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At breakfast our father tells us the man had a car accident. He is wearing a brown suit, ready for the office. I am eating Weetabix, soaking them in milk and mashing the biscuits up. At the weekends my stepmother supervises in the kitchen and we have akara, deep-fried balls of banana, rice flour and nutmeg; or else fried plantains with a hot peppery sauce made with fish and black-eyed beans. On weekdays we eat cereal and toast.
‘How did he crash?’ we ask. I layer sugar thickly over the cereal.
‘I don’t know,’ our father replies.
‘What happened to him?’
‘He’s gone to a hospital.’
We nod. I spoon the soft brown mush into my mouth while I begin to formulate another question, but my father’s next statement stops me dead in my tracks.
‘Am, I’m seeing someone today. A maths tutor. I want you to have some extra lessons during the holidays.’
My mouth is full of Weetabix and I am left speechless. It’s true that my maths is not good. I routinely come midway down my class, unacceptable by my father’s standards. Every term he hands out awards for first, second and third place but I rarely manage to make the grade. At the last minute he comes up with a booby prize ‘for effort’ which somehow always has my name on it. But the holidays have only just begun; we arrived home from our boarding schools in England ten days ago. I cannot decide whether I am affronted or pleased to be singled out for such attention, to have my own maths tutor. While I am considering all this my father finishes his breakfast and borrows my milk glass. He pours himself a glass from one of the bottles of boiled water we keep in the fridge. As the glass fills the water turns cloudy. It doesn’t look very appealing.
‘Ugh!’ I say.
‘It all goes to the same place.’ My father smiles, amuses us by draining the whole glass with exaggerated delectation. He kisses us and he is gone.
In the afternoon the rain begins. The ground around the house fills up with rust-coloured puddles. Little rivulets of blood join into ever larger tributaries which weave down the slopes to the slaughterhouse stream. The heat doesn’t abate and the smell of steaming dirt is like a wet dog. The drops hurtle onto the corrugated roof of the garage, bouncing obliquely on the curves of tin and crashing like a thousand demented timpanists. Through their discordant rhythm rises the regular beat of the man with the pickaxe, who keeps on splitting stones. He has stripped down to a pair of torn shorts and the water washes away the sweat and shimmers on his torso. The man doesn’t pause once. On his right a second mound of small stones has begun to overtake the original pile of rocks.
On the balcony, below the curled iron railings, pools of water form and stretch out over the tiles. I take my book and sit in one of the long line of chairs. I am alone. No one comes to the house today. Ordinarily, by mid-afternoon the people have begun to arrive alone and in pairs, usually on foot from Kissy Bye-Pass Road, more rarely by taxi. Anyone known to the family goes through the house and keeps company on the back veranda. The others sit out front on the roadside. They come from Freetown and from the provinces in need of help.
The chairs are strung with green and yellow plastic cord which is no longer taut and cuts into the flesh. The people sit uncomplaining on the uncomfortable chairs, nursing their requests until my father comes home from work. If he is late or busy, they come back the next day. Some of them are his former patients wanting further treatment but without money to pay another doctor; others bring news of a death or need help to school a child. Sometimes he is asked to intercede in a family dispute or help find someone a job. Most of them just want a little money.
When they start to arrive I usually disappear somewhere else. Once a blind man climbed up the stairs from the road and accidentally sat on top of me. In school we were taught that blind people had super sensory powers and hearing like a bat’s radar; we were warned never to treat them as though they’re helpless. So I watched as the blind man lowered his bottom, believing, until it was too late, that he must somehow know I was underneath him, my tongue locked with the shame of the moment. As soon as his buttocks touched me the blind man shot up in the air like a jack-in-the-box and groped his way silently into another seat. The blind man isn’t here today. There are no visitors at all. Perhaps it is the rain that is keeping them away.
