Читать книгу Heart and Soul - The Emotional Autobiography of Melissa Bell, Alexandra Burke's Mother - Melissa Bell - Страница 12

Things were going pretty well for Dad in those early days in London. He had been able to buy a house, and he had a steady job at the dry cleaner’s, which he enjoyed, and lots of friends. He even bought himself a new car, a top-of-the-range Vauxhall limousine, or at least that was what it seemed like to me at the time. Not all the neighbours liked his flash ways, but I noticed they still liked to come to his Saturday-night parties. He eventually lost the car because he got drunk one evening and forgot to take the keys out of the ignition when he got home. (Believe it or not, it only became illegal to drink and drive in England in 1967, and I expect it was a while after that before men like Dad thought the law actually applied to them.) By morning, the car was gone, never to be seen again.

Next he got a really smart Hillman Hunter (a bit like a Ford Cortina), which was new on the market around that time. It had white bodywork and a black roof and it was his pride and joy.

Although Dad was earning quite well, Mum also contributed to the family budget by getting paid to look after friends’ children. Most of them were women who had come from the West Indies like us and needed to work all week in order to support themselves and their families. The kids used to be delivered to our house on Monday mornings with mountains of nappies and food to see them through the week and Mum used to put them in any spare corner she could find. All our beds were always full of other people’s children but nobody minded. It was like it was the normal way for people to live and Mum was just providing a service that the other women needed. I dare say nowadays some nosy neighbour would complain to social services and there would be people from the council coming round to inspect her. She would probably be closed down in no time, but then it all seemed perfectly normal and acceptable.

Mum also made extra money by doing her friends’ hair for them at the weekends, styling their wigs on plastic heads so they could pull them on for parties on a Saturday night. These were the days when the musical Hair was playing on the London stage. It had starred the beautiful Marsha Hunt, who then went out with Mick Jagger and eventually had his baby. Her giant Afro hairstyle was famous and everyone was trying to emulate it, even the men. Jimi Hendrix had led the way in the late 1960s, of course, but then there had been movies like Shaft to carry it on and make ‘big hair’ acceptable for the man and woman in the street, not just the rock stars. The Afro became as much a part of 1970s fashion as flares and platform boots.

I liked the fact that the house was always full of people and voices and activity, and I also liked the biscuits that the children arrived with, surreptitiously slipping them into my own mouth whenever no one was looking.

Mum said I could have a cat of my own, and I ended up getting several over the years. They were all male for some reason, maybe because they were the ones people wanted to get rid of. I chose to ignore that fact and gave all of them female names like Linda, Mary-Jane and Katie because I was fixated with girls. I would draw pictures of girls all the time, making up names and life stories for them, colouring in their patchwork clothes. Patchwork was really fashionable at the time and I longed to have outfits of my own like that, but no one would buy them for me. I was living out a sort of fantasy life through my cats and my pictures.

‘But this is a boy cat,’ my sister would try to reason with me. ‘He should have a boy’s name.’

‘No, I want to call her Mary Jane!’ I was adamant, so my sister would just laugh and shrug and leave me to it.

Although we were living in a small house and I never had a bedroom of my own, Mum and Dad were both always working hard, which meant we were never without money for the necessities of life, so in the beginning I didn’t realise we were hard up at all. I just thought we were normal.

In 1972, having been in England for 14 years, Dad must have felt that he had made enough money, because he decided to sell the house in London and return to his homeland to build the house he had always dreamed of and set himself up in business again. So the first time I saw Jamaica was when we returned that year, when I was eight, flown into Kingston Airport by BOAC, as British Airways then was.

This was the year when Michael Jackson was singing ‘Ben’ and ‘Rockin’ Robin’, Sly and the Family Stone were singing ‘Family Affair’ and Roberta Flack had her first monster hit with ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ after Clint Eastwood chose it for the soundtrack of his directorial debut Play Misty for Me.

My grandmother decided to stay in England and not to come with us. She rented a room from the Charles family, some friends of ours who had a house not far away in Tottenham. Even though we moved around a lot in the coming years, we were always renting from friends or staying with relatives; we were never in strangers’ houses. No matter where we were or how cramped our living conditions became, we were always surrounded by familiar, friendly faces. It’s the same in my house today, with people coming and going all the time, sharing rooms, sharing beds, sleeping on bunks and sofas and floors. People always need to have places to go where they will be among friends at difficult times of their lives when they are newly arrived in a city or between homes of their own for whatever reason. If families and friends don’t open their doors to people when they need shelter, that is when the unlucky ones end up sleeping on the streets and sliding to the bottom of the pile. That sense of community spirit and sharing is so important when you are relatively recently arrived in a country and it is hard to get established. The Charles family were from Trinidad and were another of the families that always used to come to my parents’ Saturday-night parties.

