That was last week, yet here I was again. Whoever Mrs Bentham was, she did not want to go anywhere near the Area Office. Maybe someone, the same friend, had warned her off. I did not share the view that as a black Welfare Officer I was specially useful in dealing with black people. I was not the least bit concerned with being a black Welfare Officer, and it annoyed me whenever some official mention was made of my appointment, stressing the fact that I was a Negro and therefore, by insinuation, specially qualified to understand the problems of Negroes or coloureds. I believed that any person in difficulty needed help, but most of all he needed to be helped to help himself, so that he could be quickly free from the obligations attendant on help received. The colour of the helping hand was quite unimportant, or should be accepted as unimportant.
My colleagues and I were all paid servants, that is, we were all paid to serve those who needed to be helped and if we were willing, ready and able to serve them well, then as superficial a thing as the colour of our skin mattered not at all, or very little to those whom we served. It seemed to me that the only reason why I had had some little success so far was because I very deliberately placed myself in the position of servant, instead of insisting on being the ‘officer’, the extension of Departmental authority. My own criterion of my usefulness as a servant lay in the speed with which each new ‘case’ became independent of both myself and the Department, and was able to manage its own affairs. It could come about not through being ‘black’, but through trying to understand in each case just where the breakdown in personal confidence occurred, and working hard to restore it, and this applied equally to English, African, Asian, West Indian or anyone else with whom I dealt.
I believed then, and still believe, that there was never any special need in Britain for black Welfare Officers, any more than there is a special need for black judges, bank clerks, fishermen or policemen, or doctors. The urgent need is for a re-orientation of welfare workers in terms of the work they do and the people they serve. They must begin by understanding that British society is irrevocably mixed, and they must expect to serve anyone who comes to them, giving the same courteous, patient, helpful service in each case, for the best of possible reasons, because they are paid to do it. They must be taught the essential psychology of service, the better to bear the failures, frustrations and disappointments which must surely come, and they must be taught about gratitude, or the absence of it, especially from people whose confidence they helped to restore, whose consciousness of dignity they helped to re-establish.
I often listened to my colleagues discussing their cases, and it seemed to me that the gulf between the helper and the helped was often too great for communication and co-operation. True, they were all decent, intelligent, sympathetic people, but I felt that they saw themselves as officers, as people in authority, and everything they said or did was somehow coloured by that authority. I wondered if after working with them, I, too, would adopt the same attitudes, and the thought was both sobering and startling.
The feeling of irritation remained with me. I did not mind about seeing the Benthams even at that late hour, but I minded being expected to see them just because they were West Indians, as if that fact gave them some special priority on my services.
On the other hand, the word had got around about the black Welfare Officer, and I suppose it was unavoidable that I would be expected by coloured people to show them every courtesy, consideration and helpfulness. They would be more critical of any lapse on my part than of a similar shortcoming on the part of one of my white colleagues.
So I put myself at Mrs Bentham’s service.
Chapter
Two
THE ELLESWORTHS’ HOME, A neat, compact-looking, two-storeyed building, was in a pleasant cul-de-sac at the bottom of a tree-lined side-street. Like its neighbours it was fronted by a thick, well-kept privet hedge, interrupted by a black-painted wrought-iron front gate from which a flagstone pathway led through a small garden of flowering shrubs and miniature lawns to the front door.
Everything about these houses and gardens suggested comfort if not wealth. No one in his right mind could suggest that the presence of this Negro couple could make the neighbourhood less residential, presentable or expensive. I wondered if any stranger could pass by and decide, just by looking at the exteriors, which was the Ellesworth home.
They had waited dinner for me, and it was pleasant to be with them in their comfortable, well-appointed home, enjoying the West Indian dishes which Audrey cooked so expertly. At first the conversation was desultory, then gradually it drifted around to my new job and then to the reason for my visit.
“Don says you’d like us to adopt a little boy.” Audrey came to the point rather forcibly. She always prided herself on what she called her directness, but I suspected that it was merely a cover-up for her impatience; she never could wait to find out about anything which interested her.