After an hour or so I wander through the house. Inside all are preoccupied with their own business. Santigi is at the back of the house sorting the laundry. Morlai is in the room they both share off the kitchen. I expect he is studying. Santigi wants to go to school too, but he’s already over thirty, though he fibs about his age and says he’s twenty-one. He was once sent to literacy classes but he struggled to learn to read and write. Still, on occasions he borrows my maths and English schoolbooks and works through the chapters alongside me. ‘I want to learn,’ he always says. A few months ago Santigi bought a Bible and changed his name. One day he stood before us all at supper and addressed our father directly with a deadpan face: ‘Doctor,’ he said, in Creole, ‘ah wan change me nam. Please, oona all for call me Simon Peter.’ He has remained resolute since: he withstands our teasing and corrects us every time we call him Santigi.
Santigi arrived at the same time as my stepmother four years before. No one knows who Santigi is, meaning that we don’t know his family or to whom he belongs. In a society built, layer upon infinite layer, on the rock of the extended family, Santigi can produce neither mother nor father, aunt nor uncle, sibling nor cousin. All he knows about himself is that he was born in a village called Gbendembu, near Makeni in the Northern Province. After giving birth his mother, who was without a husband, put herself to work digging diamonds in an illegal pit many miles away in Bujubu. She left her baby with neighbours and never returned to claim him. Much later news came that she had died. Once Santigi was of an age the couple who had taken care of him sent him to Magburaka to work for my stepmother’s family. He first met my stepmother Yabome off the train when she was a schoolgirl returning home for the holidays and he has been by her side ever since. Santigi often spends time with me, but not right now.
The rain and the day wear on. Sullay drops by at lunch time and stays at the back of the house whispering with Santigi and Morlai. Sullay has a deep, matt-black complexion, a strong jawbone and sharp eyes shaded beneath a rather brooding brow. His whole face is a study in intensity. He rarely smiles, but he is very kind. I stop by to say hello. Sullay doesn’t stay long.
Shortly before dusk the sound of the pickaxe stops. There are no more rocks to split. The man stands in his doorway out of the rain, dwarfed by the enormous pile of stones. He is listening and waiting for the truck to come back.
My stepmother drives up in her Volkswagen and goes through to the master bedroom. A little while later our father comes home, running through the rain.
I am restless. I fetch a game of bingo given to me for Christmas. It is an inexpensive set with small wooden discs upon which the characters are stamped, slightly irregularly, in red ink. Once I had unwrapped it I ignored it in favour of grander gifts, but this summer holiday I have rediscovered it and there have been several uproarious games involving the entire household.
We use matchsticks instead of money and today I ask Santigi to let me borrow the big box of Palm Tree matches. On the cover it has a drawing of an inky native stepping between two palm trees that reminds me of the pictures in an old book of Edward Lear poems I used to own. I empty the matches out and count them into neat red-tipped piles, one for each player.
Each card has a row of numbers along the top and another row of letters down the side. The caller must pick from corresponding bags of letters and numbers. As our games draw to a close everyone always starts to call the combinations they need to win. It’s the best part of the game. Some of us call our numbers out as loudly as possible; others jig with anticipation; Morlai half closes his eyelids and mutters the figures like an incantation. Whoever is calling blows his fingertips, plunges into the bag and with great theatrics calls the winning sequence. Since I own the set I get more turns to do this than anyone else.
The last time we reached this point our father was sitting in the front on the settee, his card covered with little torn squares of paper. He only needed one more to win but several others were in the same position. The atmosphere was intense, and yet there was one outcome in which we were all united: if you couldn’t win yourself the next best result was that our father should win. After a few games I had reached the point where I stopped wanting to win at all. Instead I wanted to protect my father from the disappointment I imagined he would feel if he lost.
I had been calling the numbers. My father needed a B and a five. He said: ‘Give me a B five, Am! B, five!’
Everyone was hopping about, waving, calling out. I took my time, drawing the process out for as long as possible. I closed my eyes. I wished for a B and a five. I put my hands in the bags simultaneously and pulled out two wooden discs.
‘B, five!’ I was astonished. I dropped the five back into the bag. No one believed I had actually drawn it. ‘I did, I did!’ I shouted and started to grow upset.
I saw my father watching me. He was not sure what to believe. He smiled as if to say, ‘You don’t have to do this, Am.’
Outside the truck has arrived. The two men are shovelling stones into the back. Afterwards the driver takes some money out of his pocket, flicks off two notes and hands them to the man who lives in the panbody, who nods in return but doesn’t smile. As the truck departs he leans on his shovel and watches.