In Kingston, we stayed with the family of my sister’s best university friend, Beverley Randall. Mum had been very kind and welcoming to Beverley when she was studying in England, making her part of the family in her inimitable way, so the Randalls were happy to return the favour. Theirs was a lovely house in a district called Greenwich Farm and Mrs Randall spent all her time sitting peacefully in her rocking chair on the veranda, watching the world go by in the street outside. I expect that was the sort of peaceful life Mum and Dad were imagining they would achieve for themselves once they had built their house.

The two families had known each other since before Mum and Dad even came to England the first time, and Beverley lived with us in the holidays when she came over to study: yet another person cheerfully crammed into our overcrowded living space. Because she was older than me, Mum insisted that I show her ‘respect’, which meant I had to call her ‘Sister Beverley’ and not just ‘Beverley’. When she graduated from university, she went to Miami to become a nurse, which seemed incredibly exciting to me because America was where all the best music seemed to come from. It was like some distant promised land that I dreamed of one day visiting.

After a few weeks, Dad managed to rent us a room of our own in Acacia Gardens, a nice middle-class suburb of Kingston, which we moved into while he set about building us a house of our own on a plot in Spanish Town, an area where the singer Grace Jones was born and lived until she was 17, when she moved to New York with her parents and grew up to become a complete legend.

As usual, things didn’t work out quite as smoothly as Dad had hoped and it wasn’t long before the money started to run out and we had to go back to the Randalls while the builders continued to work on the house in the sun at their leisurely local pace.

Some of Dad’s original dry-cleaning businesses on the island had closed down without him there to oversee them, but a few still had customers and so he hired new people and tried to get everything up and running again as it had been before he left for England. He was always looking for new business ideas, talking to people, dreaming of making it big, imagining that he was about to solve all his problems and become a wealthy man. At one stage, he even opened a bar in a premises next to one of the dry-cleaning businesses. He stocked it up and there was a big opening night with free food and drink for all comers, which attracted freeloaders from all over Kingston. It wasn’t unlike the sort of parties he and Mum used to throw in England on Saturday nights except that I didn’t know all the people who came to drink with him at the bar. Dad was in his element as the owner and the centre of attention and everyone went away having had a fantastic night out at his expense. But I think that that was the only marketing idea he had managed to come up with for the venture because nothing much seemed to happen after that and there never seemed to be many customers.

Dad was always coming up with ideas, always busy, always talking to people, but he never laid proper plans or did any research or took good business advice. As I grew older, I noticed that he always seemed to end up floundering at everything he tried, moving on from one thing to another with a great fanfare of optimism. A few months after its riotous launch, I wandered into the bar and went behind the counter to get myself a soft drink, as I often did.

‘Your dad doesn’t own this place any more,’ a woman leaning on the bar told me.

It was the first I’d heard of it. I think there may have been some problems with his licence but, whatever the reason, that was the end of another of his little dreams.

He was a very stubborn man and would never listen to anyone if they weren’t telling him what he wanted to hear, so a lot of the time Mum gave up bothering and just let him get on with things. He didn’t get violent with her, like a lot of men do with their wives if they don’t agree with them, but he would shout so loudly that it was impossible for anyone else to make themselves heard and so he would always win any argument.

That trip was my first time abroad, which made it an even more intense and exotic experience to my young eyes. I can remember so many vivid details from the moment we first landed, coming out of the plane into the unexpected heat and gazing around me at the airport shacks and what looked like jungle foliage beyond. A porter in the little airport building tried to persuade Mum to allow him to take her bag, and I remember her sending him on his way, telling him he was charging too much, that she could ‘carry her own bag, thank you very much’.

Despite the heat and the tropical look of the place with its palm trees and colourful local people, the thing that struck me first as we drove through the streets of Kingston was that I couldn’t see any fish and chip shops or Wimpy Bars. To be deprived of the places that had always brought me the most comfort in my young life was disquieting and immediately I began to worry.

The mood of the spoiled little girl who had been brought up pretty much as an only child, allowed to have whatever she wanted, grew gradually darker in the following days. I threw tantrums at the slightest provocation, like when they told me there wasn’t a sweet shop in Kingston and I was just going to have to eat fresh fruit like everyone else. As the weeks went by and I grew increasingly hot and hungry and bored, I was making life hell for everyone. I was determined to force them into taking me home to England, where I would be able to indulge myself with all the things I was used to. The only advantage to all this deprivation, as I saw it, was that I slimmed right down for the first time I could remember.

