Foreigners (18 page)

Shortly after her husband's death, Gwen took her four
daughters back to Wales where she once again became part
of a Welsh-speaking community. But none of her daughters
can speak Welsh, which leads me to wonder if they
consider Wales to be home. Charmaine casts a quick glance
at the two children, who are now listening carefully. 'In a
sense, yes, of course, but Leamington Spa is also home.
Maybe it's really home.' Annette looks across at her younger
sister and picks up her cue. 'When we go there we always
take flowers for the grave, and the last time we were there
we went for a walk down the street we used to live on,
and it felt strange. Of course, the café is no longer there
as it's now a car park, but the place is full of emotions,
both good and bad. It's still home, though. At least to
me.' She pauses. 'Mum told us that towards the end she
would have preferred to sell up and go back to the Great
Orme. This was when they still had both the café and the
Great Orme, but for some reason Dad made his choice
and he chose the café and Leamington and Mum went
along with it. But when we did go to Prestatyn after his
death we were never made to feel like outsiders in Wales.'

After we have all finished eating we pause for a moment
and think about ordering dessert. It transpires that only
the children are interested and Charmaine begins to guide
them through the choices. Annette is deep in thought, and
then she looks up. 'You know what my mother's father
said to my dad when he told him that he was going to
marry Mum? He said, "Just take care of my daughter."
That's all he said. "Just take care of my daughter." My
dad was the only black man around that part of Wales,
and maybe the only one some people had ever seen, but
in Wales everybody accepted him for what he was. They
were friendly and generous, and he didn't get any abuse.
They didn't care that he was famous, and they didn't want
anything from him. For the first time in his life he was
free, and he was also among nature. He liked to work on
the hay in the fields and do farm work on my granddad's
farm, but when he was in Leamington if he had a fiver in
his pocket they'd want £4.50 of it and you know he'd just
give it to them. In a way he could be happy in Wales
because he could just be himself, and for him it was really
a big change from Leamington. I reckon things might have
been different if they'd left Leamington and gone back
and took over the Great Orme again like Mum wanted.
But that's not what they did. They stayed in Leamington.'

Having finished their dessert, the two grandchildren run
off to play by the water's edge. Annette is the more talkative
of the sisters, but being five years older her memories
of her father are undoubtedly stronger than
Charmaine's. We order coffee, and Charmaine keeps
glancing anxiously over my shoulder in order that she might
keep an eye on the children. Annette remembers that when
she was a girl there was another black family in Leamington
Spa. 'Dad used to leave the café at the end of the day and
take plates of food, stacked up high, to other poor families
in Leamington, including this black family across the street.
He'd still feed them even when we had nothing, but he
was like that. He looked after loads of people in
Leamington, poor people, old people, and he didn't make
a fuss about it.' Annette pauses. 'But there was this black
family, and years later I met a guy who was a kid in the
family and he remembered my dad bringing them food. I
think my dad made a lot of black kids in England realise
what it was possible to achieve, so his story isn't just gloom.
I'm always meeting people who remember Dad, and whenever
they talk about him they always smile. Nobody has a
bad word to say about him, isn't that right?' Charmaine
nods her head somewhat sadly, and then she picks up the
thread of what Annette has been saying. 'You see, Dad
lost a lot, but he always had dignity and he was good to
people.' Suddenly Annette remembers. 'He made that trip
to New York near the end, and Mum said that it made a
big difference to him because he was really down.' I mention
to them both that Muhammad Ali was a fan of their
father, and he talked extensively with Turpin at the dinner
that followed the Sugar Ray Robinson celebrations at
Madison Square Garden in December 1965. Both sisters'
faces light up. The children have now returned from the
river and Charmaine turns to them. 'Did you hear that?'
They both look blankly at her. 'About your granddad and
Muhammad Ali.' The kids have not heard. 'Don't worry,'
says Charmaine, 'I'll tell you later.'