On the coffee table I lay the bingo cards alongside the matchsticks. Outside the window a movement makes me look up. Two men have come up the outside stairs and are standing on the veranda looking in at me. I go out to see what they want. They are standing directly beneath the fluorescent strip light with their backs against the growing darkness; the white light casts downwards, bouncing off their cheeks and their foreheads, turning their eyes into dark orbs. I have never seen either man before but I sense something indefinably familiar about them. They are both slim, sinewy with close-cropped hair and they wear short-sleeved safari suits. One of them has on a pair of fake crocodile-skin shoes, of a type sold in the market. The shoes are badly scuffed. Who are these men? Many years later I will discover they are called Prince Ba and Newlove, names as surreal as stage names – or aliases. Their faces are impassive; they impart an air of unutterable menace. One of them tells me they are here to speak to the doctor.
My father appears directly and speaks to them for a few moments. My bingo set is beside me on the table ready for our game. He turns to me, sees that I am there and says: ‘I have to go with these two gentlemen now, Am.’
He walks ahead of the two men through the door and out onto the veranda. I see them pass the window.
‘Daddy, when are you coming back?’ I am unsettled.
My father half turns from me, seems to pass a hand across his eyes, takes a few more steps. Then he stops and faces me again. The two men wait and so do I. All my life my father has had a habit of chewing the ends of toothpicks. He always keeps a couple in his breast pocket. Now he says to me in a low voice: ‘Am, go and get me a couple of toothpicks.’
So I run to the sideboard on the other side of the room and find the little plastic toothpick dispenser. I shake out three or four toothpicks and hurry back to him. My face still holds the question. ‘Tell Mum I’ll be back later.’ These are the last words, the very last words he says to me. And he steps out into the rain.
At the bedroom door I call to my stepmother that my father is gone. A moment later she runs past me with Morlai right behind her. They run silently, eyes fixed ahead, and disappear into the crystal darkness. Through the rain I hear the sound of the car engine starting; the tyres splashing through the puddles.
The next morning we three children have our breakfast together, just the three of us. Outside the truck arrives and deposits another load of rocks. The rain is still coming down: it rains all through the day and the next night. It rains until October.
2 (#ulink_d5dbdffc-9de9-575b-b140-9ea8390e99bf)
‘Daddy’s back!’ It was my brother. I had never seen him so excited, adult poise utterly cast aside. The early morning sun was bright and reflected in his face and eyes; his whole expression was radiant.
Everyone was smiling hard at me, Yabome and my sister. The same excitement glowed in their faces, too. Obviously, I was the last to find out and I stared up at them warily, not wanting to believe.
‘It’s a dream,’ I said at last.
‘No, it’s not. He’s really here.’
‘It’s a dream,’ I insisted. ‘I’ve had them before.’
Yabome put her arms across my shoulder and squeezed me. The others laughed; it was a beautiful, silver sound. ‘It’s true. He’s coming. Sheka and I are going to fetch him.’ And before I could shake the feeling of unreality that clung to me, they were gone.
I sat down again. Breakfast was laid at the big, wooden table. Memuna stayed behind with me, but she seemed to be taking events in her stride, as ever. Her calm was a source of envy for me. I, who became so easily heated and could be wound into a frenzy by my family.
When I was ten, after my father was taken away, I began to suffer migraines that remained undiagnosed for years. With the heels of my hands pressed against my temples I would run round the house making desperate circles, as though if I moved fast enough I might succeed in leaving the pain behind. Often there was nobody at home except for us three children, but if my stepmother or Santigi were in the house they’d take me to my bed, fetch me aspirins and try to subdue me, holding me by the shoulders and pushing me down against the pillows. It never worked: when they left I would cry and bang my head hard against the bare walls of the room.
I poured a glass of orange juice and drank half of it. I found myself dithering, unable even to find a place to put the glass. The table was laden with food and with the debris of a half-eaten breakfast. The room was part of a stately home, heavily furnished, oak-panelled and cold. I didn’t recognise the house, but it was familiar as the kind of old country house where I had gone to boarding school. Eventually others started to come down to breakfast: friends of mine, who joined us at the table. A red squirrel appeared at the window. It was large and had a strange, pointed face. To me it didn’t look much like a squirrel at all: the nose was too long, like a mongoose I once owned as a child.
