Agnes & Helen McLardie

AGNES McLARDIE

April 1938 by her daughter HELEN

My Mum’s name is Agnes. She named me Helen after her friend who she came to England with from her home in Scotland

I was a feral child, and I do believe when I consider where I am now spiritually, I was always protected; there were always Angels protecting me. So, I give all thanks and credit to God Almighty for sending those angels to guide me.

I am an African. Why? I am an African from my heart, I have always been from being a child– I was an African princess.

My maternal Grandfather had very strong morals he was an Orangeman , I know that, and he hated Catholics. Mum said that she used to have really, really long hair and my grandfather used to beat her, you know, because she would sneak out the windows to go dancing. She loved dancing. Mum doesn’t speak about my Grandfather in a very good light. She has spoken vaguely about her Mother and how she would defend her and let her off with certain things. Mum had a brother who she hated, and she had a sister called Jean.

I don’t think she ever felt that she was loved as a child, so it was very hard for her to show affection to me. Mum had a child before she left Scotland and she had it adopted, so I have to assume this is why the relationship with her family was the way it was. When I speak to Mum about the son she had adopted - ‘Don’t blinding bother me’. That is Mum’s answer to everything, it’s like she just doesn’t want to revisit her past.

But one thing I will give Mum the utmost respect for is that she could have had me adopted, but she kept me. She is not Catholic, so it is not guilt (wild laughter)! I give her credit for that. I give her a lot of credit for that.

Also, there are quite a lot of the so-called African and white kids of my generation whose mothers were prostitutes. At the end of the day, it was survival, because what some of those white mothers went through with regards to their own families disowning them and social and personal rejections. I understand, they had to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head for the children. Honestly, I respect them to the max, prostitutes or not prostitutes. I really and truly do.

When I started to mingle with more Mixed Raced people I’d hear mothers taking about ‘oh yeah, you know her mum used to be a prostitute’ but I never heard that about my Mum.

Mum was a bit of a tearaway. She left Scotland with her friend Helen for Manchester. My Mum had never seen a Black man in her life. They headed to Moss Side – why they had headed to Moss Side, I don’t know. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Mum has told me her friend Helen was hustling and got in with a Black fellow. That was not what my Mum wanted so on her own she found a room in Salford. Higher Broughton had a lot of Polish refugees but predominantly Hasidic Jews. I think on the whole of Murray Street there must have been about three families. Two families and me with my Mum.

We lived in rooms of the house of Auntie Phillis and Uncle Rick who was a Polish refugee. They had six, it may have been seven children and as far as family was concerned, the Korkivishes were my family too. I was just automatically incorporated into their family when they used to go to Wolverhampton where Auntie Phillis used to live, and I would always be with them.

The nursery I went to was right next door to Mum’s factory, Manchester Metal Works, where they used to make parts for aeroplanes and gas meters, and all those kinds of things. She used to operate massive big machines

I was in Nursery from being six weeks old and I was the only Black child in there. All the nursery teaches loved me.

The nursery teachers used to take care of me; even when they got married. The one I called Auntie Linda, when she got married and moved away, her Mum and Dad used to still come for me every weekend. I remember Murray Street was a very, very long street I used to meet Auntie Flo at the red post box. I always used to be running down there to meet her on a Saturday.

Both Aunties were white professional women. I used to go to them every other weekend, one weekend this Auntie and the next weekend the other.

I remember Auntie Linda’s Mum, Auntie Nellie, would always take me to the Whit walks and I always felt a sense of pride from being small. I always felt that I was special and different, but I didn’t know why. On reflection they were looking at me because I was the only Black one there, so I just stood out. I can’t ever recall my Mum even having any form of communication with ‘my Aunties”; those things are very sketchy in my mind. I think the only time I ever remember Mum even speaking to them is when I was a bridesmaid for each of them and we went to their weddings.

There must have been occasions when they spoke, such as when they brought me home. I am sure they didn’t just leave me at the bottom of Murray Street, but drove me to the door and handed me over to her.

Mum was very insular; probably not having no family and being in a strange town. As I have said, my Mum loved to dance, so even when she was in Salford I think she used to still go to Moss Side because she loved the music, she loved to dance.