“Wait a moment!” I exclaimed, “don’t rush me. I never said I’d like you to adopt him. I merely asked Don if you two were still interested in adopting a child.”
“Same thing, isn’t it?” she persisted.
“No, not quite. If you’re not interested that’s the end of the matter, but if you are, then we can talk about it.”
“We’ve about given up hope now of having any of our own, after a few false starts,” Don added, “so if we’re to have a family at all we’ll have to try ready-mades.”
This sounded very promising. It seemed that they had discussed the possibilities and were favourably disposed.
“How do you feel about it, Audrey?” I asked. After all, if anything came of it, she would be the one who would bear the brunt.
“I’ve been trying to give myself a good excuse to quit this part-time teaching job,” she replied, smiling. “It would be fun to spring it on them that I have to stay home and look after my small child.” Her smooth, round face creased with mischievous pleasure.
“How old is the child?” Don asked.
“Just four and a half,” I replied, keeping the brake on my enthusiasm with some difficulty.
“What’s he like?”
“A handsome little devil, very sturdy and sound.”
“He’s coloured, isn’t he?” from Audrey.
“Oh, yes!”
“What happened to his parents?”
“Nobody seems to know anything about the father, and the mother abandoned him in hospital soon after birth.”
“From which part of the West Indies is she?” Don asked.
“She’s not West Indian. She’s English.”
They exchanged glances, and immediately I could feel the change in their attitude.
“Oh,” exclaimed Audrey, “I thought when you said that he was coloured you meant he was one of us.”
“Well, he’s not white,” I replied lamely.
“That makes it a bit difficult, Rick,” Don said. “After all, if we’re going to adopt a child we would like to have one which at least looked like us. We don’t want to have to explain to people about it. Apart from that, I don’t mind putting myself out for one of our own people, but I’m not getting involved with any of the others.”
There it was again. ‘My people’; ‘those people’; ‘other people’. They’d not seen the boy and were casually prepared to exclude him from their consideration purely because he was not black enough; the mere mention of the English mother had settled the matter. They were not even interested in the father’s origin.
“Poor little bugger,” I said. “That leaves him high and dry in no-man’s-land.”
“Sorry, Rick,” Don said, “but it would cause too many complications. If it was a Negro child we might consider it, but as it is ….”
Very reasonable and fair, and probably right. But, listening to him, I remembered that this was the same Don with whom I had had so many heated arguments years before when I was pa
ssing through a very rough time right here in Britain. In those distant times, he was always holding forth on the illogic of prejudice and the importance of individual responsibility. Whenever I started on my anti-white hate quest, he was the person who often talked about the futility of hate, and the need for positive endeavour to live above it. Especially that time after the Old Bailey thing; he was the one who …
I had been quite unprepared for it. The envelope seemed so ordinary except for the blue colour and the official O.H.M.S. stamp on it, that I was flabbergasted to discover that it was a summons to appear for jury service at the Old Bailey within ten days. Me. And after all the difficulty and heartache I had experienced in trying to earn a living. Me—on a jury. It seemed too fantastic for words.
I knew how people were selected for jury service, and the qualifications necessary to selection. I was a householder (quite a highbrow name to describe my ownership of the tiny two-up and one-down house which I had bought as an alternative to paying excessive room rent near where I worked), and that alone was enough to qualify me; the powers which summoned one neither knew nor cared about my state of mind.
I had spoken with Don about the summons and my feelings of resentment. He had patiently talked about the origins of the jury system, and the bloody price which Englishmen had paid centuries ago in order to safeguard this cornerstone of freedom; he reminded me that I had not been summoned to jury service because I was black, but because I was a man, a citizen, and I should be proud to shoulder a citizen’s responsibility. He further advised me to live like a man, with dignity and not let the colour of my skin cripple my spiritual growth or social consciousness. And he told me then that our shoutings against prejudice and discrimination would be empty and meaningless until, inside ourselves, we admitted no difference between men, any men, based on the colour of their skins.