Randolph Turpin's story does not end in 1966 in tragedy.
His proud daughters still love and revere the great fighter,
and in time the grandchildren will too. For Annette and
Charmaine, their father's life can never be reduced to the
cliché of the naïve boxer having been ripped off and then
committing suicide. To them, Randolph Turpin will always
be a happy, loving father who used to be a boxer.
Unfortunately their father's situation was such that he had
little choice but to carry the accumulated hurt and frustrations
of his boxing career into what should have been
many happy years of retirement with Gwen and the children.
As we wait for the bill, Annette pinpoints the heart
of the story as she sees it and as I have grown to understand
it. 'He felt betrayed.' This has to be true; Turpin's
inner turmoil towards the end cannot have been simply
fuelled by anxieties over a lack of money, and anger and
frustration at having allowed himself to be used by people.
There must have been a deeper, and in the end a far more
destructive, hurt that was engendered by knowing that those
who were closest to him had actually double-crossed him.
He lived with this hurt for many years, carefully keeping
it from his immediate family, and the great mystery is how
he survived for so long while shouldering this oppressive
burden of betrayal. Looking at his children I now know
how. After years of turbulence, both private and public,
he finally found in his Welsh girl, Gwen, the sustaining
love of a loyal and devoted wife, and four daughters whom
he adored. He persevered for them, but in the end the
mounting debt, the crushing sense of abandonment, and
a profound heartache that he was somehow failing the
family he loved, proved too much for him. To the end, he
was Beattie's most sensitive child. Annette continues. 'But
he never hated anyone. In that sense he was just like Mum.
He just let people make up their own minds.'

I remember he always used to wear a big black coat, and
he was kind of hunched over. But not like life had beaten
him down or anything. He just had this big black coat
that seemed a bit too heavy for him. In the evenings I'd
come out of where I lived on Mexborough Drive and walk
down to the main road – Chapeltown Road. I'd be on my
way up to my sister's place to look after her twins, and
I'd meet him around about Button Hill. Near where the
library and the business centre are now. Somewhere between
these two. The fact is, Button Hill isn't much of a hill.
Or much of a street really, more like a little alley that
leads down on to Chapeltown Road. But this is where I'd
meet David.

I was fourteen. Back then, we were taught that you always
had to be kind to your elders and betters. We lived a sheltered
church life, and so I always acknowledged David and
he'd just say, 'Take care, behave yourself.' That's all. 'Take
care, behave yourself.' But it happened regularly enough so
that we sort of got to know each other. I thought David
was something to do with the university. He had that kind
of attitude about him. Like he was a very intelligent man.
Judging by the way he spoke, he didn't seem to me like he
was a vagrant or anything. And underneath that big black
coat I think he had on a dark suit. He tended to have his
hands in his pockets and he looked cold. His face used to
worry me. His face always looked bruised, as if he'd been
scratched. It must have been 1968 or 1969, and you know
he wasn't standing upright. He was a little hunched over.

I remember one night when the police were out on the
street in numbers. They had come to move David on. I
asked a policeman, 'Please, what has he done? He has done
nothing. He just stands here.' But there was something
about the policeman – about how he looked at me – that
frightened me and so I ran off. That night the police
arrested a lot of people and put them in Black Marias –
you know, the big black vans. That's what we used to call
them, Black Marias. The police took a load of people
away, including David. They'd only come to get David,
but people stood up for him. The people on the street
were protecting David and objecting to the police. While
the police were trying to move David on and telling him,
'You shouldn't be here,' the young people gathered all
around him. I mean, he wasn't
doing
anything, he was just
standing by the wall like he always did. I thought he was
such a humble man. He was polite. I couldn't see anything
that was wrong with him. He just used to stand there with
his big black overcoat. But, I don't think he had the same
relationship with everybody. He didn't speak to other
people, but he spoke to me.

After the night of the disturbance, I saw him maybe a
day or so later. I could see that he had been beaten for
his face was all mashed up. He wasn't standing at the
bottom of Button Hill, he was walking up Chapeltown
Road as if he was in pain. I was fourteen. I never saw
David after that. There was no other exchange after the
night of the disturbance on the street. When I saw him
that final time he was dragging his feet. Something had
changed. I didn't know what it was, but I knew that something
was different.

I remember crying when I heard that he'd died. I felt it
hard. Like I'd lost a true friend. All we'd done was exchange
a few words over a period of months, but I would never
dare say anything to anybody about having talked with a
man. I was a Christian and I knew that it was taboo for
a young girl like me to talk with a man. When I heard
that he'd died I wrote a poem about David. All the feelings
were locked up inside and I couldn't tell my parents.
I remember that I did find a way to tell my sisters, and
they understood. But I could never tell Mum that I knew
somebody who'd been in trouble with the police. I could
never admit anything to her about what was
really
going
on out there on the streets, and so it was like I began to
live two lives. I was angry. At the time of David's death
everybody was angry. Here was a black man and you tell
me, what was he doing in the river? We knew that the
police were always trying to move him on, but something
else was wrong. What was he doing dead in the river?