Let’s not forget there were loads of Clubs in Cheetham Hill as well. There was the Ghana Club; Mum was very friendly with the owners, I used to call her Auntie Mary, a white woman with blond hair. Sometimes we would go around there to see them and have something to eat. But how she actually met my Dad, I don’t know.

We lived in a few rooms actually. It was more like board and lodging really. Big houses with several rooms rented out to various people. In the room you had your pull-out bed settee, a little sink and then you shared a communal bathroom. I am sure my Mum had a two-ring stove. You ate in your rooms, it was always food on your knee, never a table.

I remember the first house we moved to; one of those where you walk in off the street. It had a big, old fashioned fire range (a Black widow ). Oh gosh, the floor was concrete slabs and there were always snails and shite like that. (laughter). It was very, very cold; it never felt homely, it never felt comfortable. I was in the junior school at the time, all my friends’ parents were professionals. They were Doctors, prison officers, they had beautiful homes, and I would never invite any of my friends to my home, because my home was….

My Mum was never house proud. I was always in different people’s houses. When they got new things in their houses, I would ask ‘Oh can I have that’. I started to decorate from when I was ten about the same time we got our first council house

Mum used to go out at the weekends, always down to Moss Side with my Auntie Doreen; she was with Uncle Francis – he was from Sierra Leone. On a Friday night, they would sew dresses for the Saturday. Mum always had very expensive tastes for her clothes. I really was the best dressed kid. Wow, nobody could beat my Mum for shoes, so much that she would buy her shoes from Derbers1 and I would put them out in the back yard. ‘Right I am off to school now’ and I would run round, take off my school shoes and put my Mum’s shoes on and go to school. (laughter). That is something that has been passed through to me because I am a shoe lover. My Mum always drummed it in to me ‘never ever buy cheap shoes because you are always going to go back’ and still to this day, in her late eighties, she is paying like eighty, ninety pounds for her shoes.

She was an attractive woman yeah, yeah. Medium build, lovely blue eyes with beautiful skin. She had many boyfriends both Black and white and I didn’t really take to that. You know, it was just horrible seeing someone different all the time. I have got three children and I keep my relationships away from the house because I always felt that what I experienced and some of the things I saw, I never wanted my children to experience.

Mum was always a very nervous woman. I remember she was on barbiturates or something back then - I mean Jesus. What were those tablets? Yeah Purple Hearts . When I realised what they were, I used to steal them and me and my mates would get off our faces.

Yes, she was a very attractive woman and I think always searching for love, but then when love came, she wasn’t able to recognise it.

I think she did find love not once but twice. One of them was a man called Edwin Etadefe, a Nigerian

student studying Psychiatry. Edwin lived in Prestwich. It was right down the bottom of this really long lane, the back garden was adjacent to the land of Prestwich hospital , where the horses were stabled. It was just beautiful. I was a Princess living in the Palace – from the Pit to the Palace. We would stay three quarters of the week in Prestwich. Mum always kept her accommodation, that was her security just in case anything happened.

With regards to my Mum being loved, I know that Edwin loved my Mum, he loved her dearly. And I think that she also loved him. When his family visited from Africa, Mum and I were always introduced to them. Edwin took me on like I was his own child. But then after two years, I don’t know what actually happened, whether she was seeing somebody else and went off with them and ended their relationship

Then Mum was with this Bajan guy, called Ken. She was with him for years and honestly, she loved the bones off him and he loved the bones off her, but he also had a wife and children! He would spend most of the week at our house, he kept his clothes there. I think it ended when he went off with somebody else. They were the only two prominent relationships that I can actually say lasted and could be called a relationship, and also two men that I can really say loved her.

In those days, I had a Barnardo’s worker; the first Black prominent woman that I had ever met in my life. She was from Trinidad, very middle class. She used to come once a month to give Mum a clothing allowance that was rotated between Mum and me every other month.

I don’t know why that Barnardo’s worker was allocated to me. I used to call Mrs McKenzie, the social worker, Auntie Maisie, she used to take me on holidays. Thinking about it now that I work in residential homes, some had a cottage for children’s holidays.

Once a month Auntie Maisie would fill in a report as to how our relationship was and what I had been doing. She might have been allocated because I was always getting in to trouble.