When I heard my stepmother and brother come back, I started up from the table. The sound of their footsteps was on the stairs.
‘July the fourth,’ said Sheka. He was still breathless. ‘He’s going to come on July the fourth now!’ What the reason was for the delay nobody suggested. I thought he would be here, with us that very day. But I didn’t feel disappointed. Instead I felt this was how it should be: time to prepare after so many years. I left the dining room.
The huge staircase dipped away below me and the carpeted stairs swung round in a lush sweep. I put a hand on the banister, feeling the cool, varnished wood, one foot out onto the first step, and I began to walk down the stairs. My family were crowded around behind me. I could hear the rustling and feel them jogging each other. What on earth were they all doing?
As I turned the arc of the stairs I understood. The bearded figure standing in the hallway at the bottom wore a tan, short-sleeved suit, despite the cold. He had on polished brown shoes and a gold watch and although he was talking on the telephone with his back half turned towards me, I recognised him in that instant. I could still hear their voices behind me as I hurled myself down the stairs. He hadn’t seen me yet and I felt like a child again, my legs moving in great, galloping strides as I threw myself towards him. In that moment he turned round, smiling with surprise, and caught me in his one free arm.
‘Hey, hey. What’s all this?’ he said, as though I really was an overexcited ten-year-old. But I didn’t care. I put my arms around him and hugged him. I could feel everyone gathered around behind me. My face was against his shoulder and I squeezed my eyes shut.
When I opened them again the pale, grey London dawn had cast a triangle of light on the wooden floor. I could see the shadows of my clothes hanging from the pegs on the back of the half-open door. The blinds were still closed. On the chair by my bedside the faint glow of the alarm clock lit the shapes of a pencil, paper, a lip balm, a book and a wooden box. The sheet below me was wrinkled, cold with sweat.
Once a year, twice at the very most, the dreams had grown fewer as the decades passed. Sometimes I dreamed he came back from living in a far away country, that he had been looking for us, but couldn’t find us. Other times I dreamed that he had been in hiding and everyone around him sworn to secrecy. I’m sorry, Am, he’d say with a smile. We wanted to tell you sooner. Yes, the dreams came less frequently now, but despite the twenty-five years that had passed, they had never ceased entirely.
3 (#ulink_49125d6b-9f06-5b83-863e-110da15941d3)
All my life I have harboured memories, tried to piece together scraps of truth and make sense of fragmented images. For as long as I can remember my world was one of parallel realities. There were the official truths versus my private memories, the propaganda of history books against untold stories; there were judgements and then there were facts, adult stances and the clarity of the child’s vision; their version, my version.
There were times, a summer holiday or a few months, when I lived my childhood as a seamless dream where time ebbed like the tide and there was nothing to break the rhythm. But for the most part that was not so. Over and over the delicate membrane of my sphere would be broken and I tumbled out of my cocoon into the outside world.
Afterwards no one explained. People imagined these were things children shouldn’t know, or they did not think we had a right to know. We were encouraged to forget, dissuaded from asking. Gradually I learned to spy: I eavesdropped on adult conversations, rifled hidden papers, devised lines of questioning and I began to build onto my fragments layers of truth. And as I did so I discovered how deep the lies went.
I grew older, became a journalist and made a living using the skills I spent my childhood honing. All the time I hoarded my recollections, guarding them carefully against the lies: lies that hardened, spread and became ever more entrenched.
Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?
In the African oral tradition great events and insignificant moments, the ordinary and the extraordinary, are notches on the same wheel. They exist in relation to each other. The little occurrences are as important as the grand designs: the threads are the texture of truth that separate man-made myth from fact. They are the testimonies; the words of history’s eyewitnesses.
I remember cockroaches.
