Читать книгу The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Memoir - Aminatta Forna - Страница 10

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.

That first winter the wind gusted in from the North Sea, swirled around the harbour like a furious sea god and rushed straight up Union Street in the centre of town. Just when my father thought the weather couldn’t possibly get any worse, it snowed until the black city turned white, like a negative of a photograph. The next day the sun shone strongly for the first time in weeks and the sky was like a stretched sheet of sapphire silk, the colour of the Atlantic.

The unpredictable northern European weather systems left the West African students battered and freezing; they felt like pioneers battling up the north face of the city; Michelin men dressed in so many layers of sweaters. At home they spent the best part of their grant money on shillings for the gas and at night they slept with their overcoats over the counterpane.

In Sierra Leone the rains begin on 1 May every year. From then on it rains at eleven o’clock every night, gradually moving forward in the day until the rain falls almost continuously. As the season advances, so the rain recedes at exactly the same pace. Next the sun shines for seven months until the clouds come back again. On 2 May, if for some reason it did not rain the night before, people in the marketplace might remark, ‘The rains are late this year, not so?’ This, in Sierra Leone, is what passes for a conversation about the weather.

Few of the African students could afford to go home for the holidays. They spent Christmas in each other’s company, but New Year was a very different matter. My father and his friends suddenly found themselves on the receiving end of dozens of invitations from their neighbours; they accepted them all and went from house to house downing malt whiskies, enjoying their sudden popularity. The young doctors were already accustomed to locals who crept up to them in the street, reaching out furtively to touch their black skin – for luck, they explained apologetically if they were caught out. Any of the Africans who thought they’d have a quiet night at home spent the early hours of New Year’s morning answering the doorbell to revellers hoping to win a little luck in the coming year by catching sight of a black face on Hogmanay.

Mohamed and Maureen were together for two years before her father passed them on the other side of Union Street one afternoon. When she arrived home she found him maroon with rage. He told his daughter that he would not tolerate her seeing or being seen with a black man.

Later, in the little attic flat my father shared with Dan Sama, he listened to an account of the scene from my tearful mother and knew exactly what to do. ‘I’ll call on your father at home,’ he told her, confident he could put things right.

Gairn Terrace is a row of plain semi-detached houses built on the edge of Aberdeen close to the river Dee and the road to Perth. There is nothing to distinguish one house from the other, except the colour of the woodwork that brightens pebbledash facades the colour and texture of porridge. The Christisons’ window frames were painted pale yellow and two net-curtained windows faced the street, one above and one below. Curiously, in a world in which appearances mattered, the houses were built with no proper front door, just an entrance reached by a dark side passage.

When my mother was growing up there was an army training ground opposite and, farther on, a crater where a fighter plane had been downed during the war, in which wild blueberries grew. In 1935 Robert Christison bought one of the new houses for four hundred and twenty pounds and from then on he kept three boxes on the dresser. For the next eighteen years he put two and sixpence into each one every Friday to pay for the mortgage, insurance and bills. In all respects life in number 38 was equally regimented.

My grandfather’s chair was closest to the fire and faced the bay window onto the street. To the left was the wireless, which replaced the old crystal set after the war. It was a magnificent piece, in two-tone polished mahogany, and stood about three and a half feet tall, occupying the entire corner of the room. From his place my grandfather could reach it comfortably. Its prime location was really the only outstanding feature of my grandfather’s chair, which was just one part of a three-piece suite, upholstered in rust and sufficiently yet not excessively comfortable. A lace-edged antimacassar covered the headrest. My father, wearing a suit and tie, took the chair opposite.

My mother and grandmother stayed in the kitchen – Maureen preparing the tea things and Lydia smoking Woodbines – while my father asked Mr Christison’s permission to continue seeing his daughter. Mr Christison listened, though not with his lean, sparse body nor with his brisk blue eyes; he sat with his arms crossed and never once looked my father in the eye, but he didn’t interrupt either. My father spoke fluidly and directly, describing his many aspirations, including his plans to specialise in obstetrics.

