Black Gold of the Sun (8 page)

Cloaked as entertainment the programme was ostensibly victimless. At school the following Monday, when Mr Ramsden the PE teacher liked to tell me I had a chip on my shoulder, I could see its consequences. Unless I was as quiescent as a Black and White Minstrel I deserved to be cautioned and, in Mr Ramsden's case, given detention for ‘too much lip'. Fantasy was as potent as reality.

Over on ITV you could find
Love Thy Neighbour
, a sitcom about a Caribbean couple who moved next door to a white racist and his wife. It was supposed to show prejudice as farce by revealing both men as bigots who traded insults across the garden fence.

‘Sambo.'

‘Honky.'

‘Nig-nog.'

‘Whitey.'

To my ears, the white barbs dug deeper than the black ones. Any time I watched the show, I could feel my skin prickle.

‘Coon. Monkey. Wog. Jungle bunny. Rubber lips. With your smelly food and your jungle drums. Taking our jobs. Go back to where you come from.'

The audience laughed and laughed, but I could never see what was funny. Or for that matter what was amusing about
Rings on their Fingers
,
Mind Your Language
,
Till Death Us Do Part
and the other comedies based on the notion that black people were as entertaining as chimps in the zoo.

From what I could make out race was the great obsession of 1970s Britain. When Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham and Brendan Batson signed for West Bromwich Albion, the crowd hurled bananas at them. If one of these players came near the touchline the fans dropped the fruit and spat instead.

On August Bank Holiday, Kodwo, Esi and I would watch TV news reports of the Notting Hill Carnival, howling at the screen. It was the same every year. First a grave-voiced announcement about the number of arrests that year, as if the festival was nothing but a face-off between the police and black youth. Then images of policemen dancing in the street with an overweight black woman. Threat followed by passivity. Black people might seem frightening, but at heart they were really happy children.

‘They could at least vary it one year,' said Kodwo, after
we'd turned off the screen in disgust. ‘Like they could arrest some fat women or something, or ban pictures of police posing with coconuts as fake breasts.'

Did white people act as they did out of ignorance or malice? It was hard to say, but the question seemed to be getting more urgent. Eyebrows knitted, Mrs Thatcher worried that Britain was in danger of being ‘swamped' by ‘people with a different culture'. The British Movement was marching on Brick Lane, and bands with skinhead fans such as Sham 69 and Cockney Rejects were playing
Top of the Pops
.

A fashion for fourteen-hole Doc Marten boots swept the third year of Queensbury Juniors. Kids essayed furtive ‘Sieg heils' when teachers turned their backs. They chalked ‘Wogs out' on the playground walls and carved National Front logos in the desks with their compasses.

Leaving assembly I accidentally knocked into Kevin Dyer. As I stepped back he flung a punch at my head. My glasses spun to the floor. Blinking, I saw him crouched before me, fists balled. A crowd of boys formed round us. ‘Cunt,' he said, pale eyes bulging.

‘Blackcunt.'

‘Fuckingblackcunt.'

Hands shoved me towards him.

Voices hissed in my ear.

‘You're not going to let him get away with that, are you?'

I clenched my fists and set my legs apart. Kevin Dyer snarled at me.

‘Come on then, you cunt,' he said.

I wanted to hit him. I could feel my fist dent into his cheek until it met the resistance of bone. I wanted his lips bloody and his eyes swollen shut. But even as I imagined this I watched myself break free of the circle of boys and pick up my glasses.

‘He's bottled it,' said a voice behind me, as I walked away.

Why didn't I stay? Was I too scared to stand up for myself? It was true I felt shaken. But the sensation of fear was missing when I turned away. Even anger had drained away. I was quite calm.

What did it matter what Kevin Dyer called me? If I went looking I could find the words ‘black cunt' scratched into a desk just as easily as hear it from his lips.

‘Wog', ‘rubber lips', ‘sambo', ‘jungle bunny'– the words drifted through the school like background radiation. You just had to stand in the corridor as the kids rushed between classes and your Geiger counter would start clicking like crazy. In school, on television, out in the street, they were completely commonplace.

