My Name Is Why. Lemn Sissay
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distressed, because they had started to call him, ‘chocolate boy’.
When it came to the colour of my skin my parents referred to me as chocolate. It would have been impossible to ignore the dark-skinned heroes in 1970. Muhammad Ali was at his most famous that year. No one told me I was the same colour as him. No one told me I was the same colour as Martin Luther King. In my parents’ eyes, though, there were no black heroes. In their world, Africa was full of poor people waiting to be saved.
Racist comments from the outer world became more frequent. Mum and Dad’s response was to tell me to ignore it or to say back, ‘We are colour blind,’ or ‘We are all human beings. We are all God’s Children,’ or else: ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me.’ But names weren’t the problem. The underlying unkindness was the problem. We don’t fear the snakebite. We fear the venom. It has been formulated inside the snake from the moment it was born. It was the underlying unkindness of other children that bothered me because it came from their parents.
My mum fostered a child as her mother did before her; only my mum fostered a ‘coloured’ baby in 1967, in a time of racial intolerance in England. Some smiled and stopped to look at me in my pram and others spat on the back of her coat as she walked by. Years later they would do the same to me. So whatever this racism was, it would be the shadow to the light of my parents’ love.
CHAPTER 3
Meet me by the morning
On the corner of night
Where the mist rises
Where love might
Every street has its weird family. Often they are not weird at all, just bohemian, childless, pious, snobby, too well educated, super-stylish. They’re just different. You never think it’s your family, though. No one does. Our family loved God and God loved us. We feared God. We lived in love and in fear of God. It was a lot for me to take on board, especially as I also loved Jubblys, Curly Wurlys, R. White’s Lemonade, a quarter of Bon Bons, Sherbet Dip Dabs, Milky Bars. And I didn’t fear any of them.
I was a happy child, always listening to adults, to what was being said, trying to pick up the root of the conversation. I was inquisitive and unafraid. Another way of looking at it might be that I was so afraid of missing something that I had to know everything that was going on around me.
Granddad Munro made wooden chests for each of us. One for Norman. One for Christopher. One for Sarah. Outside we ran free. The Flower Park, the Big Park and the copse near the school – these were my adventure playgrounds. I was a regular candidate for the early-bed brigade and spent much of my time mooning at my friends from the bedroom window.
Mum called me in one day, but for once I wasn’t in trouble. Mum and Dad were in the kitchen. ‘Get upstairs!’ she shouted at me. But I didn’t go upstairs – not all the way. I stopped to listen as she continued with the same tone to my dad.
‘Just go out and do it. Now! Before the whole town sees it,’ she said, banging cutlery, rearranging chairs, slamming cupboards.
Mum was a nurse. I wondered whether she was like this in the hospital when she delivered the babies. ‘Just go, now! Here, take this, and you’ll need a bucket too, won’t you?’ The sarcastic tone hung in the air.
As Dad walked out the front with a mop and a bucket, I followed. On the red-brick gable-end wall of our semi-detached, someone had scrawled in giant letters: ‘BASTILLE’.
‘Dad, what’s Bastille?’
Unusually for him, he didn’t explain, but carried on sponging the wall and said, ‘Look it up.’ So I headed back in for the encyclopaedia.
‘Bastille was a fortress in Paris. For most of its history it was used as a State Prison . . .’ The rest of the day we spent on tenterhooks. It had got to Mum. And Dad too. He just shut himself up in the front room for hours. I didn’t think it had anything to do with me.
‘I bet it’s those kids,’ Mum said.
Our mantelpiece was inhabited imperiously by Wedgwood figurines: maidens with long necks and flapping ducks on their way to market. There was a disparaging tone towards the next-door neighbours because they didn’t go to church. They couldn’t afford Wedgwood. And they spent their money on bingo – gambling is the Devil’s work, after all. The grass grew wildly in their garden and their children were scruffier. But I liked them. I liked my neighbours and I liked their children. I liked everybody. Why wouldn’t I?
Mum had short black hair and dark eyes. She had stern teeth with a slight overhang. She was the louder personality. When she and Dad argued, she’d smash plates, throw ladles. I’d sit on the stairs listening to the chaotic cacophony, the clatter that underlay the stress of relationships and parenthood. She was volcanic and volatile. I never ever imagined that the arguments might have been about me.
She smelled like mums smell; there must be a smell a child is attuned to from being a baby, a cross between baby powder and witch hazel. I don’t believe that an adopted baby gets any less love from their parents than a child naturally born to them. For ages, until the end came, no matter how volatile the day had been, I would pray that she’d open the bedroom door before I slept. I’d pray that she’d sit on the edge of my bed and sing me to sleep as she did when I was younger: ‘You are my sunshine, my only sun-shine, you make me happy when skies are grey . . .’ I believed her.
Her smile seemed like it was fighting back sadness or tears. Dad was broody, tall, witty and silent. In contrast to Mum’s agitated discordance, Dad did dad things quietly. He read the paper and occasionally let it all out on the squash court. One of the social workers wrote that he was ‘basically shy and at ease talking about academic matters but more difficult when talking of personal matters’.
Mrs. Greenwood looked more tense and anxious and talked about her job and husband’s new job rather a lot. Husband not too good about putting himself forward so is thinking he may have taken on too much by becoming Head of Junior school. He is basically, a shy person. One has to work very hard to draw him into discussions; he seems alright when discussing at an academic level but isn’t really too good when trying to communicate at a feeling level.
Told Mrs. Greenwood that we had no intention of removing Norman. This promoted further discussion on the management of him but it was obvious that things would not change overnight. She accepted this as being so but it was threatening to her to think that she and her husband with their expertise may have gone “wrong” somewhere!!!
Obviously need to support this couple through their unverbalised anxieties.
Norman continues to thrive; on the whole a satisfactory placement for him.
The front room was his library. It was the quiet room, which doubled up as a posh room for visitors. The bay window looked out to the laburnum tree, which at night threw grue-some shadows back at us.
Cornerstone books for me back then were the Bible and books on the books of the Bible, the Famous Five series, Secret Seven, of course, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. C.S. Lewis was a rock star in our house. All of the books stacked along the bookshelf in the front room waited for our hungry eyes. I don’t remember other novels or poetry – except T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which was my favourite, and I memorised it.
Mum and Dad said I was like Macavity. It felt affectionate then, but later I realised something wasn’t right. Macavity was dark, quick and a thief. Macavity was such a contrast to my blond blue-eyed brother Chris. His affectionate nickname was Bunty.
11.12.74
There are no problems with Norman. Mrs. Greenwood does not think of the boy as a foster child. He has been with this family since he was a couple of months old and Mrs. Greenwood considers him as theirs.