Anonymous

WE BRING OUR MEMORIES WITH US

ANONYMOUS

SuAndi: Sometimes not even rose-tinted glasses have the capacity to disguise painful memories brought about by poverty and related abusive life circumstances. Revisiting the past can bring into the present heartache that has lain dormant. Memories can evoke emotions ranging from discomfort to a sense of shame and often this is not from the actions of the person remembering. It is for some of these reasons that these contributors have requested to remain anonymous because for them privacy and family is their priority

The first time I left home I think I was about sixteen or seventeen. I had plenty of trouble with my father. He ruled with an iron fist, an iron fist. He threw me out one time, I think it was Christmas, I had nowhere to go so I went to the men’s accommodation. Do they still have them these days? I think it could have been Walton House. I knocked on the door because I was chucked out, but they wouldn’t let me in, and I am knackered.

I got really, really, really abused; so, abused. My father was a drummer and he had drumsticks. One time, I had done something wrong and he had come home from work in the afternoon for his dinner, because we all had to come home for our dinners and then go back to school. I had done something wrong – and he got some drumsticks and started to beat me with them. But I was so fast that he couldn’t get hold of me. So, he made my brothers hold me, then he laid in to me. I had welts on my back; really, really bad welts. That was grievous bodily harm, he could have got years for that.

Later I had to go to hospital I think it was with pneumonia, so I had to have some check-ups. I still had

these big “lashes” on my back, they were scars. SM1, she said, ‘when the doctor actually examines you and looks at the scars, just tell him that some boys did it because you were Black’! What choice did I have? It was either that or tell the police and he is going to end up...and it’s hard times isn’t it?

The first time I left home, I ran back to Derbyshire, to the foster home. It had always felt like it was a real home run by a lady called Mrs Clayton. Ohh she was lovely. Nanny Clayton. I’d lived there for years. I mustn’t have been happy because when I got a bike from my Dad and Step Mother I rode it back to Derbyshire. Yeah on a bike and somebody gave me a lift, put the bike on a wagon and took me down there. I could have been killed, couldn’t I? (Oh my god!!)

I must have been about ten or eleven when I did that. For a holiday, we went back to her. You know what I mean, we went back to her and stayed a couple of days. I can remember that – a lovely place, right in the countryside, just like here it was. This is why I like living here. Why are you in the countryside friends have asked me? I don’t tell them it’s because I was always trying to get back – to those days, you know what I mean, away from the city, because I know about country.

I was born in Matlock, Derbyshire. My father came from Ghana. He was an engineer, he had learned his craft in the air force. Then he worked for one of these big tractor companies, called Massey Ferguson. Not Massey Ferguson – it wasn’t that, it was – I want to call it James Brown, it’s not James Brown as well, it’s something Brown. – DB, David Browns

My mother, my real mother, she was from America – I’ve got some photographs. There was some communication because we used to get presents from America.

That’s all I know; that there were some presents that came from America. That is why I like Christmas so much. You know, the Yankee way of Christmas; Bing Crosby and all that stuff. I think she must have been very light, very light. SM used to say she passed for white, I would wonder why SM said that? SM came from Moss Side, Manchester. I think she must have been about twenty-two. A blond, a pretty blond, you would say. They start a relationship, then I come along. At some point, she has got to have the conversation with him, ‘who is this boy?’ and ‘where is the mother?’ and stuff like that, and ‘why have I got the kid?’

She tried to portray me as ‘my big son’ and she might even have thought that I was her big son, sort of thing, but no I was a second-class person in that house. I called it the inner sanctum. We (my brothers and I) got the margarine and SM’s children got the butter. Is that a good way of putting it? Did she rescue me? It could have been that I was worth some money to them. Could it have been that? I don’t know, it’s just something after all these many, many years I have thought. They must have got some money for me, you know what I mean, when they brought me in to the family, all those years ago?

I was three. I was the first one to come. My brothers? I don’t know when they came, it must have been a few years later.

One brother is eighteen months older than me, he’s the middle child. I was still at school when my eldest brother died. He was quite brainy, had a good job at the College of Commerce or something like that, then he died of stomach problems when he was sixteen, so I must have been young. I was nine or ten when the light came on and I suddenly realised that I had a gift, as it were, of the gab;

that is my first memory. Only I knew it, it’s not a thing that everybody would have realised. Yeah, only I know that I had it and it was a revelation.

I went to Every Street Primary School then Burley Street, in Ancoats There weren’t lots of Black kids at the primary school, but I don’t think I was bullied. I can remember a guy called Frankie Bostock being the boss of that school. I am laughing now as it comes back to me. Frankie Bostock in primary school he was top dog . I ended up fighting with him in the playground and all the kids got around us two fighting. It must have been a lucky punch, but to all intents and purposes it looked like I had given him a corker , (laughter) but it was a lucky punch! The teacher gave me the thumbs up, but it was a lucky punch. I was the cock then, but he was always after me after that, so I had to keep out of his way.