The tiniest of tickles across my toes made me look down. Early morning and I stood alone, chin high to the bathroom sink, both taps running. The cockroach was standing next to me and his sweeping, chestnut antennae brushed my foot in a way that seemed remarkably intimate, as though he imagined we were friends. Glossy wings tucked flat across his back; legs angled outward below the armoured undercarriage; the jaws which dominated his minuscule head worked steadily like a toothless old man. I kept my foot still, one eye on my flat-backed companion, while I reached for the tooth mug. As fast as I could manage I up-ended the beaker, pulled my foot away and trapped the cockroach under the glass. It sat unperturbed, as at home as a fish in an aquarium.
By the end of the day there were half a dozen inverted objects on the floor around the house: two china cups in the sitting room; a plastic toy cooking pot and a second glass in the hallway; and in the bathroom a toilet roll with a wad of paper wedged into the top. They were put there by the three of us: my sister, my brother and me, and we waited for our father to come in. This was our daily routine. When he arrived he went round the house picking up each object and dispatching the creature beneath, while we followed behind gazing at him with a mixture of disgust and admiration.
You could hear the crack and crunch of the cockroach as its skeleton gave way underfoot, pale innards spurted out. We were in awe at the way this grotesque feature didn’t seem to bother our father, who would squash a cockroach with his bare feet. If you caught him at a particular time, when he was still in his pyjamas in the morning, say, and asked him to kill a cockroach for you, he would go right ahead and stamp on it with his naked feet.
My mother had a story about cockroaches that took place in the same house. We’d just moved up-country, where my parents planned to set up a clinic, the only one for hundreds of miles. For several months my father had scouted the regions looking for a suitable spot and finally settled on Koidu, three hundred miles to the east, right on the border with Guinea, in the heart of the diamond-mining region. He rented a rambling bungalow with several wings, set within its own compound, with the idea of turning one wing into a ward for in-patients and living in the others. My mother and we three children left our noisy, downtown flat in Freetown and flew to Koidu in a plane that bounced from town to town across the interior of the country, while my father drove up in our Austin with the dogs and the luggage.
When we arrived it was late into the night. My parents stacked our belongings in the main room and my mother set up cots for us in one of the bedrooms, camp beds for my father and herself in another. In the early hours of the morning, when it was still black, she awoke to the sound of my cries. She rose and came to me, turning on the lights as she passed through the house. She soothed me and returned me to my cot. Just as she was back in her bed and falling asleep again she heard me crying. This happened three times.
The fourth time she didn’t bother to turn on the lights. She paused at the door to my room and as she looked around she saw that the walls seemed to be moving. My mother decided that she must be exhausted or else still dreaming and lingered a while in the dark at the bedroom door. Yet beneath her gaze the entire room seemed to have lost density: ceiling, floor, walls, even my cot heaved. Her baby was still shrieking. She flicked the light switch. Nothing. Turned it off and waited. Slowly the walls turned fluid again. She ran to fetch her husband, who was still sleeping deeply on his camp bed. As they stood at the door of my room, she showed him what she had seen, flipping the lights on and off.
He saw it, too. He rubbed his face, yawning widely. ‘Cockroaches,’ he said, and he turned to go back to bed.
My father’s feet had strong, yellowish soles. He told us that he didn’t own a pair of shoes until he went away to secondary school, and up until that time he had to walk five miles to classes and back again. This deeply impressed us, at the first telling. I disliked wearing shoes and at first I assumed the story’s purpose was to let us know that shoes didn’t matter. After all, my father managed without. Both of us had the same broad, long, flat feet: African feet. While I was growing my feet shot out first, ahead of the rest of my body. By the time I was eleven they were size seven and I barely cleared five foot. I was an L-shaped child.
In fact, our father’s story was a multipurpose parable with ever-extending dimensions of meaning. At its very simplest it was a warning against the dangers of catching hookworm by wandering outside without shoes on. I learned that one the hard way. They burrowed through the skin on the soles of my feet and made a home in my bowels.
Then the story was an inducement to be grateful for what you had. My father grew up in the villages, where life was very harsh indeed. There were no hospitals and very few schools. When Ndora, my grandmother, was sick the family had to take her all the way to Rotifunk, on the other side of the country, where there was a mission hospital. In Freetown there were several hospitals to serve the British administrators and their Creole civil servants, but these were not open to people from the country. They walked most of the way, carrying pots of food and sleeping mats on their heads. When they got to the hospital, amenities there were so basic that the doctors could not come up with a diagnosis. So they shrugged and sent her away, telling the relatives to bring her back if she got any worse. As if that were possible.
