‘To hell with my knee, I’m bored,’ he said. He stood up abruptly and sat down again. ‘I wake up bored. It’s unbearable to have no place or point anywhere. Boredom is my cancer; it’s killing me. “He died of boredom” – scrawl it on my gravestone.’
‘Let me tell you something, Luca,’ she said. ‘Your anger is preventing you thinking what to do. You should meditate.’
‘I must? Do not mock me,’ he said. ‘Haven’t I tried to be kind tonight?’
‘You must meet me on Friday morning at nine. I will give you a free lesson. When you realise you enjoy it, you can sign on with me. Meditation helps with difficult things like anxiety and fear. Believe me, you will feel calm.’
‘How can it be a solution to sit and do nothing? I already do that! Your mother would never recommend anything so ridiculous. She was full of ideas.’
‘Remember, I am not a telephone to her. I was always a bigger fan of my father’s suicidal extremity.’
‘You were?’
‘Mother rightly called Father “insurrectionary”. Don’t we need trouble-makers and tribunes of the proletariat? It shows greatness to protect the poor and exploited! You rant and choose to be offended rather than hear me.’
‘Hear your nonsense?’ He got up and gestured at the room. ‘Look at this place—’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘It’s untidy, it’s even dirty. There is ash and candle wax here. Your clothes are on the floor, the glasses are dirty and the bins are unemptied. You, from your decent family, can barely care for yourself. And don’t you think I’m sick of fatuous ideas? Do you not have the ability to do anything to alleviate your condition?’
‘Like give you my mother’s email address?’
‘I understand now that it is an enviable talent, almost a kind of genius, to find a good partner. You and I – we haven’t achieved good marriages. Or even children, and certainly not financial stability. We are just clinging on. This is the new Europe: democracy, religion, culture – it could easily be knocked out again. All of us are on the razor’s edge. The country has collapsed. Soon it will be the Muslims or the Chinese who will rule us – anyone who really believes, anyone with a passionate intensity. Your father – he fought, he believed.’
‘You look anguished.’
‘He had an authoritarian state of mind. He was unshakeable. It’s commendable and mad. It—’
‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘Just don’t bother to say anything about my father …’
He opened his mouth. She got up, wobbled a little on her feet, gathered herself together, took a step forward – and slapped him.
After a time he said, ‘Will you tell your mother that you struck me?’
‘I don’t speak to her.’ She sat down again. ‘I haven’t spoken to her for months and won’t again until she gets in touch, and who knows when that will be. When the time comes I will ask her about you, yes.’ She went on, ‘I failed. I failed at my chosen thing. I failed for a long time. Failure was good for me. I found something else. I have begun to teach acting and Shakespeare to schoolchildren.’
‘Do they understand it?’
‘I’m a pessimistic optimist,’ she said. ‘I try to give people a vocabulary, a language, to express what they need to say. I love it. I enjoy it more than anything. What do you love? What do you love to do? Really, it’s the only question.’ She shook her fist. ‘My thirties have been a bit shaky. But my forties will be a riot.’
He was still rubbing his face. ‘I’ll come to the meditation on Friday. I’m sure it will help,’ he said. ‘Do you use your spare room for the class?’
She opened her drawer and handed him a card. ‘No, why do you ask? Here’s the address.’
He put it in his pocket. ‘Thank you. But tell me, are you renting that spare room?’
‘It’s hardly a room,’ she said. ‘You had a good look in there.’
‘I could help you with the rent. I’ve served culture, in my way – I could put your books in alphabetical order. I’ll look after you again, Frida,’ he said.
‘It would be nice to have company. But I think I might get a cat.’ She sighed and said, ‘Don’t worry, Luca, there will be other paradises.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, why would there be?’
She stood up and opened the curtains. The light was coming up. He got up and stood beside her. Together they looked into the park opposite.
‘They’ll be opening the park soon,’ she said. ‘Will you walk across it? I’ll wave to you.’
