Somewhere else it’s 1991 and Bernard Daniels, now retired, decides that he and Joyce should visit Sierra Leone once more before they’re both too old to travel. David doesn’t know a lot about the politics prevailing in West Africa just then but isn’t sure the journey is a good idea, and Andrew feels the same. Their dad waves their concerns aside. His sons are Brixton born, have never been to Africa and no doubt see it through their native English eyes as somewhere threatening, as a dark continent. Bernard and Joyce are Africans and have no such anxieties. They’re simply going home, and David harping on about the tensions growling round the lion mountains at the moment isn’t going to dissuade them. Bernard casts a cursory glance over the international pages in The Times, concluding that the situation over there is just business as usual by Sierra Leone standards. Siaka Stevens steps down a few years ago in favour of another ethnic Limba, Major General Joseph Momoh. There are all the customary attempts at overthrow, or at least allegations of the same, and all the usual retaliations by way of low-hanging fruit along the Kissy Road. Admittedly, there’s all this business going on with Momoh being forced to re-establish multi-party politics, with plenty of dark mutterings breaking out already in the opposition ranks, but Bernard knows that if he waits for a politically clear day to make their trip then he and Joyce will wait forever. It’s all settled. Flights are booked. There’s nothing else that David, Andrew and their families can do but cross their fingers and hope for the best, which obviously never works. In all their fretting over the fraught politics of Sierra Leone nobody has considered what’s currently happening across the border in Liberia, this being bloody and horrific civil war, most of it orchestrated by the leader of the National Patriotic Front, Charles Taylor. This is the man responsible for the most forceful and compelling slogan ever used in an election anywhere:
I KILLED YOUR MA.
I KILLED YOUR PA.
VOTE FOR ME.
Taylor decides it’s in his interests if fighting kicks off in Sierra Leone as well. He helps to found the Revolutionary United Front with ethnic Temne army corporal Foday Sankoh, expert in guerrilla warfare, trained in Britain and in Libya. When civil war erupts in Sierra Leone, Bernard and Joyce are in the middle of it, in their seventies, both ethnic Krios who are disliked by the native tribes, with no flights to or from the country and thus no way to get out. It’s terrifying. Lives are ending right across the street in unimaginable shock and fear and pleading, seldom with a gunshot, seldom swiftly. There are fashionable necklacings with burning tyres and twenty-minute executions using blunt machetes that can leave the murderers exhausted. Cowering in their hotel the couple peer out from between drawn curtains at the drifting smoke, the angry black tide sluicing up and down the street. Meanwhile, in England, David and the family are frantic, making calls to travel agents, embassies, and in the end somehow they bring their parents home, severely shaken but unharmed. Unharmed, and, in the case of Bernard, seemingly unaltered. Everything he’s seen confirms his strongly-held conviction that Sierra Leone’s native tribes are savages who only benefited from colonial rule and find themselves unable to exist without it. As for his opinions on events closer to home, these remain similarly unaffected. Bernard still refuses to bestow affection and encouragement on Andrew’s kids to the degree he does with David’s, while Andrew’s attempts to prove their father wrong by forcing Benjamin and Marcus to shine academically are by now ingrained and obsessive. David watches this unfolding and it’s like a ghost story, a haunting, an uncanny repetition of events and attitudes out of the past eerily manifesting in the present day, in 1997. Finally he gets a phone call from his brother one Saturday morning where Andrew can hardly talk, can’t get the words out properly. Marcus, his eldest son, has killed himself. Andy’s just heard about it from the college. Pressure of exams, they think. Oh, Christ. A terrible slow car crash that’s begun in Freetown forty years before reaches its point of impact and the Daniels family find themselves sat dazed and paralysed in the emotional debris, with blossoms nodding in the breeze all up and down the Kissy Road.