Five months later she died, leaving a six-month-old baby girl and her two beloved boys. Our father was five years old then. That evening as he was sitting among the men at the back of one of the houses he heard a high-pitched, rhythmic wail coming from the street. It was a Bondu elder, speaker for the secret society of women, and she was holding a broom up to the sky. That was the sign that one of the village women had died. A fragment of her song came across: ‘…the one from Rothomgbai’ – my grandmother’s village. Then he knew Ndora was gone.
Soon afterwards, our father ended up being the only person in his entire family to go to school just because his mother had died. The missionaries had opened a school nearby in Mamunta. The days passed and nobody came to enrol their children in the new school, so the missionaries approached the chief, who listened to what they had to say and then passed an edict: each household from the villages neighbouring Mamunta would volunteer one child to the new school. None of the women wanted her son to be chosen. People were very suspicious of education back then; they said that people who went to school never came back. With no mother to defend his interests my father was elected to go. Fourteen years later, when he left for Britain to become a doctor, he thanked them and they were pleased they were right. See, they said, he’s leaving for ever, as we knew he would. This was the final meaning of my father’s story: it was about the value of education and not shoes at all. Do well in school and thank God you had an education, because lots of people don’t even know its value.
In fact the new school was closed within the year after the head teacher was caught having an affair with one of the paramount chief’s wives. The headmaster was fined, which was the correct punishment. But the cuckolded chief wasn’t satisfied and he closed the school down as well, saying that there would be no more white man’s education in Mamunta. Privately Chief Masamunta, who was also my father’s uncle, arranged for his own two sons and his nephew to be transferred to another mission school in Makeni some miles away.
My mother didn’t have African feet like ours. She had European feet. They were similar in the sense that they were quite big, but the arches were high and the soles smooth and thin and pale as paper. I had my father’s feet but, on the matter of cockroaches, my mother’s western sensibilities.
Gradually the cockroaches moved on as we swept the house out, washed cupboards down and covered the thick green and blue gloss on the walls with white emulsion. We hired a local man to help us with the work, and under our mother’s instruction he cut down branches from the trees and pushed them into the earth around the edges of the compound to protect the house from the churning dust of the road. When the rains came the branches flourished miraculously and our house was enclosed in an elegant screen of trees; we were all astonished and delighted, my mother as much as the rest of us.
My father bought iron beds and mattresses for the maternity ward and my mother donated my cot for the newborn babies. Within a very short time word got around that the clinic had opened and new patients began to arrive; every day the line of people trailed out of the waiting area and onto our veranda.
Our father worked ever longer hours. He ran two clinics in the centre of town – one for prescriptions, the other for minor surgical procedures: cataracts, circumcisions and the like. He tried hard to persuade people to bring their boys to him, instead of cutting the foreskin the traditional way, by a cleric or medicine man who tugged on it three times before slicing the skin off with an unsheathed blade. Certain days were set aside for circumcisions and sometimes fathers arrived from the countryside with six or seven boys of different ages. The obstetrics clinic was at the house, so my father could be on hand for those women whose babies came at night.
There was no nurse, so our mother helped. She held the women’s hands while they were in labour, especially the Fula women, who had to endure childbirth in silence. They were also supposed to give birth alone and by the time their relatives forced themselves to break their own traditions and bring them to the clinic the women often didn’t make it. Other times my mother monitored heart and blood pressure when an anaesthetic had to be administered; often my father just wanted my mother to stay in the room for propriety’s sake, so few of the women had ever been to a gynaecologist before.
When she wasn’t helping out in the clinic, or in her part-time job at the Volkswagen franchise in town, my mother sang: ‘“Dance, then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance,” said he.’ Her mighty voice was the loudest, purest sound I had ever heard; it ran through my body with a shiver, like a cold drink on a hot day. She sang sitting cross-legged with her guitar balanced on her knee, in a cotton dress she’d made herself, hair hanging loose.
