they were whinier.
Like many old towns in England the centre of Abingdon had been defaced by town planners. A big shopping precinct was built into its heart: a blasted 1960s excrescence. We stole handfuls of sweets from Woolworth's, and I lead my brothers in daring raids on railway yards. Jumping over the walls we found white cotton wool-like rolls of what were probably asbestos, and other strange objects. We walked a long way along the railway lines.
There was an abandoned prison by the Thames and we climbed up many flights of stairs to the top floor. There at the top we found a tiny room with grey dusty floorboards, straw and small barred windows. Walking out across the top floor we saw that the prison was in fact a shell. With the exception of the boards we stood on, the insides of the building had all caved in and we could look down at heaps of timber and stone in the gloom six or seven flights below. We picked and ate some of the big Bramley apples we found weighing down the scratchy black branches of a small tree in the prison garden.
I remember a gypsy camp and caravans close by the church, and the sweet, brewery smell of barley roasting. My mom's bete noir, so to speak, was to have to get up at five in the morning to light the coal fire in order to warm the house for us before breakfast. When the miners were on strike she would get up and do it in the dark by candlelight. We bought the coal at hardware stores.
After school we would tramp the mud in and and she would send us right back to the park after a snack. We with the dog to the Abbey meadows and it would take hours to convince it to come back to its lead.
We waited for Playschool to finish and then watched Jackanory and the Magic roundabout. I remember seeing the moon landing on the TV in our living room and the long and pointless coronation of jug eared Prince Charles in the ruins of Carnarvon castle and Chelsea beat Leeds to win the cup. Norman wisdom films and the Carry on films and Alf Garnet. I never understood how Alf Garnet was supposed to challenge racist stereotypes. He didn't, he confirmed them.
On Saturday we went to the cinema to watch the double bill with the inevitable advertisements before hand and the nauseating equivalent of the scatological Dick and Dom: "Oh oh Tongo, danger island!". I remember watching Tommy Steel in Half a Sixpence and tearing up and hating myself for it.
I bought my first record: "Sweets for my sweet, sugar for my honey, I'll never ever, let you go." I wrote poems about the Mau Mau and eagles and my parents read them and thought I might be gifted. But the people who gave me an IQ test disagreed. They decided I wasn't. In fact I was so dreamy, I was heading for disaster. I probably wouldn't have passed the 11 plus exam.
The school had a fare and I remember they took us to the secondary modern where we were supposed to pay to throw wet sponges at teachers in T shirts and apples and what not. Boys lined up to get their own back. But when I got the sponge in my hands and looked at one particular bullying adult who looked back at me with his thirty five year old eyes, I couldn't.
My mom gave me the Narnia books and they convinced me that there might be the entrance to a secret world in our loft, so My brothers and I climbed onto a flat roof, taking a hammer with us, and I knocked a hole into the wall. We looked inside, but there was was only a tiny white room. Carefully, we replaced all the bricks, and climbed down again.
Dad had the offer of a job on a socialist newspaper in Tanzania and so took it. We were all agreed. Mom mean while had to keep the house in order and keep three small boys in line. In letter after letter she writes back to say what a handful we were and how she longs to be with dad in Tanzania. "Your son is going totally wild." She wrote to dad, and she was right. I was. Completely.
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