I believed him. I believed all he said because we had shared many similar experiences and had so much in common, and I daily discovered further evidence of the truth of his remarks. But even so, when I went to the Old Bailey, and took my place with the other jurors, I slipped up rather badly; for I missed much of the initial part of the hearing, so intent was I on watching the prisoner, counsel, judge and fellow-jurymen to discover if they were taking any special notice of my presence among them. Only when it was patently clear that they were all too busy attending to the business in hand did it finally sink into my head that my business in that place was to follow the case closely so that I might fulfil the responsibility I had been summoned to undertake …
Now this same Don, a little older and more comfortably prosperous, was casually talking about not being involved.
“But everyone else considers him a coloured child,” I argued. “I suppose that’s the same thing as being Negro. As long as there’s any hint of non-white admixture the label is black.”
“Yes, I know,” he answered. “But people who don’t know about us and see the child with us will begin to wonder all kinds of things.”
“Is that important?” But even as I asked it I realized that it was important. They were nice respectable people and they did not want complications. If they adopted a child, it must seem to be their natural offspring, and no questions asked. I couldn’t quarrel with their attitude, but I couldn’t help remembering the old Don. Without realizing it we had both gone very separate ways.
Audrey saved the situation from becoming awkward by suggesting that we had a drink, and somehow the conversation became diverted to more commonplace things, to everyone’s relief.
After I left them I could not throw off the feeling of disappointment. Somehow I felt let down, and the feeling persisted although I could see the reasonableness of their position. After all, why should they be more generous than anyone else? I realized that I had been so sure of their agreement that I had taken their refusal rather hard. I was not in a frame of mind to be very helpful to the Benthams, but there was nothing I could do about that. They’d just have to take me as I was.
Randall Street, Stepney, where the Benthams lived, presented the dreary picture of a long terrace of dilapidated three-storeyed houses, all of them covered with scabs of dirt and flaking paint, and sagging visibly as if impatient of the long overdue demolition gangs. The mixture of twilight and smoky overcast added to the general gloomy depression and untidiness of broken railings which no longer secured any privacy, and large lidless dustbins which squatted beside the littered area-ways, carelessly pregnant among the overflow of rubbish. No lights showed in any of the houses, but the heavy air vibrated with the hum of music escaping from imperfectly sealed windows and doors. Indoors it must be awfully loud.
This is what English folk often complain about, I thought. They don’t understand it because they haven’t ever felt the need of it. They don’t know that loud music can be needful to the lonely and rejected, an insulation against pressing loneliness, an opiate for the hours and weeks of nowhere to go and no one to talk to. As I approached I could identify the rhythms, the haunting pathos of songs which spring from an urgent need to survive. Frank Sinatra’s “Only the Lonely,” each note reaching deep into the consciousness to find the wordless, immediate response.
On the steps of No. 58 Randall Street I paused and looked about me. Farther down the street two men, dimly discernible as Negroes, hurried into a building. Maybe only coloured people live in this street, I thought. The blacks move in and the property loses its value, or so the man said. Then the whites move out. Strange how such supposedly devalued property becomes so shockingly expensive whenever the black man tries to rent or purchase. Randall Street, Negro Section, or Negro Quarter. Quarter of what?
A little way down the street I noticed that the Council had begun putting up new blocks of flats. One fine day they’d reach this spot and put the bulldozers and demolishers to these stinking slums and clear away every last rotting brick to make room for clean, new modern buildings. Then these slum-dwellers would get a chance to live at a greater distance from filth and grime. Or would they? Perhaps they’d be bulldozed and cleared off with the rotting bricks, and forced to find some other blighted dead-end in which to hide and proliferate their miseries; some other rotting slum long devalued and condemned, but still expensive to its numerous black occupants. God, what a stinking vicious circle.