Despite my tantrums, Dad was determined to make a life for us on the island. He refused to listen to my pleadings to be returned home and enrolled me in a local school, confident that I would get used to the idea eventually, once I had made some new friends. In England I had been very happy at school, so that wasn’t a problem to me, until my first day at my new school. What I hadn’t been prepared for was that to the other children I would seem very different, an object ripe for derision. At my school in London, I had been pretty much like everyone else, but in Jamaica I appeared to be a spoiled little rich girl, and they instantly hated me for it. Things that I would never have given a second thought to at my old school, like the fact that Dad had his Hillman Hunter shipped over from England and drove me to and from the school gates in it each day, made me look really pampered compared with everyone else, as they had to walk everywhere and didn’t have their parents watching over them every second of the day. The fact that I was wearing normal leather shoes, bought from Clarks back in England, also marked me out as being different from the others, who came to class in worn-down slippers, sandals or even bare feet, and they set about making my life a misery at every opportunity.

‘You’re a rich bitch, with your leather shoes and being driven to school!’ they taunted.

‘You must be some kind of millionairess!’

‘Give us some of your money!’

Mum would pack me up a nice lunch each day, making me different from the others yet again, but she didn’t give me any money, so I had nothing I could give my tormentors to make them leave me alone, and that made them even angrier. To begin with, it was only one or two of them picking on me, but the feeling of hatred towards me seemed to spread and before long virtually every child was throwing abuse in my direction. Even some of the teachers seemed to think I was some sort of lowlife, singling me out in front of the class for humiliation.

‘Is that your real hair, girl? Let’s have a look and see.’

In class, I was a hard worker, so I had some protection there, but in the playground I was totally exposed and the bullies had free access to me with no restraint from adults. I realised that I needed to find someone to look after me if I didn’t want to end up being teased and maybe even physically hurt every day. Some enterprising local traders had set up stalls all round the grounds to sell snacks and books and stationery to the kids because the school was too poor to supply anything for free. In a poor society, there are always street traders ready to fill every gap and cater for every need, desperate to make a little money to live on, always struggling through one day at a time. This was my chance to find some protection against my tormentors. Plucking up all my courage, I went to a man who was selling stationery.

‘Can I help you during playtime?’ I asked.

‘Sure,’ he grinned, probably spotting that I was a lonely little fat girl in need of a friend. ‘You can stand there and watch the stall. Make sure the kids don’t steal the rubbers and stuff.’

It was a relief not just to have a friend and ally, but also to have something to do during the breaks since I didn’t have any friends to play with. From then on, the moment the bell went for break time I would head to the stall and help the trader, making sure that I stayed close and that everyone could see he was my friend. He was pleased with the arrangement too because he found that his profits actually went up with me guarding his merchandise. The others couldn’t touch me as long as I was around a grown-up, and I got free stationery in exchange for my services, but of course it didn’t help me to integrate myself with the other kids and probably made them hate me all the more.

Dad was always surrounded by loads of hangers-on wherever he went, because they all thought he had money and hoped some of it would rub off on them. Compared with the rest of them, I suppose he had. He did nothing to discourage them because he liked to be the centre of attention and to have everyone listening to his words of wisdom, laughing at his jokes. Most of them, however, were pretty unreliable friends. He was out drinking with one of them one time and the guy, who had probably had far more to drink than he should have done, took the keys to the Hillman without asking, drove off at speed and ended up crashing it into a petrol station. He was lucky to get out alive, but the car was a write-off and I don’t think Dad had any insurance. People seemed to be very casual about things like insurance in Jamaica.

We might have seemed rich to the other kids, but we certainly didn’t have enough money to buy another car when everything we had was going into building the house. Not having a car any more meant that I had to start travelling on the school bus with my tormentors, which was like hell because it meant they had me totally at their mercy and it was impossible for me to escape their taunts and threats. I might have found a way to make my lunchtimes and breaks safe, but I still lived in fear of being caught on my own by the others. My life was such a misery that eventually I told Mum I wasn’t going to go to school any more.

‘I want to go back to England,’ I told her firmly. ‘I want to go back to my old school. I was so happy there.’

She must have been able to see that I was serious, because she told me I didn’t have to go to that school any more.

‘We’ll find you somewhere else,’ she promised.