They must have got money for me until I left school. Ok, so I got a job, and Alan Tottoh was at the same place. It was called Stopfis, he was a sheet metal worker. He was already there when I started in the Easter after we left school. When I came home with my first wages, I remember it was 30 bob, . Yep 30 bob. SM, she said ‘that is no good to me, you will have to get another job’.

30 bob is no good! So, she took me out of a trade, because that was a trade and I had to go and find another job, which I did. I went to Apollo street to a Rag & Bone Shop Do you remember when the Rag and Bone men came around and collected everyone’s left overs? Well they had to take it somewhere didn’t they? They took it to this place, a sort of factory where all the rags got ripped up to be used as cleaning rags for oil and stuff like that.

Awful isn’t it? I might have still been a welder now. Anyway, that is where I ended up, though I had a few jobs after there, but then that was it. Actually, Foo Foo, you know Frank Lammar , he was the manager there, at that rag shop. (laughter) That was his day time job. Ended up by being a millionaire, or something like that. That is what people say, with a big Rolls Royce. People used to say to me later on in life ‘she must have gone through a lot of stick’, you know what I mean, just going in to a white area with these…., you know a Black family into a white area. As I said, she must have had some stick, but I didn’t see it. They did have a social life, they went out on a weekend. He was also a musician, a drummer. I think he had gigs in working men’s’ clubs, but before that he used to work in Jazz clubs to supplement his wages. He was a jazz drummer. Pretty good apparently.

I don’t know when he died. I said to myself when he dies, I am not grieving for him and I never did. SM died in January, she passed away in January 2016.

There was this one time when SM was talking about the pubs in Ancoats and the Crown came up and she said ‘I remember the Crown and Band on the Wall when all the Canadian soldiers were there’ so I thought I would keep that because she had always told me that she couldn’t remember anything. So, about a couple of weeks later I got on the phone and said, ‘Seeing as you can remember the Canadians and that is before I came over, can you tell me anything about me?’ ‘I can’t tell you anything, I have forgot’, she said. So, they weren’t going to tell me anything.

I asked him about what happened, where we are from, you know, who was my mother?’ He just said, ‘I’m not telling you nothing’. I kept going on about it ‘I want to know about my family’ you know what I mean? I’m sure SM knew a lot more.

They stayed together, but I used to hear a lot of crying and screaming and stuff like that. It’s one of those things that I can remember. So, there must have been things going on if someone is screaming

and shouting, somebody must be getting hurt. But I never saw anything, it was always in that back bedroom, but maybe it happened in every household. There was a lot of stuff that was taboo - you didn’t talk about it. I don’t think anyone said don’t talk about this, but it was taboo sort of thing, you didn’t talk about those things.

Those flats were really good, weren’t they? Three-bedroom flats in Ancoats. I didn’t go to Moss Side until I was eighteen, that’s when a lot of people did like Johnny Savages, and others. The flats had air raid shelters underneath them. We never knew that for years and years and years. When we did get down there and found them, it was like another world underneath there, because the flats ran a full street. They were solid those flats, yeah, big bedrooms and front rooms.

I can remember going to the baths. The Galleon . Yeah – has anyone else said that? Holiday? Would be no, but I did go somewhere with SM and her mother, no not her mother, her friend, to I think Fleetwood, or Southport. I remember peeing in the bed. (Laughter). I was the biggest “pee’er”. That’s when you know you’ve not got a good upbringing when you pee in the bed constantly, isn’t it?

I don’t know what a mother’s love is, that is the best way I can put it. But I remember that lady, yes Mrs Clayton, so kind.

They took me away; they dragged me away from her. Or they might not have dragged me away from her, but they dragged me away from the home. We were called whilst she was dying, so they knew that we were special. The neighbours called us to say that she was dying. I can’t remember going to the funeral, but I can remember her. I was just there running around the hospital so that I didn’t have to actually see her. I was only little.

These days people are always saying to each other ‘love you,’ ‘love you’, ‘love you’. Everything is ‘love’, ‘love’, ‘love’. I don’t think we ever got that. That’s why I can only say I had that as a baby. As I got older I began to understand that people just say that to each other, or is it a new thing, or has it always been like that? … I don’t know what love is, put it that way.

SuAndi: During the interview he took a telephone call from his partner at the end of the call he said, “I love you”. For me I left a man who has finally found a place to live a life in happiness, in a location that reminds him daily of the best years of his life. A place like Matlock, living with someone who loves him and who he loves in return.