Mr Christison was not impressed by the black man’s credentials. Nor did he like his forthright manner. ‘Arrogant’ is how he would dismiss him later. He stated his position, an entirely simple one: ‘I’m not prejudiced. I’m sure you’ve done well enough. But I won’t have Maureen going about town with any man of a different colour. It’s my view you stick to your own. There are black women for black men, Chinese women for Chinamen and, for all I care, green women for green men.’

‘Forgive me, sir, but if Maureen dated a teddy boy, would that be all right…as long as he was white?’

‘I wouldn’t tolerate that either, as a matter of fact. But that’s as much as I have to say to you on the matter.’

Mr Christison stood up, shaking the newspaper from his lap. He was much taller than my father; he once tried out for the Rhodesian police. He said: ‘Thank you for stopping by.’ Their eyes still did not meet and he excused himself from the room.

While the visitor was still in the house Mr Christison remained outside, standing on the steep slope of his garden digging at his rhubarb. His wife fed the visitor angel cakes and tea and chattered nervously all the while. If her husband was unimpressed, Lydia Christison was secretly delighted by Maureen’s African doctor, who in that hour charmed her entirely. For years afterwards she defied her husband, paying visits to her daughter carrying petits fours and children’s clothes, and allowing my mother and her little ones back for hot baths in the years we lived without a bathroom.

Afterwards my father told my mother what had transpired in his conversation with my grandfather. And I can imagine exactly how my grandfather behaved during the exchange, because almost forty years later, shortly before he died, he was the same way with me when I asked him about the day he met my father for the first and only time. There we sat in the very same room, the decor barely changed in all that time. A clown doll made by my grandmother after she had her stroke sat on an occasional table. A set of tiny ornamental sabres I used to play with as a child had gone. Those were the only differences I could see. He sat in his chair and I, cross-legged on the floor, my back leaning on the chair where my father had sat. Between us on the leather pouf was a great pile of photographs and a tape recorder.

My grandfather was preparing to die: emptying drawers, sorting through closets; he had even finally given away my grandmother’s clothes. The next day the two of us took a trip up the coast towards Inverness. By then he was over ninety, had trouble walking and had been forced to stop driving, but he read the map and worked out different routes there and back that carried us through the finest scenery. On the way up we stopped at a roadside tea room – a lodge, he called it – and told me how he used to bring my grandmother there. Among the trinkets for sale I found a pretty rococo coffee cup and saucer, but when I showed it to him he called it tat and said I was daft to want to buy it.

In the morning I stopped by Gairn Terrace to say goodbye: I was on my way back to London. He called me upstairs, to one of the bedrooms. Inside, piled on the bed were dozens of different household objects: framed pictures, coat hangers, an old heater. He handed me four yellow and black coffee cups and a set of tea cups in the same florid style as the single coffee cup I had chosen at the lodge. They were my grandparents’ wedding gifts, entirely unused in almost seventy years.

I smiled and kissed him and he hugged me back. Three months later I was up in Aberdeen again, in the snow and sleet, this time for his funeral.

The end of my father’s first year in Scotland coincided with the culmination in Ghana in 1957 of years of brokering between the Ghanaian leaders and British rulers over a new constitution which would bring self-government to the colony. After the Second World War Britain had promised her colonies independence in return for their military assistance. Hundreds of thousands of black and brown soldiers died and, though India was granted independence in 1947, the African nations remained colonies. Virtually overlooked by the Marshall Plan, which gave millions to rebuild Europe and the Far East, impoverished by the low, fixed prices paid for cash crops while European middlemen grew fat, African leaders began to rally their people against the inequity of colonial rule.

In Ghana the independence movement was led by a charismatic former teacher called Kwame Nkrumah, a pan-Africanist who had been imprisoned for several years by the British. Nkrumah was Scottish-educated, and during the 1940s a leader in the influential West African Students’ Union. It was inside WASU that the seeds of pan-Africanism and anti-colonial politics germinated, fuelled by the hostility of British society and the humiliation of the colour bar. Later these sentiments were re-imported to Africa, where they ultimately flowered in rebellion.

All the African students watched and waited as one after another the colonies were granted independence. Shortly after my parents met, Nigeria celebrated its break from the empire, alongside thirteen French colonies – practically the entire Francophone empire, with the exception of Algeria, which remained sunk in a bitter and frustrating war of liberation. For the West African states autonomy was not so much a question of if as when, and the anticipation ran like a fever through the exiled students.