It was such a relief to be able to stay at home and not face all the bullies. But finding somewhere else for me to go was never going to be easy, especially when Mum and Dad were distracted with the problems of building the house, and a year later I was still at home every day and still miserable. I didn’t waste my days completely, because I had plenty of time to read books, but in other ways my education ground to a halt as Mum searched in vain for a suitable school. I didn’t care how long it took. It was too hot for school anyway and if I had to be in Jamaica I was perfectly happy to laze around in the shade all day, chatting to the neighbours, who were all a great deal friendlier towards me than the kids at school had been.

That year the workmen finally finished building our new home, a beautiful wooden house. The results were impressive, even if it had taken a lot longer than Dad had originally anticipated. To me it seemed like the poshest house in the area, partly because it was the only new building and partly because it was such a nice grey colour, with smart red doors and white windows. People actually used to gather at the metal gates to the courtyard just to stare at it and take pictures, which made me feel very proud. No one would want to take pictures of it now because it is so rundown and the whole area round it has gone to seed. It’s hard to keep things nice in Jamaica when the sun is so hot and the rain storms are so fierce, and no one ever seems to have any money for repairs or enough energy for regular maintenance work.

Outside of school, I did manage to make friends with a few people of my age. There was a boy called David Burke, who was six years older than me and lived in the next big house down the road. He first got my attention by throwing bottle tops at me, which I thought was quite funny but which made Dad so angry that he forbade me to talk to him again. It was probably just an excuse: I think Dad would have forbidden me to talk to any boy at that stage, however well behaved he might have been. I guess all fathers can remember what they were like when they were boys and want to protect their daughters from the truth.

But David was too full of self-confidence to allow himself to be intimidated by Dad, and persisted in coming to our gate most days, sometimes on his own and sometimes with a group of other boys. When Dad arrived home unexpectedly one day and found me out there with them all, he completely lost his temper and stormed straight into the house, leaving me frozen to the spot in horror at what might be in store. Having grabbed a leather belt he came running back out and set about beating me with it, shouting and flailing about and putting on a show in front of the whole street. It was the only time he ever hit me and I was mortified, not so much because it hurt but because everyone else was laughing and pointing as he whacked me, knowing that I was too fat to be able to run away.

It was perfectly normal to see Jamaican fathers doling out corporal punishment to their children, but it was unusual for Dad, and in any case I thought it was really unfair. I hadn’t even been doing anything bad with David and his friends, but the rule was that I was never allowed to play with boys, no exceptions. I think it was the fact that I had directly disobeyed him that really made Dad angry because normally I was a pretty obedient child, for all my tantrums. Humiliated at being made such a spectacle of, I burst into tears and ran indoors to escape the jeering of the crowd with Dad in full pursuit, shouting and lashing out at me. It was the only time I can remember him raising his hand to me, or to anyone else for that matter.

Dad installed a dry-cleaning and pressing machine in an annex on the side of the house to provide a service to the local neighbourhood. Once people heard that he was there, they all started using his services and from then on he was always to be found in the annex, working. He was passionate about the way he turned out the clothes and justly proud of the way he presented them back to their owners. I still think of him whenever I pass a dry cleaner’s and catch the familiar scent of the chemicals and solvents they use. He always smelled like that when he came back from work, as if he had been personally cleaned and pressed.

Being surrounded by older relatives and listening to them talk and reminisce about the past, I began to learn more about my family history. Dad’s mother had come to Jamaica from India when she was young. I guess they must have been a trading family, or maybe they came as indentured servants after slavery was abolished. Dad always told us that his mother was stunningly beautiful and that all the local men wanted to marry her.

‘There were a lot of people who were jealous of your grandfather when she chose him from among all her suitors,’ he would tell me. ‘Some jealous person decided that if they couldn’t have her no one would. So they put poison in her food and she died. After that my father left Jamaica and went to live in Cuba.’

To a young girl’s ears, it seemed a sad but romantic story. My grandmother was only 33 years old when she died, but she had already had three children. My father, his brother and his sister were then brought up by their maternal grandparents on the Indian side of the family when their father left for Cuba. It wasn’t unusual in the Caribbean for the grandparents to play a major role in bringing up children while the parents went off to be the breadwinners for the whole family. Maybe it was memories of what his grandparents had done for him that was part of the reason why Dad was so supportive of me when I was later left on my own with my four kids.

I remember meeting his Indian grandmother, who didn’t die until she was 105 and seemed to me to be the oldest person in the world. A lot of the members of Dad’s family lived to fabulously great ages. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why some people are chosen to live two or even three times as long as others.