It’s 1997 and the Railway Club along the end of the St. Andrew’s Road by Castle Station is pretty much all that Eddie George is living for. He’s getting on, eighty or more, and he’s got one of those things that he can’t pronounce, sclerosis or what have you, but if he can get out from his place in Semilong down to his usual table in the club he’s happy just to have a Guinness and see all his friends. You get all sorts of people from the district going in there, that’s what Eddie likes about it. Couples with their children, lots of old gals and old fellers like himself and all the beautiful young women where there isn’t any harm in looking. Often when he’s in there he’ll bump into young Mick Warren and his family, Cathy his wife, sometimes his scruffy-looking sister and his two boys, Jack and Joe. Jack’s around six or seven and he seems to like having a chat with Eddie when he sees him. Eddie likes it too. They mostly talk a lot of nonsense with each other and it takes him back to when he was a boy himself, playing with all his sisters and his brothers on the pavement right outside their house in Scarletwell Street with his little wagons, and then later when his dad gave Eddie his own funny bicycle and cart before he died. The damn thing fell to bits only a few weeks after. It makes Eddie chuckle just to think of it while he’s calling his cab to take him to the Railway Club, but that sets off a thudding in his chest and so he just sits on the sofa and calms down while waiting for the taxi to arrive. It’s a grey day and what with Eddie’s eyes it’s looking kind of murky as he sits there in the tiny living room. He’s thinking about turning on the light just for a bit of cheer, damn the expense, right when his car turns up and toots its horn outside. Just standing up makes him feel dizzy, as if all the thoughts and the sensations in his head are draining to his feet. He lets the capable young driver shuffle him from his front door into a back seat of the vehicle, where he needs help to get his seat belt buckled properly. At least it’s warm, and when the engine starts up and they roll away he’s looking out the window at his neighbours’ flats and houses sliding backwards up the hill as he descends down Stanley Street towards St. Andrew’s Road. Stanley Street, Baker Street and Gordon Street. It’s taken Eddie some good years of living here in Semilong to figure out that they’re the names of famous English generals who relieved Mafeking and all that business, back more than a hundred years ago. For a good while he’s laboured under the impression that it’s all something to do with the film actor Stanley Baker, and that makes him smile as well. The taxi-cab turns left into St. Andrew’s Road, and on his right there’s all the yards, furniture reclamation businesses and lock-ups that have been here for as long as Eddie can remember, some with signboard lettering upon their peeling wooden gates that looks to Eddie’s eye like it might be Victorian or something. Across the road from these and on his left, there are the openings to the neat row of hilly streets that make up Semilong, all parallel with one another, Hampton Street and Brook Street and all them. Eddie’s always been very happy here. He likes the neighbourhood, but nobody could say that it was doing well. It’s not the worst of places by a long shot, but in terms of getting taken care of then it’s plain that Semilong’s a fair way down the list. What it’s about as far as Eddie sees it is that where he lives now is too close to where he used to live, which is to say the Boroughs, or Spring Boroughs as they seem to call it nowadays. It’s as if things like being poor and having low property prices are contagious and will spread from area to area if they’re not kept in isolation, maybe with a blanket soaked in disinfectant hung across the door the way they used to have up Scarletwell Street when somebody had the scarlet fever. Just like with his mix-up over Stanley Baker, Eddie can remember when he thought that scarlet fever is something that only people living up in Scarletwell Street got; that maybe people down in Green Street got afflicted by green fever. How you think when you’re a youngster is something that never ceases to amaze him, and he hopes that little Jack is maybe going to be there when he gets up to the club. Out
of the window on the right now is the stretch of turf and trees that run down to the brown-green river, which in Eddie’s younger days is always known as Paddy’s Meadow although he expects they’ve got some different title for it now. He peers through bloodshot eyes at the old children’s playground at the bottom of the grassy slope there that he still calls Happy Valley. There’s a little sunlight falling through the clouds to strike upon the rusty roundabout and on the blade of the dilapidated slide, and Eddie feels a lump come to his throat because it’s all so precious. He recalls adventuring amongst the reeds down at the water’s edge with all the other grubby little boys, and how they liked to scare each other by pretending that there was a terrible long monster in the river what would snatch them if they get too close to