We sang too, after a fashion, like three baby crows gathered around a songbird: ‘I danced for the scribe and the far-thest-seas, but they would not dance and they would not follow me.’
She could practically sit on her hair; it was thick, naturally bleached by the Tropics and people in Sierra Leone marvelled at it. One of my aunts thought she must iron it straight and asked to borrow her hot tongs. My father used to have fun taking several strands and tying them into a knot to demonstrate how they unfurled in an instant, sliding like wet ice across glass. The trick was quite a crowd-pleaser among our African relatives, who came forward one at a time and asked to touch it.
Years later, when she no longer lived with us, her hairstyles became the test of memory between us children. ‘Can you remember Real Mum when her hair was long?’ we asked each other. Around the time she and my father split she cut her hair short. If you remembered her when she pulled it into a doughnut shape on the top of her head, or let it dry in crinkly waves down her back, then you remembered a time when our parents were together.
For me the image of her face and her hairstyles faded and brightened through the years. But her voice: I never, ever forgot the sound of her voice.
4 (#ulink_2287bd03-e008-53a7-b32e-25b4e0db4a79)
They met at a Christmas dance in 1959. My father was a third-year medical student at Aberdeen University and my mother was in her final sixth-form year at the Aberdeen Academy and a volunteer at the British Council. She wore her hair in a French plait, a tight-waisted skirt that made the best of her voluptuous figure and winkle pickers on her feet.
My father was just five foot eight; one of those people everyone imagines to be a great deal taller. In his student photograph he wears a well-cut suit, narrow in the leg and lapel, in the style of the sixties. His dark skin glows against the starched white cuffs and collar. The expression in his eyes is both amused and utterly self-possessed. Scattered like freckles across his cheeks and nose are dozens of small round scars, remnants of a childhood battle with smallpox. Yet the scars, like his height, were obscured by his own self-confidence. He had an eye for attractive women and he crossed the room to her: ‘I’m Mohamed.’ He extended his hand. ‘And you are…?’
Maureen Margaret Christison was a local girl, raised all of her nineteen years in Aberdeen. Her father was a clerk in a travel agency and a strict Presbyterian; her mother, dark-eyed and anxious, had a job in a milliner’s until she began to have babies and slowly developed agoraphobia. Maureen was smart, attractive of a strong, open type that in Scotland they call bonny. The confines of home life were as suffocating to the daughter as they were comforting to her mother. Maureen found herself drawn on many nights to the British Council, to the events held for overseas students which she volunteered to help organise.
For the African students Britain was a new and demanding experience. Many kept to themselves, finding safety in numbers. They were all on government scholarships – men and women chosen to lead their countries one day soon across the post-independence horizon towards a new Africa where they would design bridges, run schools, plan towns, drain swamps, build hospitals or, as likely, become desk-bound bureaucrats.
When he was fourteen my father had won a scholarship to Bo School. The Eton of the protectorate of Sierra Leone was established by the British in order to educate the sons of chiefs to take their place in Britain’s empire. He spent seven years there, wearing a white uniform, taught by English masters. In his last year he became head boy and while he was waiting for the results of his scholarship application to read medicine in the UK he taught the junior years. Alongside his formal education the years at Bo gave him an understanding of the men who ruled his country and their values and their history, or at least the version taught in England’s public schools.
Before they boarded a cargo ship bound for Liverpool at Freetown’s docks, the only understanding of Britain most new pioneers possessed was through their first British Council induction seminar. The arrivals from the provinces were herded into a darkened hall, where they watched reels of black and white short films entitled An Introduction to British Life and Culture.
In one short film, Lost in the Countryside, two young Africans in old-fashioned tweed suits amble through a pastoral scene. Their skin is so dark they almost look like they’re white actors in blackface, and their hair is brushed straight upwards. Suddenly they realise they can’t find their way back and a crescendo of mishaps parallels their mounting panic. When they emerge from a haystack pulling strands from their hair an authoritative voice cuts in: ‘If you become lost in the countryside do not panic. Find a road. Locate a bus stop. Join the queue [and there, in the middle of nowhere was a line of people]. A bus will arrive, board it and return to the town.’ The film ends with the Africans looking mightily relieved sitting on the bus, surrounded by smiling locals.