There was no bell or knocker on No. 58, so I rapped with the handle of my umbrella on the rusty letterbox on the door; I continued this rat-tat for about five minutes before the door was opened a few inches and a voice inquired, “Who is it?”
I could dimly make out a shape through the narrow aperture.
“I’m calling to see Mr Bentham,” I replied.
“All right, come in,” and the door opened wide. I entered a narrow, dimly lighted passage which was partly blocked by a slim, blonde woman who held a dressing-gown or wrapper tightly about her as she looked me over; behind her the passage continued towards a flight of stairs leading upwards. There were closed doors on each side of the passage and I guessed she came out of the one before which she was standing, nearest the front door. Music from several sources mixed to become a tuneless insistent pulse. She seemed in no hurry to stand aside and let me pass, so I asked again, “Where will I find the Benthams, please?”
She turned sideways and nodded towards the stairway.
“Up the stairs and first left.” Her voice betrayed a strong North Country accent. As I passed she reached behind her and turned the doorknob to let herself backwards into the room from which dance music suddenly blared out. Ah! I thought. So it’s not only the black ones who need the magic boxes to drown their loneliness and despair. From the quick glance I had had of her I guessed she was about twenty-three or twenty-four years old. Did her presence here add to the sordidness of the place, or was it a saving grace?
I went up the stairs, which were covered with sticky linoleum. The upper floor was a replica of the lower, the same narrow, dimly lighted passage between the
rooms. I knocked on the first left. It was quickly opened into a room shiningly bright after the outer gloom.
“Oh, Mr Braithwaite, come in. We’d begun to wonder if you’d ever get here.”
She was large, nearly as tall as myself, with bare arms shiny smooth from elbow to wrist which somehow suggested muscle rather than fat. Her broad, light brown face was attractive and topped by short, curly, black hair. ‘Mixed parentage,’ I thought, ‘probably Negro and Indian.’ Her figure looked good in a dark pleated skirt and frilly white silk blouse; on her feet were soft, inverted sheepskin slippers, the sight of which reminded me of my own tired, aching feet.
“Awfully sorry about being so late,” I offered to excuse myself, “but some of my other visits didn’t go according to plan.”
“Never mind, let me take your bag.” She took my briefcase and umbrella and showed me to a chair. “Do sit down. This is Mr Bentham.” She waved an arm backwards and he came from somewhere behind her, a small, compact, very dark man, who shook my hand with a surprisingly powerful grip. He was quite bald, yet young-looking, tough and athletic. He wore grey flannel slacks and blue sports shirt open at the neck.
“Gladtomeetyou.” He ran the words together as if in haste to get the introduction over with, then moved away and looked at his wife as if waiting for his cue.
“Would you like some coffee, or some rum, perhaps? Have you had any dinner? We could find you something if you like, no trouble at all. We weren’t sure when you’d arrive so we’ve already had ours. Shall I fix some coffee or will you have the rum?” All this without pause.
I was not hungry, only anxious that our discussion should be over as quickly as possible.
While both she and her husband busied themselves with the rum and glasses, I took some notice of my surroundings. The room was not large, but it looked and felt comfortable. A double bed with a gaily patterned coverlet took up most of one side; lengthways against the foot of the bed was a new, black perambulator, shiny with chrome fittings; its hood was neatly collapsed, and I could barely see a bit of hair from where I sat; the infant was evidently sound asleep. In the centre of the wall, opposite the bed, was a deep recess which might once have been a fireplace, but was now concealed by curtains of printed plastic material through the folds of which I glimpsed several suitcases neatly stacked, one upon the other. On one side of the recess was a highly polished radiogram, and on the other a television set. Neatly fitted into a corner near the door was a small gas cooker. The rest of the furniture consisted of a large all-purpose table, two straight chairs and the upholstered armchair in which I sat. The floor was covered in shiny linoleum the colour of simulated marble, and projecting from the wall over the table was a white enamelled metal cabinet from which my hosts were removing glasses. Near my chair a cylindrical paraffin heater made faint blurping noises.