Every time I heard them they still hurt, though. I told myself they described me no better than the glistening face of a black-and-white minstrel. In doing so, I realized I faced a choice between fantasy and truth. Either I could play along with white people's expectations of me as a minstrel or I could confound their prejudice and seek out the real, paradoxical nature of the world. That was the true fight. What did Kevin Dyer matter by comparison?

On 4 June 1979 my childhood ended.

I'd just turned eleven. Family photos show me poised with a spoon, about to rain destruction on a chocolate fudge sundae at Baskin Robbins during birthday celebrations. Benny Mitchell, Greg O'Rourke, Jamie Brown and I had just watched
Battlestar Galactica
at the Empire cinema, Leicester Square, in ‘Sensurround'. In our violently stimulated state, laser blasts seemed to caroom round the white-tiled walls of the ice-cream parlour. As I pictured it at that moment the future involved screaming guns and faster-than-light star cruisers.

After my birthday, though, the green leather family photo albums that had recorded first days at school in awkward new uniforms, outings to Hampton Court and grumbling visits to obscure relatives go blank. The Eshuns turn away from the camera. Our attention is diverted by foreign affairs. On 4 June a coup takes place in Ghana. The photo albums are a void after this date because, for us, the promise of a vivid future has become a thing of the past.

In the beginning the word meant nothing to me. I heard it repeated over and over behind the door of the living room as aunties and uncles huddled in conference with my parents. From their hushed tones it was obviously something fearful.

‘Two steps forward, one step back,' I heard my mother say, to murmured agreement.

But how bad could a ‘coup' be?

As far as I could tell from eavesdropping, the grownups were debating whether to stay in London or return to Ghana. That would mean enrolment at Mfanstipim, Achimota or one of the country's other boarding schools where the boys slept in dorm rooms, wore shorts till they were sixteen and saluted in the presence of teachers. It was not a prospect I looked forward to.

In the
Observer
that Sunday I saw for the first time a picture of Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. He was tall and light-skinned, the child of a Ghanaian mother and a Scottish father. The coup had been staged by junior ranking officers like him from their base at Burma Camp. Rawlings called it a revolution. Politicians and senior army officers of the previous regime were being arrested en masse, said the report. Afrifa, Acheampong and Akuffo, the three former heads of state, were to stand trial on corruption charges under penalty of death. I read through the story a second time and put the newspaper down.

Judging by the reaction of the grown-ups, the coup was a grave event. To me it sounded thrilling. I pictured crowds amok on the streets of Accra. The mighty being torn from their palaces. Buccaneers seizing the crown. It was like a real-life version of
The Count of Monte Cristo
or
The Prince and the Pauper
.

No one had asked my opinion about returning to Ghana – I was against it for reasons of tight discipline and dorm
rooms – but a febrile atmosphere pervaded the house. There were late-night crisis meetings, phone calls from Accra at unfeasible hours, aunties in tears on the doorstep. If a coup meant the upending of the existing order, then it was already working its magic. One step forward, two steps back. There was no way to tell where we were heading any more.

Perhaps it's because of this, because I was dazzled by the realization that the adult world was no more ordered than a child's, that I failed to notice the real effects of the coup until it was too late. I couldn't have done anything to stop them, of course. But it might have given me the chance to reflect that when it comes, change rarely takes the form you expect.

That summer my parents didn't throw a party.

In the attic the supplies of duty-free whisky and brandy ran dry. The sweep of a torch revealed only the broken Scalextric sets and radio-controlled helicopters of Christmases past. My heart still beat a secret rhythm for Penelope and Eurydice, but we hardly had any visitors to the house any more.

Yet for a while it seemed we were too far from its epicentre to feel the coup's tremors. My father disappeared into the Volvo every morning. My mother made jollof rice and chicken stew. On Sundays, Kodwo, Esi and I sprawled on their bed, eating toast and reading the newspapers, the radio tuned to the World Service for news about Ghana. From round the globe I heard reports of natural disasters
and threatening noises made to the west by Mr Brezhnev. There was nothing from Ghana, though. Squashed between my parents while our neighbours washed their cars outside, it felt as if there could be no safer place on earth.