it. He looks out at the empty meadow now and feels convinced somehow that all those days are still there, in the rushes, on the squeaking swings, still going on except that he’s too far away to see it all. That must be how it is. He cannot find it in himself to think that any moment, anybody, anything is ever truly lost. It’s just that him and everybody else moves on, and find themselves washed up in times and circumstances they don’t fully understand or like much, necessarily, without a way of getting back to where they’re happy and contented. There’s a lot about the world these days that Eddie doesn’t have the measure of. He’s not sure what to make of this new government that just got in, these Labour people who don’t talk or look much like the Labour people he remembers, and the business with Princess Diana getting killed in that car accident takes Eddie by surprise as much as anyone, how the whole country seems to have fallen to pieces for a while with all the crying. It appears to Eddie like there’s more news all the time these days, until he feels like he’s full to the brim with it and one more model with an eating disability or gang of raping footballers could make all of the knowledge that’s already in him spill out on the floor. By now his taxi’s at the traffic lights where Andrew’s Road crosses the foot of Spencer Bridge and Grafton Street, and he finds himself looking at the lorry park just past the lights and on the far side of the road, the Super Sausage place that used to be a meadow with a public baths up at one end. It’s still too light for any of the girls to be around, and Eddie’s glad because he hates to see that, how the women in that line of work are getting younger all the time. He’s tired. The world’s making him tired, and Eddie fidgets in the rear seat where it feels as if his seat belt is too tight, like it’s not done up the right way. The lights go green, the cars move on and now they’re coming past the fenced-in lorry park to where the train yards are behind the wall there on the right, and on their left is the short strip of grass between Spring Lane and Scarletwell Street that was once a row of terraced houses. Eddie can’t help taking a long look up the street he was born in as his cab goes by the bottom of it, where that eerie single building still survives down near the corner there all on its own. The old slope rises up with the Spring Lane School playing fields on one side, and across the road there on the other are the flats they put up in the 1930s after they tore down the homes where Eddie and his family and their friends all lived. The rounded balconies are peeling and the entrances to the courtyard inside have all got gates on now. Up at the hill’s top there are those two blocks of flats bigger than all the rest, Claremont and Beaumont Court, the towers standing there victorious when everything around has been knocked flat. The street don’t look much, he admits, but it’s where he began and it’s still got that sort of light inside it. Eddie shuts his eyes upon his birthplace, and there’s all those floating jelly blobs of colour that you get. The accidental pattern that they have to them reminds Eddie of something and he can’t think what, then realises it’s the scar his dad’s got on his shoulder with the triangles, the wavy lines. He thinks about his parents and it comes to him that it’s one hundred years exactly, maybe even to the month, since they first came here to Northampton and laid eyes on Scarletwell Street. How about that? Doesn’t that beat everything? A hundred years. He kind of feels the car pull up outside the Railway Club and kind of hears the driver say “We’re here” which gives him satisfaction, but if truth be told by then Eddie’s already dead a good few minutes.
Up the line by just shy of ten years in 2006, Dave Daniels strolls down sunlit Sheep Street on his way to Alma’s exhibition. Other than the round church, everything is different and he can’t work out which of the windows might be those of his old house, the one that Andrew was excluded from, or even if his old house is still there. He’s got a vague idea it might be one of those demolished to make way for the huge corned beef-coloured premises belonging to the Inland Revenue, but isn’t sure. It doesn’t matter. He hardly remembers spending that first year or so here, anyway, and what with Andrew’s eldest taking his own life like that David has come to blame the situation back then in the early ’Fifties for his nephew’s death, although he knows the truth of it is probably a lot more complicated, much less black and white. Things usually are. Further along the street he peers in through the open gateway to the yard where the old beech tree used to stand, but after having talked to Alma on the phone the other night he knows what to expect. The tree is gone, a thing as old as the round church itself that had withstood all the crusades and civil wars, finally poisoned in the night by some bigwig proprietor of an adjacent business who’s got plans for the location that the beech tree and its preservation order are unfortunately standing in the way of, or at least if all the ugly local