Читать книгу Heart and Soul - The Emotional Autobiography of Melissa Bell, Alexandra Burke's Mother - Melissa Bell - Страница 8

My mum and dad, Ivy and Ivan Ewen, arrived in England in 1958 on a Spanish boat called the Begona, which carried thousands of immigrants to Southampton from the West Indies with promises of jobs and glittering new lives in England, luring them away from the poverty of the islands. After the Second World War, it had taken hundreds more migrants from Europe down to new lives in Australia, and before that it was a troop ship going under the name of the Vassar Victory. It’s hard to imagine in these days of casual air travel how many people were being ferried around the world by sea in the recent past, moving at an altogether statelier pace, many of them travelling in the hope of exchanging their old lives for something more exciting.

It was also the year that Elvis Presley was being drafted into the US army and the newly launched Cliff Richard was singing ‘Move It’, which John Lennon would later describe as the ‘first English rock record’. It must have been an exciting time to be young and full of dreams for a better future.

In fact, in comparison with most of the West Indians who arrived on boats like the Begona and the better-known Windrush, my parents weren’t really poor at all. Dad was already a successful entrepreneur with a string of dry-cleaning and pressing shops in Jamaica, but I think he believed he would be able to rise to even greater heights in England, making enough money in a few years to return home a truly wealthy man, able to build his own house and live a comfortable life. It has always been a tried and trusted way for ambitious young men to establish themselves, heading to places where the wages are going to be higher than in their homelands, where they believe it will be possible to build up a little nest egg for the future. Dad was a man of dreams and ambitions, although those dreams never seemed to quite work out as well as he hoped.

I still miss Dad terribly. Although he was a small man physically he was a larger-than-life personality – I wouldn’t have been able to manage without him when the children were small and I was left to bring them up on my own. He would have been so proud to see what Alexandra has achieved, to hear her voice everywhere he went and to stand in places like London’s O2 arena and see her up on stage, singing in the New Year in front of tens of thousands of cheering people, standing alongside Will Young, with Elton John banging away at the piano beside them.

We are a real melting pot of a family, like many people from the West Indies: the result of many centuries of trading, immigration, adventuring and slavery. Dad was half Jamaican and half Indian, Mum was half Jamaican and half Irish, so I guess it’s not surprising that there aren’t many people in the world who share my blood group. Dad was a handsome man, but tiny and skinny. He was no more than five feet tall, but he had a big voice to make up for it. He was trained as a tailor before he discovered he could make more money out of cleaning and pressing clothes rather than making them.

He was never work-shy, and as soon as he arrived in north London he took a job with a Cypriot family who owned the Alex Dry Cleaners chain. They had a few branches, one of which was next to the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, which was where Dad went to work. He still used his tailoring skills as well to earn a little extra, doing alterations for people, and making clothes too if they asked, mainly slacks. There was always a sewing machine standing in the corner of any room we lived in and people would come to him with patterns and lengths of material to get him to make clothes for them.

The Rainbow was something of a landmark in the area. It had originally been an Astoria cinema but in the 1960s the management started staging one-night concerts by the stars of the day. Everyone from Shirley Bassey to Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra to the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin to the Beatles appeared there. Many of the great events of modern musical history happened there. It was where Jimi Hendrix first set light to one of his guitars on stage and where David Bowie later staged his renowned ‘Ziggy Stardust’ concerts. It was converted into the Rainbow Theatre in 1971, relaunched with a concert by the Who, and became a world-famous venue where everyone from the Jacksons to Bob Marley came to play. Now the live acts have moved on to bigger concert halls, stadiums and arenas but the building is still there, looking much the same.

Many of the biggest stars who played at the Rainbow would bring their costumes next door to Alex Dry Cleaners and they would ask for Dad personally because they loved the care he took over his work, often showing their appreciation by giving him free tickets to get us into their shows. To my child’s imagination, being given free tickets felt like we lived at the very heart of the show-business world, like we were personal friends of the stars who everyone else was having to pay hard-earned money to see.

Mum was a big, beautiful, buxom woman, who looked like Carmen Miranda with her coffee-coloured skin and thick, dark hair piled high. She had a beautiful singing voice but never thought of turning professional. She had worked in Jamaica as a hairdresser, which gave her a skill she could use to earn money once she arrived in London, and show business would have seemed a distant and inaccessible world to her. I wish she could have been around to see how far Alexandra has gone, how her granddaughter has benefited from the decisions and sacrifices she made all those years ago.

Both Mum and Dad had had children in previous marriages but I was the only child they had together who survived, and that made them incredibly protective of me. Frances was Dad’s daughter, who lived with us and as a child always looked on Mum as her real mother. Frances’s birth mother had handed her over to Dad as soon as she was born, saying she wanted nothing to do with the child. Dad took responsibility for her with the help of his sister, until he met and married Mum when Frances was two years old. Mum always treated the two of us the same, never showing any favouritism that I could see.

Dad was never married to Frances’s real mum but both Frances and her birth mother are dead now, so there’s no way of finding out the truth of what their relationship might have been like all those years ago, on those hot nights in Jamaica when Dad was probably as careless as most young men with only one thing on their minds.