I wasn’t really happy within myself because a child at school called me a ‘black bastard’. I didn’t know what that was because as far as I was concerned, I was the same as everybody else. I ran home and got a photograph of a white child in a pram; I took it in to the school and I said to this kid ‘look this was me as a baby. My Mother must have just left me in the pram, and I got a suntan’. After that it was pouring bleach on my skin and getting the scrubbing brush and trying to get this brown off.

I went to North Salford High School on Leicester Road. Roxanne Boscoe was several years ahead of me, but she was like a protector to me. All her sisters went there.

I remember I had to do a project for the Mexico Olympic games and I had to mark down who got what medals and der der der and it was the time when the three Black Americans did this (Helen raises her fist in the Black Power salute). When I saw that it was my awakening.

The Sibthorpes’ were one of the families that lived in Salford, and I don’t know how I was connected with them, but Angela, John and Victor, they also took me under their wing, and they were in to the Black Power Movement . So as a young person I was exposed to these things that raised my cultural awareness and identity.

I was always in trouble at school, sometimes I was responsible for the things but then other times when things happened ‘It was Helen McLardie’. They knew that I didn’t have a Dad and how weak and feeble my Mum was – it was easy for them to apply more pressure on her based on the fact that she had a

Black child. Yeah, without a doubt. The bigotry that comes in that assessment. Without a doubt. I don’t even think my Mum was that aware, to tell you the truth. She had no awareness of the fact that I was a Black child living in a predominantly white environment and that effect on me.

My Mother couldn’t even do my hair. I was taken to the barber’s where my head was shaven. I dread to think what my skin was like. But yet, I always had food, I had a roof over my head, and I had clothes on my back. I think my Mum, because she provided the three basic necessities of life, thought she fulfilled motherhood.

Mum always told me that my Dad was dead. Then one Sunday morning she threw a telephone number at me and said, ‘Your Dad wants to see you because he is going to Africa’. And I said, ‘My Dad?’ and then to myself ‘has he been resurrected?’ It was about 1972, so I was thirteen turning fourteen.

Now I am going to meet a man, an African man who, as far as my Mum was concerned, was dead, and he is my father. I was really excited, really excited. Having a Dad meant being able to tell my friends at school, ‘I’ve got a dad and my dad is coming to school to pick me up and der der der’.

My Dad David Lagbodo Emare told me he heard through the grapevine that my Mum was pregnant. I think it was whilst pregnant she may have even gone off with one of my Dad’s friends or something like that. Dad said that when he heard of my birth he went to Hope Hospital, and as he entered the ward, he heard this child crying. He found where Mum was saw me and then he said, he just touched me, I stopped crying!

He asked her ‘let us try and work something out’ and she said, ‘I don’t need you, I will do this on my own’ and that was her attitude and it is still my Mother’s attitude to this day, hence why she is still a very lonely, lonely woman.

The relationship with my Mum changed after I met my Dad because I would play one off against the other ‘I want this, oh well if you don’t get it for me, I will go to my Dad’. It used to really get to her. Yeah.

Who do I look like? Both of them, both of them, I think so anyway. You know what I wonder as ‘Mixed’ (I hate that term Mixed Race) for me, I have always wanted to have that affiliation from my Dad to my African heritage, in my looks, my attitude, my ways. I don’t think I have really got anything of my Mum in that sense, but then again my children might say something different. I do have an independent attitude very much like her, I have raised three children on my own and there is still nobody in my life.

I was fifteen when I got pregnant. Oh Jesus Christ, my mother didn’t talk to me for the first seven months, and we lived in the same house. It was (the late) Tony Cole that I had to ask to tell Mum because I was scared. Our relationship was really tarnished, it was horrible, very, very cold. I remember one time, running a bath and staying in it, and I thought ‘I am going to see if she cares about me or bleeding not’. Well didn’t the bath go freezing cold and she still hadn’t come in to see if I was alright. Eventually she did, so I jumped out the bath then.

Throughout my pregnancy she wasn’t interested; she was ashamed. When she saw me coming down the road she would go to the other side. Mum had to leave from work to come to the hospital when I went into labour. I was on the labour ward and she looked at me and said, ‘To think you are going through all this pain for a worthless bastard like him’. I could see the expression on the nurses’ faces. Why couldn’t she have put that to one side just for this one time and said something like ‘it happens all the

time darling’ and just maybe have a little bit of compassion or a little bit of empathy for a young child, her child, going through labour. Very cold.