In the early seventies, the London Black Panthers began
to infiltrate Chapeltown. They kept telling us that things
were possible. They insisted that things could be changed,
but they made it clear that we couldn't do it openly. They
kept mentioning David, and they were very aware of him.
Somebody put graffiti about him on a wall. It was near
where we would all meet. It just said 'Remember Oluwale'.
And we did. We knew that we had to have a strategy, and
so we became even more angelic during the day, and then
at night we'd go out and do things. His death made us
brave. It made us more militant, and it gave us an increased
sense of wanting to tease the police. We no longer felt
the same about them. We would shout at them. We would
throw stones at them and then run off down the backstreets.
We knew which houses had cellars that we could
dive into and hide, and nobody ever knew what we'd done,
or what we were doing. But we couldn't take this rebelliousness
back into our homes. It really was like being two
people. Once the head of my school called me in and
asked me if I would meet with the police as they were
trying to become more community-oriented. I went home
and told my sister and she looked at me and said, 'No
way, absolutely not.' So I had to go back to school and
tell the headmaster no. The police were trying to mend
the community, but they'd already shown their hand and
done something which let us know that our community
didn't matter to them. That was how they felt about us.
We'd always known it, but now we knew it for sure. We
had evidence.

But David wasn't a West Indian like us, he was a West
African so his death didn't galvanise the community in the
way that it might have. There would have been even more
trouble if he'd been a West Indian. But he wasn't. The
area around St Mary's Close had a lot of African students
living there. I would sometimes see him on Chapeltown
Road walking from that direction down towards Button
Hill, and maybe that's why I thought that he was a student.
My sister lived at 276 Chapeltown Road. That was when
I would see David by Button Hill. At the time she was
married to a Nigerian, and he was studying in Liverpool.
My brother-in-law used to take the last train to Liverpool
and at nights my sister needed help with the twins, so
that's when I would go up there, usually between ten and
eleven. That's when I would see David. He didn't seem
West Indian to look at, so I must have known that he was
African. In this period we thought of most of the Africans
as people who carried briefcases and who studied hard
before getting ready to go back home to Africa. We, the
West Indians, were mainly workers not students, and of
course we also said that we were going home. But in reality
we weren't going anywhere. Few of us ever went back home.

I called him David, I remember that much. I knew his
name. Somebody must have told me his name, but I don't
know how I knew it. He struck me as highly intelligent.
Not crazy at all. You could see that he had a depth to
him. Whatever it was that was inside of him he just kept
it to himself. I can remember him looking at me. He had
a powerful stare, but I have to admit he did look poor. I
thought he was a poorer person than all of us, but as a
devout Christian girl I just wanted to give him respect.