‘Okay,’ he said, putting on his hat and coat. ‘I’ll do that. Goodbye.’
As he walked across the park, he was determined not to turn and look back because she wouldn’t be there to wave. No one was sincere; and, anyway, he couldn’t possibly have anything she wanted. But, at the exit, he did stop and turn. He thought he should; it would soon be time to face important things. And she was there because she knew he would turn. She was standing, doing her breathing exercises, he guessed. And before he went away, he waved back.
The Heart of Whiteness
E. R. Braithwaite’s To Sir, With Love
I didn’t know I was coloured until I went to school. It wasn’t until much later that I knew what it meant. Books helped me: in Bromley Library in 1970, aged sixteen – around the time I was reading Ian Fleming, the Saint, P. G. Wodehouse, James Baldwin and Mickey Spillane – I found To Sir, With Love. As a half-Indian, half-English schoolboy living in the suburbs with no vocabulary for describing his experience, this 1959 novel about a black teacher in Cable Street in London’s East End was a revelation. At last there was a way to talk about race and what racism might do to someone. This had barely begun as a public discussion in Britain, except in the negative by people like Enoch Powell, who, in the midst of Britain’s imperial decay and decline, were attempting a resurgence of supremacy.
This straightforward and moving story of an educated Guyanese in a new-style ‘free’ school – a man journeying into whiteness, class, miscegenation and teenage sexuality – helped me see what might be possible for a tyro writer tackling a subject that had hardly been broached by British artists. Growing up in an atmosphere of casual and deliberate racism, forbidden from visiting various houses, and with fascist groups like the British National Party around us in South London, I was beginning to think of how I might approach this material in fiction and begin to write myself out of the corner I was in.
With its reference to Rosa Parks and the early civil rights protests in the US, the novel begins with an insult on a London bus. A woman refuses to sit next to a black man because of his colour. It is a very clear beginning to the story. The woman wants this man to know something. It is not that he is merely dehumanised for her: she could, after all, merely ignore him or, in fact, not see him at all. But she doesn’t. He is not ‘invisible’ as he might once have been. In his essay ‘Marrakech’ (1939), George Orwell comments, ‘[I]t is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces – besides, there are so many of them! […] Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff …?’
But now, after the empire, and as London begins to change, the black man is too present, and so the woman becomes coercive. She insists, with her refusal to share a seat with him, that he see himself through her eyes and know his place. The insult not only creates a necessary distance between them – making it clear that he is abhorrent to her – but tells us that she is superior to him and that this gives her the power to hurt. She could traumatise him repeatedly if she wished. At the moment of the insult he no longer has an identity of his own; he exists only as she sees him. She counts for more than he does and, because he is inferior, she can enjoy humiliating him. And we know, as she petrifies him, that she takes pleasure in it.
To Sir, With Love bristles with such humiliations and the attempts of the new teacher, Ricky Braithwaite, t
o live with them. He has to. He loves the idea of Britain, though Britain doesn’t love him as much as he thought it might. Braithwaite has served in the RAF and now, after the war, is desperate for a job. He is a qualified electrical engineer, but because of his colour has been unable to find a position. He has been rejected repeatedly and told that whites will not accept a black man in authority over them.
To Sir, With Love is a shocking novel because the desire to degrade and humiliate is so strong in the whites. Braithwaite has to deal with this constantly. As the only major black character in the book, this is the story of a man trying not to lose his mind while keeping his temper – a daily struggle involving him in such an awful, limiting self-restraint that it is difficult to know whether he is a saint or masochist. He has, unfortunately, to be good all the time for fear of descending into the clichés with which the whites surround him.
The desire to degrade and humiliate is not simply an addictive sadistic amusement, although there is a great deal of that in this book. It is also the desire to sustain power: the power of whiteness, of whiteness as the norm, the core, the invisible standard of what a person should be in order to become entirely acceptable. This notion of whiteness begins to decline in the early post-war period, as the world starts to come to Britain, altering it forever. But in London, a city devastated by war, the pleasures of privilege and empire were never going to be easy to give up. Hence the desire to defend an already dead idea. The insult, therefore, is unambiguously and structurally supremacist. Blacks, Asians and others will always be secondary in derivation, with no identity of their own. They are like us, but never enough like us. They are separate; they are not authentic, but failures or ‘mimic men’, bad copies of the original. Their position is always impossible, which is how the whites like it.