They were given a map of the London Underground, a train timetable, and a talk on expected etiquette, including how to behave in a British home. Visits should be undertaken on invitation only. Never walk into a British household and sit in the chair belonging to the man of the house. In Britain visitors are expected to maintain a flow of conversation. It is polite to decline a second helping of food. And on it went.
So very different from the African household in which I was raised. On the weekends and even the weekdays my aunts and uncles appeared at all hours and sat on the veranda for lengthy periods, just keeping company. They talked for just as long as someone had something to say and then lapsed into companionable silence. Every now and again one of my aunts would break the silence to begin the routine of greetings all over again. When they’d finished, people would snort with serene satisfaction; my aunts would adjust their head-dresses and lappas; and settle even more deeply into themselves. Conversation is a whim, not an art. Of me no one expected anything except a respectful silence and the appearance of listening. If I’d begun to try to amuse them with stories and precocious attempts at conversation, the way children in England did, they would have exchanged sly glances. ‘How dis pickin dae talk so!’
In time, very often when most people had already been there for half the morning, the cook would begin to prepare food. I’d be given a plate with a man-sized helping and if it was a special occasion we were all expected to go back time and time again to taste each dish: mounds of jollof rice, cooked in tomatoes so that the rice turned pink, sour sour or stewed sorrel, okra stew, chicken fried with fresh Scotch bonnet peppers, deep-fried plantains. At the end of the day half the visitors left carrying a tin dish wrapped in cloths to take home for the rest of the family.
From Freetown to Liverpool, then by train to Aberdeen, where the green and ochre of Africa was replaced by shades of blue and grey. In winter the sky over northern Scotland turned to black and the granite of the buildings glittered like silver. And the cold, it was alive! It stung legs, bit cheeks, pinched fingers and toes. It was like going for a swim and being caught in a flurry of jellyfish. The newest arrivals were always obvious: they wore old-styled cotton suits made by their provincial tailors, neither customer nor tailor imagining for a moment that they would not be thick enough to stand the coolest weather. By the end of the first week their smart new suits were packed away in tin trunks for good.
No traveller arrived in Britain from Africa without being suitably awed by his first sight of a terraced row. The houses were built in a single row that ran the entire length of the street like a set of dentures. A rich man in Africa builds his house to stand out from every house around it. In Britain people owned their homes, but all the houses looked the same. A story was told of an undergraduate on his first day in Aberdeen who was taken to his friend’s student digs in a terraced row. He thought his friend must have made good and exclaimed on the length of the house. When the others laughed and pointed out that the building was in fact many houses, he was crestfallen. Now the house began to looked cramped. But once you were inside you saw there were more rooms than you could ever guess at from the narrow frontage.
My father discovered the sin of sweet things for the first time in his life, munching his way through packets of Opal Fruits. Muslim or not, his newly awakened sweet tooth extended to an enthusiasm for sweet alcoholic drinks: sherry or brandy mixed with ginger ale. In Aberdeen he had his first toothache, followed by his first visit to the dentist and his first filling.
The short, round African vowels that fell off the front of his tongue moved further back in his throat and lengthened into local Aberdonian rhythms; he began to draw out his ‘e’s, to emphasise his ‘r’s and then to roll them; and finally he adopted the local idiom, talked about patients turning ill and taking scarlet fever, asked them where they stayed. For the rest of his life he spoke with a curious hybrid accent that puzzled some and brought a smile to the lips of others.
In his first year as a student my father spent much of his time on his own, walking up to his chemistry and biology lectures in the Old University buildings in the north of the city. The next year there was a batch of new arrivals from Sierra Leone: Bernard Frazer, a confident Creole, was wealthy enough to fly to Britain when he started at university (generations of his family had been educated in the UK); Dan Sama, a Mende also from Sierra Leone, was dark and serious and had a long-term love affair with a Scottish student. There was Charlie Renner, who sped around Aberdeen in a green Mini; and the Guineans Henry Blankson and David Anamudu. David’s square face and glasses earned him the nickname ‘Mr TV’ and he skated fearlessly over the wet, black cobblestones on a Vespa scooter. They were all studying medicine.