I had Auntie Maisie as a social worker right up until I had Curtis. She brought me the most beautiful, beautiful wicker basket on a stand. Not these crappy ones, the real McCoy. It was like - Wow. Curtis is born and she kind of bonded with him straight away, she really did love Curtis. I left home when he was about eighteen months and moved down to Liverpool with Carol Brennen and we lived with Deli in his Mum’s big fancy house. Then we got a council flat in Carl Gardens. While I was in Liverpool she didn’t contact me. I had been through major operations and still my Mum wasn’t supporting. One day this lady I used to call Auntie Dot, came to visit me. When she saw the environment, I was living in she said, ‘this child isn’t living here’ and she took my baby Curtis to Manchester. It was only for about three weeks, and then I came running back to Manchester, because I couldn’t be without my baby!

She loves all her grandchildren. She has been blessed with two beautiful grandsons and she loves the bones off them, but in her way of loving, to her understanding as to what love is. You walk in to Mum’s and it is just pictures of her grandchildren and great grandchildren. It’s just really strange. Mum always paid for my School pictures. Has she has got them now? Has she heck, has she heck. Not at all, not one school photograph. Facebook has set up all these school pages and I have asked many times has anybody got any picture of me from me being small?

It was while I was pregnant that Ken left her. I don’t know if her feelings are too hard for her to bear or what. But when it comes to her feelings there is always this huge wall.

Every time my Mum looked at me, she must have seen my Dad who she hated for a long time, but this is the twist in the tale. When I was forty, I had not long come back from Nigeria with my Dad, and my Mum is sat there with the man I have always called my Uncle Francis. Mum just started crying so I asked her ‘What is wrong?’ and she said, ‘I have got something to tell you, David is not your Dad, Francis is your Dad’. I am forty years of age now, don’t forget I have been led to David who was dead, but resurrected, and now my Mum is telling me that Francis is my Dad. (Helen is crying as she tells this) I remember turning round to Uncle Francis and said, ‘if you are my Dad you better get some money together and send me to Sierra Leone coz I need to find my people, but you know that I have just come back from Nigeria with my Dad’. I said, ‘Mother as far as I am concerned you pointed me to David, and David will always be my Dad, end of story’.

Even when my Dad died, two years ago, my Mum said, ‘Well he wasn’t your Dad’. And it was always something that played on my mind, so much that when my Dad was dying, and he was in the hospital, I remember calling one of the nurses, and I just said ‘listen, is there any chance we can have a blood test? Coz I just really want to for sure that David is my Dad’. She said she would go and enquire. Anyway, I was churning it in my head, and then I told myself ‘do you know what Helen, it doesn’t matter if he is or he isn’t, as far as paper and DNA are concerned, because he will always be your dad’. Francis didn’t deny it, and he didn’t acknowledge it. When I look at my one of three pictures of myself as a child, I see Uncle Francis, but then David, my Dad, I can see so much of him in me; his broad face, his thickness.

I went to Nigeria how many times with my Dad and Uncle Phil. We would all travel together because Uncle Phil was wheelchair bound so our assistance was needed. Once he was settled in Ikga we went on to Benin. When we went to the village you know, everybody reacted– them see me, them know me, you understand what I am saying.

When a man or a woman takes on a child it’s a responsibility, you know what I mean, an identified responsibility. It doesn’t mean because you didn’t come from their sperm or out of her womb – family is family.

My Dad was of that calibre anyway, because when he met my half-brothers and sisters’ Mum, Auntie Alma, she was pregnant with a white child, and she got my Dad’s name. I didn’t get my Dad’s name. She got my Dad’s name, he raised her. Dad adopted Carol at birth. She was raised as a true Nigerian being taught how to barter from an early age.

It’s really strange, every time I go to Nigeria my heart cries out ‘leave me in my village’, ‘leave me in my village’ My father is Nigerian, and my Mother is Scottish; that is exactly how I say it, my Mother is Scottish, my father is Nigerian, I am African.

I met my Scottish Auntie June once in 1973. She came to Manchester and I remember saying to her ‘how come nobody has ever invited my Mum back to Scotland?’ I remember my Auntie June saying to me ‘You know there were a lot of things that went on and that is just how it is’. So, I said ‘Well what is wrong with you Scottish people, don’t you know how to forgive?’ Cut a long story short, not long afterwards Mum got a letter with some train tickets in it and went on her own up to Scotland, and she saw her Mother just before she died.