It was round then the disappearances started. I noticed it first with the wood-panelled Sony Betamax recorder. My father had heaved it home in the primitive dawn of domestic video manufacture and it had remained with us for years, defeating all attempts to make it record, until, overtaken by the march of VHS, it had been retired to an ornamental position beneath a doily in the living room. Without explanation the Betamax vanished one day, leaving behind nothing but a pale rectangle on the sideboard. Its departure was followed by the industrial-sized Nikon camera with which, crouched behind a tripod, my dad used to corral Esi, Kodwo and me into posing for him while we whinnied like foals. From the garage my mother's shipping trunks went missing. Even the signet ring my father had always worn on his left hand disappeared.

They'd made up their mind and we were going back to Ghana, I decided, ferreting through their dressing table for an Achimota school prospectus or other signs of imminent departure. For all the discomforts of school, I'd grown used to Queensbury. I knew the way through the maze of alleyways that ran behind our house and why it was a good idea to avoid the chip shop on Roe Green Lane, haunt of the neighbourhood skinheads. I liked the wild raspberries that grew in Harold Trescothick's back garden and the
giant jars of acid drops and lemon sherbets arrayed behind the counter at Stanford's, the corner shop.

For a week I expected to hear that we'd be following the Betamax abroad. My parents said nothing, though. It was as if they were waiting for a sign. By Sunday, with still no word, I started to relax. Stretched out on my parents' bed reading the football scores I'd missed most of the World Service report until my father turned up the volume. Afrifa, Acheampong and Akuffo had been found guilty, said the newscaster. Their sentence would be death by firing squad. Far from bringing order to Ghana, Rawlings had proved to be just another tyrant. My mother looked at my father.

‘We can't go home,' she said. ‘When they start killing people this is too much.'

It may have been that they were waiting until that verdict to make up their minds. Yet somehow I doubt it. If I could have looked beyond my appetite for wild raspberries and lemon sherbets I might have realized they'd already made their decision. The possessions disappearing from our house weren't being shipped to Ghana, but jettisoned to make room for our new life.

It was only then that we began feeling the impact of the coup. As an employee of the previous regime it was too dangerous for my father to return home. But staying meant the surrender of all his official ties with Ghana. By the end of the summer there had been a new round of disappearances. This time they took place in full view. My father left his job. With it went the midnight-blue Volvo. And
also our house which had been rented for us by the High Commission.

Packing the remainder of our possessions into a removal lorry we left on a brilliantly clear day, the splendour of which struck me as mocking tribute to our downfall. Harold Trescothick waved weakly from his front door, but I felt too miserable to say goodbye. Squeezed into the back of a rented Ford Escort beside Esi, Kodwo and a quantity of suitcases, I stared furiously at the frayed laces on my trainers, trying to keep my mind blank of apple trees and summer parties so I wouldn't start to cry.

Not that we were going far. Our new house stood in a row of terraces in the neighbouring suburb of Kingsbury. It had a small back garden and three bedrooms that seemed ominously cramped by the time the removal men had unpacked the lorry. The scent of perfume hovered in the bathroom. Long strands of brown hair clogged the sink. Outside a dog barked maniacally. No one tried to stop it. On foot, the distance between Kingsbury and Queensbury was only twenty minutes, but it seemed to me that we'd crossed a chasm. Perhaps all of the things that disappeared from our life still exist somewhere in the gulf, I reflected. Maybe they never went away at all. Maybe it's us that have vanished instead.

Across the divide, the laws of nature were now inverted.

My father stayed home while my mother went to work. She had found a job as an auxiliary nurse on the geriatric ward of Edgware General Hospital. In the evening she'd arrive home hobbling, trailed by the scent of antiseptic. I pictured her tending to the flesh of her patients, watching some bloom and others wither. Her back ached, she said. Her face was more lined than I remembered. Broadly speaking, however, I was an unsympathetic witness to her troubles.

‘Is it too much to ask?' she said. ‘Can't you children clean up before I get home?'