Gradually the topic began to dominate every gathering; people turned the record player off at parties the better to be heard and huddled over the paraffin heaters in each other’s apartments late into the frosty night. For Maureen the talk soon palled. Mohamed, on the other hand, was already deeply politically committed, a member of the British Labour Party and president of the local chapter of the West African Students’ Union – although in truth Aberdeen was never able to boast more than a handful of members.

In the years before full independence was finally granted Sierra Leone had moved slowly towards self-government, a wind of change that revealed schisms hidden under the sand of white rule. In Freetown the Creoles had fought for self-rule since the founding of the colony by the Nova Scotian blacks in 1792. They were former slaves who fought on the side of the British in the American War of Independence. After the American victory they were forced to emigrate to the British settlement of Nova Scotia in Canada and thence given passage to Sierra Leone with the promise of land and freedom. But Britain double-crossed them: Freetown was given first to the profiteering Sierra Leone Company and later turned into a crown colony. A hundred years on, during the scramble for Africa, the rest of the country was brought under British protection.

Freetown soon flourished. In the fifty years up to 1900 the city, holding onto the south-westerly curve of the continent, became known as the Athens of Africa. The Creole emphasis was on education and professional achievement, their aspirations essentially European. They looked outward, across the sea, rather than inward to the hinterland, sending their children to Britain to be educated. Freetown had a flourishing free press; the first university in Africa founded at Fourah Bay; and at that time there were more children in school in the colony than in England itself. When Britain became the dominant colonial power they looked to the Creoles, in their starched bibs and laced boots, to fill positions in civil service administrations throughout West Africa.

On the whole the Creoles did not view themselves as Africans. They opposed the creation of a single state of Sierra Leone and objected to the right of people from the protectorate to sit on a new post-war legislative council in Freetown. The Creoles already enjoyed separate status as British subjects and they wanted this fact to be acknowledged in any new constitution, a wish that was ignored by Britain. In 1957 Sir Milton Margai, an elderly doctor from the provinces, successfully led a broad-based coalition to become the country’s first prime minister; a year later all British officials relinquished their government posts.

During the university vacations most of the African students took the train to Norfolk and worked in the Smedley pea factory, filling and labelling cans. At night they slept together in long dormitories of bunk beds, up to a hundred young men side by side, above and below. The factory was some way out of town, and evenings were quiet. Among the gathered students from universities all over the country and as many different nations, talk turned frequently to the question of independence.

At that time most of the African students studying in Britain were still young men from privileged families, town dwellers. Mohamed Forna was the first Sierra Leonean from the provinces to be admitted to Aberdeen University. Sitting on a suitcase at the end of his bed, Mohamed described existence in rural Africa, the total absence of basic life-giving amenities, the yawning disparity between the city and the people of the provinces. He was convinced that Africa’s poorest were already being cut out of the future.

When the Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba was murdered, my father cried. At the time the popular leader’s death was blamed on Katangan secessionists led by Moise Tshombe; not until decades later was it actually revealed to be the work of the CIA and the Belgian government, who had a deal with Tshombe to exploit the vast mineral resources of Katanga. It was the only time anyone heard my father swear. ‘Moise Tshombe is a fucker!’ He shook his head in despair.

He joined the British Labour Party and began to attend student meetings regularly. Even among his peers he had a reputation as a firebrand. One evening Bernard Frazer, who took a more languid view, challenged Mohamed. If he thought all the politicians back home were doing such a poor job, why didn’t he run the country himself? I will, replied his friend, rising to the provocation, if I have to.

In 1960 a series of meetings began to be held in London to agree a new fully independent constitution for Sierra Leone. As a representative of one of the student unions, my father was invited to meet the Sierra Leonean delegates. They gathered in the tense and heady atmosphere of Lancaster House to weave a constitutional framework for the future.

‘Uncle Sam’ was a one-time church minister in Freetown who arrived in Britain in the 1930s to train as a doctor. He flunked and switched to law; flunked that too. With the last of his savings he managed to buy a four-storey house in Paddington and he set about restoring it in a haphazard manner. In the meantime he lived quite well renting out rooms to a tidal population of students. Uncle Sam’s house was where most young men from Sierra Leone who were short of cash but wanted to see the big city ended up staying.