Later, when she was grown up, Frances came to resent Mum, believing that she had split Dad up from her real mother, which was a shame because it seemed to me that they always had such a good relationship when Frances was young. The pressures of life so often drive wedges between family members as children grow up and begin to assert themselves.

Sonia was Mum’s daughter from her first marriage to a local Chinese businessman. (There is a large Chinese community in Jamaica.) Mum told me that their marriage broke down after their first son, Danny, died from consumption when he was two and she didn’t manage to conceive again. Mum continued to have problems conceiving again after meeting Dad and it was eight years after they were married before she finally found herself pregnant with me, which was, I think, another reason why they were both so protective of me. Having had so much trouble making me in the first place and having had to wait so long, they didn’t want to run any risk of losing me.

By the time I was born, in 1964, a lot had been happening on the British music scene. Top Of The Pops had been going on the BBC since the beginning of the year and the Beatles were singing ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. Jamaican singer Millie Small, the daughter of a sugar-plantation overseer, whose stage name was simply Millie, had a quirky little hit with ‘My Boy Lollipop’ (the first major hit for Island Records after Chris Blackwell, the label’s founder, discovered her and brought her to England in 1963), and Cilla Black was belting out ‘You’re My World’ and ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’. Peter and Gordon had released ‘World Without Love’ (Millie had a brief relationship with Peter) and Billy J. Kramer was singing ‘Little Children’.

I, on the other hand, was not ‘little’ or ‘small’ at all, weighing a massive 13lb (almost twice the average weight of a newborn baby), and my birth actually killed Mum. The hospital had even called in a priest to give her the last rites. Dad had already been brought to the hospital by the police, where the doctors told him that he was going to have to choose between saving his wife and saving his unborn baby so that they would know what to do in the operating theatre.

Although I know how much they had both wanted to have me, Dad had to make a choice and he told them that they should try to save my mother.

I guess he thought that he and Mum could always try again for another baby but that he would never be able to replace her. It must have been a horrible decision to be forced to make and I don’t blame him at all for choosing Mum over me because he’d never met me, and I know how much he loved me once I arrived.

I had to be delivered by Caesarean section and, despite the surgeon’s best efforts, Mum’s heart stopped beating while she was still on the operating table. They called the priest into the theatre to administer the last rites and as he stood over her prone body on the operating table there was a miracle. Mum’s heart started to beat again. At the same time as she was coming back to life, the midwife had managed to get me to take in a lungful of air and I let out a loud cry, the first musical note of my life. I’m sure it must have brought a great deal of joy to all those who heard it and who just a few minutes earlier had thought I would not live. Having thought for a moment that he was going to lose both of us, Dad found in an instant that he had his beloved wife back and a bouncing great baby girl with a powerful pair of lungs as a bonus.

That was also the year when the Supremes had their first worldwide hits with ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’, ‘Baby Love’ and ‘Stop in the Name of Love’, and changed everything for black female singers. A few years later, Diana Ross would go solo and become one of the biggest stars in the world, but I am getting ahead of myself.

Although her life had been spared, Mum’s health never really recovered after that traumatic day – although perhaps she would have become ill anyway, regardless of whether I had come along when I did. She was already diabetic, which was the reason why I was such an enormous baby, feeding greedily on the sugar in her blood while I was inside her womb. Gestational diabetes is apparently very common among Jamaican women. (Insulin is a hormone and sometimes the other hormones of pregnancy block its usual action to make sure the baby gets enough glucose, creating a need for more insulin.)

Even once I was out of the womb, however, Mum and Dad’s troubles with their new baby were not over. Three weeks after I was born, the doctors found a growth in my back. I was operated on immediately and it turned out to be benign, but I was still left with a scar down 80 per cent of my back. It has grown with me and is still there today as a reminder of just how precarious my entry into the world was, and how I nearly didn’t make it. It seemed that right from the start I had been marked out as someone who was going to have to struggle to stay alive for her allotted span on earth. Watching their baby daughter being wheeled off into the operating theatre must have been like a nightmare to Mum and Dad, especially when they had just been through such a terrible trauma during the birth. And it was surely yet another reason why they were so protective of me while I was growing up, wanting to keep me away from every possible danger that they imagined might be lurking in the world outside our home, waiting to pounce. They knew already how easy it was to lose a small child.

But, however much we watch over our children, accidents will always happen and I believe that more come about inside the home than outside it. When I was four, we still didn’t have an inside bathroom and so we used to fill an iron tub in front of the fire in the front room with boiling water from saucepans heated up on the stove. Mum was filling the tub one day and I became impatient with the whole laborious process, wanting to play in it immediately. Not realising that the water was still boiling hot, I plunged my arm in up to the shoulder while Mum was looking the other way. The skin all the way up my arm was burned, leaving yet more scars that are still with me today as a reminder of how easily accidents can happen. Despite having lived with the scars all these years, I don’t remember the actual incident, but I do remember the subsequent ambulance ride to the hospital with Dad, the wailing of the sirens and the worried look on his face. Yet again they had seen how easily they could lose or damage me and their determination to keep me swathed in cotton wool grew stronger still.

They had both lost too much in their lives to be willing to allow me to take any unnecessary risks. Despite the restrictions which their fear put on me, it also made me feel very loved and very special at the same time.