Of course, as Ricky Braithwaite points out when teased and goaded to exasperation, there is nothing natural about this notion of whiteness as the supreme standard. It is as arbitrary and socially conditioned as every other moral ideal. The children begin to understand this because to a certain extent Braithwaite – under the descriptions of others – resembles the pupils he is trying to instruct. The immigrant, like the teenager, is gradually losing his home, his past, his safety and stability. Like them, he has been placed outside. He wants to be assimilated, to find a position where he can live a fruitful life, but the whites will not have it, preferring the fantasy of the black or alien intruder. What sustains racial insults might be the wish for unstained whiteness, for purity and a healthy world in which the intrusions of others’ gratification don’t exist. But there is another sense in which the racist never wants the pleasures of persecution to end.
If blacks are considered, in this branding, to be savages – uncontrolled, greedy, noisy, over-sexualised, dependent and so on – there is a similarity here with the children Braithwaite is teaching. One of Braithwaite’s colleagues, Weston, considers his job as ‘survival’ and the children as barely human. But if a place has been assigned to them, there is always the danger they will escape their fate. Someone, somewhere – women, children, deviants, blacks, colonial subjects – could be getting too excited and will have to be suppressed. As Orwell recognised, as a colonial administrator in Burma, for the ruler the key thing is the maintenance of order and ‘the long struggle not to be laughed at’.
However, Alex Florian, the novel’s headmaster, likes children and thinks of them as individuals rather than as a mob or horde. He knows how they and their parents suffered in the war and the deprivation they are currently living with. Braithwaite based Florian on Alex Bloom, the headmaster who ran the St George-in-the-East secondary modern school on Cable Street where E. R. Braithwaite himself taught. Bloom wanted to attempt a different way of interacting with children. Influenced by the work of Freud and his followers such as Melanie Klein and the psychoanalyst of children D. W. Winnicott, Bloom wanted to escape the Dickensian model of discipline, obedience and punishment to which English working-class children had long been subjected. Children were humiliated for their own good; nothing was feared more than the collapse of authority, which had to be sustained at all costs. But in the new thinking, new questions arose: what would happen if children didn’t represent the uncertainties of the adults? If they were not seen as having monstrous and uncontrollable appetites which had to be subjugated?
In To Sir, With Love the teacher Ricky Braithwaite sees that he has to change the children’s attitude to him as a black man before he can interact with them positively, before anything good can take place. Fear, submission and hate make only chaos. It’s significant that Ricky Braithwaite, despite Greenslade being a progressive school, doesn’t introduce more freedom into the situation in which he finds himself. He wants more rules, insisting on politeness and respect, knowing that we are profoundly dependent on the way others speak to us. He asks the children to read, explaining that they are made and constrained by language. This is why jokes and insults matter; no abuse is a trivial ‘one-off’. The insult is violent, political and authoritarian, part of a collective view which can be resisted. Poetry, for him, provides better words for things.
To Sir, With Love is partly a record of where we were in Britain at the beginning of the 60s. From this powerful testimony we can see what has changed and how we’ve remained the same. The language used about strangers and immigrants in the novel is used by fascists and fundamentalists today. Unsurprisingly, we are still people who love to hate, and are much bothered by what we imagine to be others’ pleasure. Their happiness is always more than ours; however much joy we might have, we have been cheated, deprived and exploited. We are missing out on something which the other, however poor they are, clearly enjoys. And what could be more intolerable than other people’s ecstasy?