What Sam made on the house he regularly lost on the horses and at those times he would go round the house emptying gas and electricity meters of shillings, and shrug soulfully at the bitter complaints of his young tenants.

Some years back Sam won the love of Dora Fossey, an English hospital matron who lived several doors down and regularly bailed him out of his financial straits. Dora and Sam never dared to marry or even to go out in public more than once in a while. Instead, when her shift at St Mary’s ended Dora spent every evening at Sam’s, watching television and cooking him English meals. Anyone who knew no better would imagine they had been married for years, but their relationship was conducted entirely within the narrow world of the crumbling West London terrace.

One afternoon Mohamed came back to Uncle Sam’s to find one of his many cousins standing in the kitchen. Brima Sesay, nephew of Chief Masamunta, was a nursing student making a tour of the country. Neither could believe the luck of the coincidence and they crossed the floor to embrace. Afterwards Brima took Mohamed to Shepherd’s Bush market, where they bought slippery okra, palm oil, tiny stinging scarlet peppers and blackened, smoked grouper. That night they stayed in with Uncle Sam and feasted on rice and plassas. They hadn’t seen each other since they used to play on the Fornas’ farm during the school holidays. They had lost touch when my father was eleven, at which point one of his teachers had asked the family permission to take him away to the south as a ward in order to complete his education. Soon afterwards Brima had been adopted into a group of missionaries who brought him to England.

Brima called my father Moses, explaining to a mystified Dora how the mission teachers went round the class on the first day of school changing the names of the children for their own convenience. Around the same time my father chose his birthday: November, which coincided with tarokans. The date, the 25th, he decided on himself. A name the bureaucrats could spell and a date of birth: these were the first essentials on the path to westernisation. My father dropped Moses the day he left the primary school; but Brima used both his names: Alfred Brima.

Days later my father caught the train from King’s Cross back north and Brima went on to Birmingham. When Alfred Brima was back at college in Portsmouth, a letter arrived. It was from Mohamed and contained bad news. ‘Remember Maureen, the girl I told you about?’ Mohamed wrote. ‘A terrible thing has happened. She is pregnant.’

Mohamed wanted advice from his cousin, someone who knew the family. He had thoughts of marriage but worried about Maureen’s father who, he supposed, would detest this solution as much as any other. His greatest fear was that Mr Christison would report him to the university authorities and try to have his scholarship revoked. Then there was the matter of the Fornas. He remembered the Conteh cousins who returned from Britain, one after the other, each with a white wife, and the indignation and upset that the women managed to provoke within the family.

Brima didn’t hesitate. Marry her, he said. The older members of the family aren’t going to live for ever. But, he warned, you must make sure the family never have reason to resent her. And if you take her from her own country, to a place where she is a stranger, you will have to be utterly loyal to her, too.

Maureen and Mohamed married at the register office in Union Street on 28 March 1961. She was nineteen years old and he was twenty-five. Charlie Renner acted as a witness and Dan Sama was my father’s best man. Dan’s Scottish girlfriend had given birth the month before, but she had disappeared back to her family and given the child up. She dropped her classes; no one had laid eyes on her since. Bernard Frazer came along and proposed several toasts in the Union building after the ceremony.

On her wedding day my mother, dressed in a pale-blue suit, left Gairn Terrace with a packed suitcase in her hand. She didn’t tell her parents she was getting married, though she found out many years later that they already knew because someone had seen the banns up on the board in town. But within the house no one spoke of it.

One month later, in April, the British flag was lowered in Sierra Leone and replaced by the green, white and blue tricolour. My father organised a sherry party in the beautiful stone British Council building in the harbour at Aberdeen. At the end of the evening, flamboyantly drunk, he staggered away under the weight of several crates, declaring there was far too much sherry to leave behind. On the top floor of the bus he lit six cigarettes and smoked them all, three in each hand. Someone teased that he wasn’t even a smoker. ‘I’m smoking the smoke of freedom, man.’ He blew out great gusts of smoke. ‘I’m smoking the smoke of freedom.’

At the end of the evening my mother, pregnant and sober, pushed him up the stairs while he leaned back so far he was almost horizontal. Then she put him to bed with a bucket by his side.