rumours Alma has passed on to David are to be believed. He shakes his head, suspecting that it’s just the way the world is going. When he reaches Sheep Street’s end he crosses a dual carriageway that wasn’t there before and walks beside the empty yawn of unkempt grass where the Matafancanta used to be, just down from the still-standing bus station recently voted the ugliest building in the country. He remembers Alma telling him that quite apart from being hideous the whole thing has its entrance at the wrong end so that busses have to do a complete circuit before entering, this due to a town planner working with the blueprints upside down. It’s nearly funny. He turns right before he gets to the old Fish Market that’s up there at the top end of the Drapery and walks down by a Chinese restaurant with a multi-storey car park just across the busy road. He doesn’t know this place at all. He’s looking at some sort of brutal traffic-junction where there used to be the cheery confines of the Mayorhold, which he knows for Harry Trasler’s shop that he and Alma, way back, scoped for comics almost every Saturday. He never looks at comics these days, even though they’ve become fashionable to the point where adults are allowed to read them without fear of ridicule. Ironically, in David’s view, this makes them a lot more ridiculous than when they were intended as a perfectly legitimate and often beautifully crafted means of entertaining kids. At age thirteen, David’s idea of heaven was somewhere that comics were acclaimed and readily available, perhaps with dozens of big budget movies featuring his favourite obscure costumed characters. Now that he’s in his fifties and his paradise is all around him he finds it depressing. Concepts and ideas meant for the children of some forty years ago: is that the best that the twenty-first century has got to offer? When all this extraordinary stuff is happening everywhere, are Stan Lee’s post-war fantasies of white neurotic middle-class American empowerment really the most adequate response? David descends into a sodium-lit pedestrian subway system which takes him beneath the hurtling traffic to emerge on the far side of a broad auto-waterfall that he thinks might be called Horsemarket. Heading down beside the churning flow of steel David anticipates the Barclaycard Credit Control Centre that stands on Marefair’s corner at the bottom but discovers even that is gone, replaced by some variety of leisure/entertainment complex. Walking along Marefair almost to the Castle Station end he turns right into Chalk Lane, which he thinks should take him to the little nursery where Alma’s show is happening. He’s immediately drenched in poppies, spurting from the distressed mortar of a very old-looking stone wall there on his right. The sudden scarlet saturation brings to m
ind the news he hears a few weeks back, of how the extradition process that will see Charles Taylor tried for war crimes in a glass box in The Hague is just now getting underway. About time. Fifty thousand people dead in the ten years the civil war was going on until they finally declared an end to it in 2002, and the UN peacekeeping forces were required to stay there until, what, six months ago? It’s staggering to think that all that harm and carnage can be instigated by a single individual, pretty much. “I nearly killed your ma. I nearly killed your pa. Now give me clemency.” Not likely. Joyce and Bernard have been dead a year or two but David’s memories of those few frantic weeks spent trying to extricate his parents from Sierra Leone’s nightmare are still with him, just as sharp as if the whole thing were still going on somewhere. Ascending past a humble limestone building he believes is Doddridge Church, he notices a seemingly redundant doorway stranded halfway up one wall and thinks about his nephew, Marcus, who will now be frozen at nineteen forever in his thoughts. He thinks about the prejudices that his dad Bernard encountered when he first arrived here in the ’Fifties, and the prejudices he brought with him. His ideas of status, the defensive snobbery of Krio families escaped from slavery to populate a British colony and earn the deep resentment of Sierra Leone’s native people. All these little cogs that turn the bigger cogs, in history and in people’s hearts, a mechanism that’s almost impossible to perceive properly, its action taking place over the span of decades, centuries. The way that everything works out. For his own part he’s getting tired of Brussels, wants to maybe kick back for a while with Natalie and their two kids, live on the savings and Natalie’s income for a while and just see what comes up. He wants to enjoy life while it’s actually happening rather than retrospectively or as a thing deferred until the future. It can all be over just like that, a sudden civil war, a looming big exam, you never know, and David wants to live each moment like an ethically-sourced diamond. He can see the nursery up ahead, a modest crowd of people that he doesn’t know gathered outside and in the middle he sees Alma in a fluffy turquoise jumper, waving to him. Every moment. Every moment like a jewel.