Now Mum and her sister have stayed in touch via birthday cards and at Christmas. Now I wear my Grandmother’s ring, but Mum has never shared what happened on the visit. Mum was and remains a loner.

Mum was always very cold. I don’t think I got a love that I understood was love. Because when I compare the way I am with my children to the memories that I have of the way my Mum was with me, it is worlds apart.

My Dad always said out of all his children, I am the only one who brought myself up. I think I was a feral child, I really and truly do. She would take the strap to me because I was just wild, I was just a wild child. Just for clarity (laughter) Mum would give me the rent money to pay the rent. It was something like a pound back in those days and I would go and spend it. I remember I used to wet the bed and waking up to ‘Oh you blinding bastard you have done it again’ and I would be getting slapped because we would sleep on the same bed, you know the pull out settee kind of thing. So, I would get beatings for that and when things happened at school, I would get beaten for those too.

When I have said it to her ‘I love you Mum’, ‘Yeah, blinding love you’. You know what I mean? Ask her anything about her life, the same reply almost she always said, ‘don’t blinding bother me’. One time when something happened, I was trying to talk to her about the almighty, (Mum is an atheist) her saying ‘Oh, God bless you my love’. That to me was priceless.

Mum’s affection towards me, her love towards me I could only identify maybe five times, maybe throughout my life. Those moments – they are my treasures, they are priceless for me. Christmas/birthdays I always get a card, I always get twenty five pounds in it and sometimes I will go to her house and ‘there is your birthday card, you can write it’. But then there are other times, when she has taken the time to write a real nice, nice verse.

She is about 89, or is she going to be 89 this April 2018. She lives in Higher Broughton. It was one of those fifties’ old folks’ flats, she has been there years. The housing situation has changed now, and

younger people are moving in. It is literally about five minutes’ walk from where I grew up in Murray Street.

Now I see her about three times a month. There’s no hugging or kissing; it’s very hard to describe She is a very cold person, she kind of melts around her grandchildren, especially my Curtis. She melts around Curtis, but I would say as she has got older, she has got kind of worse.

I think my Mum ’s relationship with her own family was destroyed long before I was even thought of, but then I became, I feel as I am talking now, I feel like maybe I was the scapegoat. She saw me as the big mistake in her life. For a mother to turn around when they were angry and call their child ‘black bastard’ - there was a resentment, a real, real resentment.

You know when you see an African and ask them ‘Oh so which part of Africa are you from’ and they say Nigeria and when I push for more details, they reply ‘Lagos’. Don ’t forget they are looking at me, my dreadlocks they think - Jamaican. Then I say ‘Oh, where in Lagos? Ecaga? Anthony Village? Sulerio?” ‘Yeah, my Father is from Benin, just past Agbo and my father’s village is Egbanke and it’s all part of Omelera’. And they look at me...

I remember going to Scotland one time to play netball in Glasgow and Paisley. I never even thought of looking for my Mum ’s family because I never felt any affiliation to the Scottish side, not at all, it has always been my African side.

I have got three photographs of myself. In the main one I have I am in the nursery grounds holding a white doll. Sometimes I just look at the picture and it is just sadness.

Helen shared the following which resulted in an “epilogue”

In 2017 I was working at Barnardo’s at the mother and baby unit. Talking to one of the workers there I said, ‘I used to have a Barnardo’s worker’ and she said, ‘Oh you could maybe access your records’. I applied and got notification at the beginning of January that my file was available. If I wanted, I could go to Liverpool and have someone read them and explain them to me. I said, ‘just send them to me’. So, from that part of my upbringing, I know I am going to be able to read this through the eyes of this social worker, Auntie Maisie.

FAMILY Helen’s Children Curtis McLardie (Carlino) Autumn Jerusha Gayo Grand Children David Rafiel Davier H Haile Helen

SONS

Old ladies tell me I look like my mother And I can see her perfectly I paid the price of love to have her etched into my heart When I think of who I resemble, I see my father’s hand The fingers are bent Permanently The skin is shiny, taunt, like deep brown leather In him I see my face reflected in perfect symmetry Funny that Because old ladies tell me, I look just like my mother.

© SuAndi Edited