The insult, which exposes this envy, excludes exchange. The woman on the bus and many other characters in the novel fear equality. What might happen if people encountered one another directly, without a barrier of subjection or oppression? But it is precisely because equality is unpredictable that it is also difficult and more dangerous than the dreary repetition of degradation. We will never not be ambivalent about others. We do know that worthwhile relationships can happen, and that equality makes difference possible.
Ricky Braithwaite knows he didn’t make the difficult world in which he has arrived, but he never gives up resisting its deadness in his own way. He knows he can bring it to life through language. Appearance isn’t destiny if we change the way we speak. And we can find ourselves in books, as I did with this one.
We Are the Wide-Eyed Piccaninnies
I was fourteen in 1968 and one of the horrors of my teenage years was Enoch Powell. For a mixed-race kid, this stiff ex-colonial zealot with his obscene, Grand Guignol talk of whips, blood, excreta, urination and wide-eyed piccaninnies was a monstrous, scary bogeyman. I remember his name being whispered by my uncles for fear I would overhear.
I grew up near Biggin Hill airfield in Kent, in the shadow of the Second World War. We walked past bomb sites every day; my grandmother had been a ‘fire watcher’ and talked about the terror of the nightly Luftwaffe raids. With his stern prophet’s nostalgia, bulging eyes and military moustache, Powell reminded us of Hitler, and the pathology of his increasing number of followers soon became as disquieting as his pronouncements. At school, Powell’s name soon become one terrifying word – Enoch. As well as being an insult, it began to be used with elation. ‘Enoch will deal with you lot,’ and, ‘Enoch will soon be knocking on your door, pal.’ ‘Knock, knock, it’s Enoch,’ people would say as they passed. Neighbours in the London suburbs began to state with some defiance, ‘Our family is with Enoch.’ More skinheads appeared.
It was said, after Powell mooted the idea of a Ministry of Repatriation, that we ‘offspring’, as he called the children of immigrants, would be sent away. ‘A policy of assisting repatriation by payment of fares and grants is part of the official policy of the Conservative Party,’ he stated in 1968. Sometimes, idly, I wonder
ed how I might like it in India or Pakistan, where I’d never been, and whether I’d be welcomed. But others said that if we were born here, as I was, it would be only our parents who would be sent back. We would, then, have to fend for ourselves, and I imagined a parentless pack of us unwanted mongrels, hunting for food in the nearby woods.
Repatriation, Powell said, ‘would help to achieve with minimum friction what must surely be the object of everyone – to prevent, so far as that is still possible, a major racial problem in the Britain of ad 2000’. It was clear: if Britain had lost an empire and not yet recovered from the war, our added presence would only cause more strife – homelessness, joblessness, prostitution and drug addiction. Soon the indigenous whites would be a ‘persecuted minority’ or ‘strangers’ in their own country. It would be our turn, presumably, to do the persecuting.
Powell, this ghost of the empire, was not just a run-of-the-mill racist. His influence was not negligible; he moved British politics to the right and set the agenda we address today. Politicians attack minorities when they want to impress the public with their toughness as ‘truth-tellers’. And Powell’s influence extended far. In 1976 – the year of the Clash’s ‘White Riot’ – and eight years after Powell’s major speeches, one of my heroes, the great Eric Clapton, ordered an audience to vote for Powell to prevent Britain becoming a ‘black colony’. Clapton said that ‘Britain should get the wogs out, get the coons out,’ before repeatedly shouting the National Front slogan ‘Keep Britain White’.
A middle-class, only child from Birmingham, socially inept and repressed, Powell had taken refuge in books and ‘scholarship’ for most of his life. He was happiest during the war, where he spent three years in military intelligence in India. It was ‘intoxicating’. Like a lot of Brits, he loved the empire and colonial India, where he could escape his parents and the constraints of Britain, and spend time with other men. Many Indians were intimidated by and subservient to British soldiers, as my family attested. Like most colonialists, Powell was a bigger, more powerful man in India than he’d have been in England. No wonder he was patriotic and believed that giving up the empire would be a disaster. ‘I had always been an imperialist and a Tory,’ he said.