David, do you remember this girl? The fourteen-year-old
girl who would walk up Chapeltown Road and see you
near the bottom of Button Hill. She knew your name.
Your history you kept locked up inside of you. Shut tight,
out of sight. But your name, David. She knew your name,
and it felt good on her tongue. She smiled and looked
into your eyes, and you told her to take care of herself.
You waited for her and basked in her smile, and exchanged
your few words, and then you watched as she disappeared
from view. And then what? She didn't know that you had
nowhere else to go. Once she'd passed out of sight you
didn't linger for too long. You moved on your way. Perhaps
you wondered how you could ask the girl her name without
the full weight of the question frightening her away. But
in your heart you knew that you would never ask. Did she
remind you of somebody? A sister? Your mother? Back
home, a long time ago before this nightmare descended
upon your young shoulders. Back home, where you spoke
of your life in the future tense. Back home, this girl with
fine manners and good breeding might have been your
wife. You studied hard at your school under the guidance
of Christian missionaries. You worked with a burning desire
to escape to your future as soon as possible. Your parents
loved you, but they recoiled in shame for they knew they
could no longer protect you from your ambitions. In their
hearts they were proud, but the books that you studied
had already carried you beyond them and to a crossroads.
They took their place behind you, for history had chosen
you and your future was calling. You turned and said
farewell to your parents, and then set out on your journey.
1949. Yoruba boy. Going to England to make a life for
yourself. Eighteen-year-old Yoruba boy stowing away in
the dead of night, trying to make yourself invisible in the
belly of a ship bound for England. Leaving home for the
rich white man's world. Dark black night. You felt the
heaving and creaking of the cargo ship, the
Temple Star
, as
it laboured away from the Lagos quayside and out into
the waters that were slick with spilled oil and clogged with
debris. You felt the ship rising and falling as it moved
beyond this tumult and into the clearer waters of the
Atlantic Ocean. Leaving home. Yoruba boy. With your
dreams of being an engineer locked up in your young heart.
You were unable to come out of hiding and take one final
look at the line of lights that illuminated the coastline of
your vanishing world. You were unable to wave to your
mother. Unable to stand straight like a small, thin manboy
and bid farewell to your Nigeria. Unable to promise
the wind and the moon and the stars that one day soon
you would return as a successful man with a twinkle in
your eyes and with England tucked away in your jacket,
ready to produce and display it to any who might wish to
glimpse your pocketed jewel. You lay, instead, hidden in
the bowels of the ship listening to the roar of the malevolent
water as the Atlantic Ocean asserted its authority over
the clumsy vessel, tossing its rusty bulk high and then
abandoning it so that it crashed back to the watery earth
with a loud slap. Yoruba boy. Young lion leaving Lagos,
Nigeria, in the oil-rich heart of the British Empire. Cold
and tired, chilled in your young bones, curled up like a
newborn babe. A hand reached down and pushed you. You
opened your eyes and saw your saviour glowering at you,
disgusted that he had discovered a nigger on his ship.
Yoruba boy travelling to meet his future. Please, do not
look at me in this way. I desire only to reach England in
safety. To travel across this terrifying water to England,
and thereafter to continue with my life. But he stared down
at you, didn't he, David? As though he was eager to throw
you into the water that frightened you so much. Toss you
away into the open mouth of the sea. But he did nothing.
You uncurled your tight, stiff body and stood uneasily.
Water. You asked him for water to drink. Water. But the
man said nothing. He simply stared at you and watched
your mouth moving like that of a fish. Water. And then
many days later the water came to an end. There was no
more water, there was only land, and an arrival in a moribund
grey coastal town in the north of England, among
a colourless clutter of wharves and barges, and cranes and
container boxes. Your eyes feasted upon the grey vista of
Hull at the mouth of the River Humber on the east coast
of England, and you held your breath. Yoruba boy in
England with a whole life in front of him. But first, prison.
The policeman handcuffed you and led you down the
plank to the shore while hostile eyes burned a hole in your
thin body. You had imposed yourself upon them. Your
heart sank, and for the first time it occurred to you that
these people might cast you back upon the water and
attempt to send you home. But they said nothing. They
simply locked you in a cell and told you to wait. Wait.
Their food would not stay in your stomach. You did not
enjoy the contempt with which the guards looked at you.
In fact, there was no joy to these men, to this country, to
this prison, but it was too late for you had crossed the
water and arrived. However, if only they would allow you
to remain in their country then you felt sure that one day
you might find joy. Eventually they bullied you into a
courtroom and imposed twenty-eight days in prison upon
you, after which they promised you that you would be
permitted to enter British life. Twenty-eight days only.
Twenty-eight days to freedom. But they did not take you
from the courtroom and accompany you back to the
familiar cell. They put you in a van and turned inland,
away from the sea, away from Hull, and they travelled for
fifty miles with their Yoruba cargo in the back of their
vehicle. They furrowed their way towards the centre of
England. Leeds. In Leeds the jail is Victorian. Its high
Gothic walls are imposing and frightening. An extremely
narrow gate. Armley jail. Your twenty-eight days would be
spent here, away from the sea, in the heart of England.
And after twenty-eight days of misshapened dreams that
presented themselves as nightmares, they released you into
this city of Leeds. To go back to Hull would be to suggest
a return. No. You were cold. A teenager. Already a veteran
of an Atlantic passage and prison. But now you were free
and ready. But that was a long time ago, David. It would
be nearly twenty years before you would meet the nameless
girl at the bottom of Button Hill. Twenty years in
which to live a life in Leeds in the heart of England. David,
do you remember the girl? She did not know your history,
but she knew your name. You waited for her and bathed
in her smile, and exchanged your few words. And then you
watched as she disappeared from view. Yoruba boy from
Lagos who, on arriving in Leeds, thought only of himself
in the future tense. A teenager at home in Leeds. Alone.
I will stay in Leeds. No more water. No water. You decided.
And then later. Imagine, a fourteen-year-old girl with
manners from the Old World who showed you respect.
And after she had passed you by it was time for you to
leave Button Hill. You walked down Chapeltown Road
towards the heart of your city. The language of hope no
longer sat on your tongue. It was difficult to speak in the
future tense. But the appearance of the girl gave you hope.
The girl seemed to know who you were even if your city
misunderstood you. But after twenty years you refused to
leave your city.