This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (9 page)

Into our decaying streets they came, useful scapegoats for the overcrowding, the appalling conditions, the poverty, the absence of hope and aspiration. One of Roger Mayne’s 1956 photographs brilliantly captures the cultural collision. Four West Indian men are pictured sauntering into Southam Street (perhaps they were heading for number 27), relaxed but wary. One looks at Mayne’s camera with amusement, two are half-smiling. But the man in front is on the look-out for trouble as they head towards a group of young guys gathered round the steps leading up to a front door. Youths with grey, pinched faces who don’t yet seem to have noticed the quartet ambling towards them.

The black men are dressed in stylish jumpers and jerkins, baggy trousers and wide-brimmed hats, set at just the right angle. Four little white boys stare, glued to the spot as if they were witnessing a Martian invasion. I was six when that photo was taken, living in that exact location at that exact time. I remember very well the cards in newsagents’ windows (we were instructed to check them on our way to school to see if anything interesting and cheap was being offered for sale). Those headed ‘Rooms to let’ were, like most of the rest, handwritten,
but the legend ‘No Blacks’ could have been pre-printed, it was on so many of them. Often it was accompanied by ‘No Irish’ and ‘No dogs’.

On stifling summer evenings, the little communities that gathered on the steps of the houses in Southam Street, their numbers swelled by the need of most inhabitants to escape the intolerable heat indoors, became a daunting challenge for any passing West Indian. The preferred method of provocation was to flick little missiles, usually rolled-up strips of the silver paper from their cigarette packets, at any black face that came within range. If their victim stopped to remonstrate there’d be a row, and often a full-blown fight. If he chose to ignore them and walk on, he would have to endure the catcalls that followed him down the street.

These black men were bus conductors, postmen and hospital porters and tended to be older, wiser and more self-controlled than their tormentors – young, thin Teddy Boys, either unemployed or still at school. But there was little doubt that those silver pellets conveyed the hostility of most of the community.

Maybe a year or so before Mayne encapsulated the simmering tension on our street, a young woman had hammered desperately on the door of 107 Southam Street. I have no idea who she was or why she ran to Lily for help. But I do remember why the Teddy Boys were chasing her. She had committed the ultimate sin in the eyes of her pursuers: she was a white girl who’d gone out with a black man. Lily went to the door and ushered her inside. Four or five Teds began to throw stones and junk from the streets at our window, shouting that the girl was a ‘fucking wog-lover’. We cowered inside, transfixed
by terror, until eventually they gave up and went away. This must have been around 1955, during the first stirrings of the rancour that would lead to the Notting Hill race riots three years later.

Was Lily different from most of her neighbours? That incident stays with me as evidence that she was. A kind woman, with instinctive Christian ethics, she was constantly exhorting Linda and me to see the good in everybody and did her best to instil compassion and tolerance in her children. I’d like to think that when the tensions exploded into the Notting Hill riots of August 1958, our three rooms in 149 Southam Street were a bastion of liberal values. And I believe that was in all probability the case, though I have no concrete evidence for it. I was too young then to grasp the complexities of the crisis; to absorb much more than the sense of fear and threat on the streets – and we already lived with that every day, to some degree.

I haven’t the first idea what Steve’s views were, either on politics in general or immigration in particular. I can’t say I remember ever hearing him using what we would now call racist language, but by this time I barely saw him and wasn’t privy to his conversations. Back then the complaint that immigrants were ‘coming over here and taking our jobs’ was practically a mantra – a soundtrack to our lives as familiar as moaning about the weather, or the filthy state of the streets or the absence of police on the beat (a common grievance in 1950s Notting Hill) – and given the prevailing atmosphere it would be remarkable if Steve was a non-conformist. There certainly wouldn’t have been any black faces in the pubs where he played the piano, all of which had a saloon bar, a public bar and a colour bar.

The additional accusation that ‘they’ were taking over houses meant for us could have had a particular potency for Lily and Steve. But as well as being compassionate Lily was an intelligent woman, and would surely have been clear-sighted enough to observe that, far from ‘jumping the queue’ for one of the council houses for which she had been patiently waiting for ten years by then, black immigrants were being squeezed into the same sordid, decrepit buildings that we were occupying.

The August riots of 1958, so far as I know, didn’t spread to Southam Street. Linda told me that there’d been fights in Bramley Road, where one of her friends lived, and the siege of Blenheim Crescent, during which white youths tried to burn down a house full of black immigrants, took place half a mile away on the other side of Ladbroke Grove. So even at eight years of age I knew that our little world was being discussed in every newspaper – variously described as Notting Hill, Notting Dale, Kensal New Town or North Kensington – and suddenly the focus of national interest.

I have no doubt that Lily would have stood up for the small, beleaguered black community who had come to live among us. I like to think that if we’d had any black neighbours, she would have been one of those Notting Hill women who did their shopping for them – black women didn’t dare go outside during the riots. That she would have agreed with Justice Salmon’s famous pronouncements when sentencing four white youths to four years’ imprisonment for the part they played in the mayhem: ‘Everyone, irrespective of the colour of their skin, is entitled to walk through our streets in peace, with their heads erect and free from fear. As far as the law is concerned, you are entitled to think what you like, however foul your thoughts; to
feel what you like, however brutal and debased your emotions; to say what you like, providing you do not infringe the rights of others, or imperil the Queen’s peace, but once you translate your dark thoughts and brutal feelings into savage acts such as these the law will be swift to punish you, the guilty, and to protect your victims.’

There were 108 arrests for offences ranging from insulting behaviour to grievous bodily harm. Mercifully, nobody was killed during the six days of rioting. But it would be only eight months before somebody was.

During 1958, the tensions on the streets were mirrored by increasingly strained relations at 149 Southam Street. Making ends meet was growing even more difficult. Steve had been out of work for months but continued to play the pubs and clubs, returning in the early hours, when he returned at all, and sleeping in until midday. His violence towards Lily was, for the time, at the mild end of the domestic abuse spectrum – many women put up with worse – but it’s hard to express just how terrifying it was for a child to lie there at night listening to all the shouting and screaming, fearing for his mother; hard to convey the deep unhappiness it caused. Steve was a dark shadow in our life, and Linda in particular was becoming more and more contemptuous of him.

The pools win was a distant memory. The Rowe Housing Trust had decided to remove all ‘pay-as-you-go’ electricity meters from their Southam Street properties because they were being robbed so frequently, mostly by residents
desperate for cash. That meant one more bill for Lily to struggle with.

One terrible day is etched on my memory: the day everything came to a head over a pet dog we had acquired after Linda passed her Eleven-Plus. Once my sister had persuaded Lily to let us have a dog as a reward, Linda and I had gone to Battersea Dogs’ Home and fallen in love with a hairy, black mongrel with a sweet nature and bags of energy. We named her Cheeky and brought her back home with us. Our love for that dog was as fierce as Steve’s hatred of her. He seemed offended by our devotion to Cheeky, and shouted at Lily for letting us have her in the first place. Lily shouted back and refused to upset us by obeying Steve’s decree to return our pet to the dogs’ home.

A compromise was reached. Cheeky was to be placed in the yard on a chain whenever Steve was at home. Given how rare this was, that didn’t seem too unreasonable. In any case, Cheeky was terrified of Steve and would much rather not have been around when he was.

On that awful day, Steve came home early and drunk. It was around 6pm and he must have been drinking since lunchtime. Lily was cooking dinner on the gas stove on the landing. The stove, like the sink, was stand-alone, and when the oven was on the entire cooker was too hot to touch. Cheeky was in the kitchen. It was a bitterly cold day and when Steve insisted that she be taken down to the yard, Lily and Linda pleaded for her to be allowed to stay indoors.

Voices were raised and Steve moved menacingly towards the dog, which ran to the only shelter available and sat, petrified, in the space beneath the oven. There she remained, even though
her back was touching the underside of the oven and being burned by the hot metal. While we cried, the dog howled and Steve yelled, Lily was on her hands and knees, trying to coax poor Cheeky to leave her refuge. When the dog was finally extracted, shaking with fear, there was a large bald patch where the heat from the oven had singed off her fur.

This was a watershed for Linda: the point at which her dislike and disapproval of Steve crystallized into hatred. From that day onwards, I watched my sister become a much more formidable opponent for Steve.

Linda had matured very early, both physically and emotionally. At eleven she was already bigger than Lily. The tone she used when speaking to Steve, even before the incident with the dog, was increasingly scornful. Steve was spending more nights away but when he did stumble in, drunk and abusive, he often found his daughter waiting to defend Lily and to remonstrate with him for his fecklessness.

On one occasion I saw Linda attempting to kick and punch Steve while Lily tried to restrain her. Linda marched down to our room and returned a few minutes later with her Girl Guide’s penknife open in her hand. With a look of utter determination on her face, she launched an attack on her father. The knife would probably have struggled to cut butter but Steve’s face was grey as he fended off and finally disarmed his daughter. Linda ran off with Cheeky. After several hours Lily found her sitting on a park bench in Wormwood Scrubs and persuaded her to come home.

One winter’s day the year before, when Lily, Linda and I had been queuing to pay the rent at the cashier’s grille in the Rowe Housing Trust offices, we had noticed a poster inviting
applications to emigrate to Australia. A picture of an ocean liner sailing into a sunlit port, surrounded by images of kangaroos and koalas, promised ‘a better life’ for just £10 per person. Lily looked at it for a long time before saying, almost to herself, ‘Shall we leave your father and go to Australia?’

She would have been almost thirty-six then, still a young woman but worn down with the pain and drudgery of her life. She carried her burdens cheerfully for her children, but she was desperate to improve our standard of living. Could we have joined the ranks of the emigrants known as the Ten Pound Poms? The Australian government, in a bid to expand the population and attract workers for their developing industries, offered assisted passage to adults, and children, in fact, travelled free. But however keen they were to have us, would we have been allowed to go without Steve? I don’t know. All I can see, looking back, is a woman dreaming of ‘a better life’ feeling sorely tempted to climb into that poster and away from the slums of Southam Street. The response from Linda and me was firm and implacable. We didn’t care about leaving Steve, but we were not prepared to leave London. ‘No,’ we said. ‘We are not going to Australia.’

The moment passed, Lily paid the rent and we went home.