Small Island (34 page)

‘Don’t leave me,’ I told Arthur. I opened the covers for him to get into the bed with me. But he tucked them back, then pulled the chair up beside me and sat down. Silently.

1948

Thirty

Gilbert

If the Almighty, perusing that list in the celestial book, was to have told me, ‘One day, Gilbert Joseph, you will be pleased that by your name, in the list of achievements, is written only the one word . . . driver,’ I would have had to tell the deity, delicate but firm, that He was mad. But, as ever, the Almighty in His wisdom proved to be right. Come, let me tell you how. See me now. I am dressed no longer in my RAF uniform of blue but still, from the left, from the right, this West Indian man is looking just as fine in his best civilian suit. In my hand I have a letter of introduction from the forces labour exchange concerning a job as a storeman. I take it to the office of the potential employer.

I enter and am greeted by an Englishman who smiles on me and shakes my hand. ‘Come in. Sit down,’ he tell me. A cup of tea is brought and placed before me. All good signs – I have the job, I comfort myself. The man takes up the letter to read the contents. Everything is in order. ‘So, you were in the RAF?’ he ask.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I was in the RAF. Where were you stationed?’ There then followed a short conversation about those days, before the man said, ‘Myself, I was in Falmouth.’ For the next hour I am having to shift delicately on my seat and pinch myself so my eyes do not close, while this man acquaint me with his time on radar. In a pause between his breaths I shrewdly remind him of the job I had come to see him about. Was it to be mine?

‘No, sorry,’ he say.

His explanation was that there were women working in the factory. Not understanding his meaning I said that I did not mind. He smiled at this and then told me, ‘You see, we have white women working here. Now, in the course of your duties, what if you accidentally found yourself talking to a white woman?’ For a moment the man sounded so reasonable, so measured, I thought him to be talking sense.

‘I would be very courteous to her,’ I assured him.

But he shook his head. He wanted no answer from me. ‘I’m afraid all hell would break loose if the men found you talking to their women. They simply wouldn’t stand for that. As much as I’d like to I can’t give you the job. You must see the problems it would cause?’

Once my breath had returned enabling me to speak again, I asked him why he could not have told me this an hour before when I still had feeling in my backside. He tell me he wanted to be kind to an ex-serviceman.

Another office I am invited into, the man ask me if I am a Christian. Let me tell you, after a few weeks back in this after-the-war England, God slipping from me like a freshly launched ship. But I say yes. The man start praying among the telephone and blotting-pad. He invite me to join him. I need the job so I lower my head. At the end of praising the Lord together he tell me he cannot employ me because his partner does not like coloured people. I nearly knock him into an early meeting with the Almighty when he called on God to bless me as I left.

In five, no, in six places, the job I had gone for vanish with one look upon my face. Another, I wait, letter in my hand, while everyone in this office go about their business as if I am not there. I can feel them watching me close as a pickpocket with his prey but cannot catch even a peeping twinkle of an eye. Until a man come in agitated. ‘What’re you doing here?’ he say to me. ‘We don’t want you. There’s no job for you here. I’m going to get in touch with that labour exchange, tell them not to send any more of you people. We can’t use your sort. Go on, get out.’

The girl at another office look on me with such horror – man, I swear her hair standing straight as stiff fingers – that with no hesitation I walk right back out again. Was I to look upon that expression every day? Come, soon I would believe that there was indeed something wrong with me.

After a few weeks of this benighted behaviour it was as the Almighty had foretold. This ex-RAF man had come to love his full and permanent driving licence. Man, I was as jubilant as a boy on his birthday when my hands finally caressed the cold of a steering-wheel as a postman driver for the Post Office. Ah, that celestial book. I may not have been studying the law in this Mother Country but, let me tell you, for a Jamaican man a job as a driver was great luck – if only luck England-style.

‘Oi, you,’ the foreman said at the sorting office. As far as I can remember this man had used my name on only one occasion. When I first stood before him his gaping mouth had mumbled, ‘What’s all this?’ Looking confused he rifled through pieces of paper from his seniors. Then, finding that I was indeed the driver he had requested, he said, ‘Humph. You’re Joseph, right?’ However, since that early, almost courteous encounter, ‘Oi, you’, had become his preferred way of addressing me. Scraping ice from the windscreen of a van, I did not answer in the hope it might force him to use my given name as he did to all his other drivers.

‘Clarke’s sick,’ he told me.

Bert Clarke. I had been delivering and collecting with Bert from Victoria for weeks. On every run, there and back, he insisted on telling me the way. Left here . . . right now . . . round the roundabout. He believed I, as a foreigner, did not know or could ever learn the route. Every day the same way, and every day the same instruction. He had been working for the Post Office since men still rode the mail across the land on horseback, he assured me. But his drilling had lately become accompanied with an unruly cough. ‘Oh, sorry, Gilbert, bit of a frog today but you’re doing all right.’

‘Sick?’ I said.

‘Yeah. Don’t you know what sick means?’ The moustache on this foreman always seemed to have a little bit of egg yolk clinging tenacious to it. And the bothersome ice had so numbed my fingers I was unable to make a fist.

‘There’s someone else on the run with you. Get going.’

The foreman pointed this young man, who was to partner me, in the direction of my van. I watched this man. Strutting along, his hands in his pockets. He wiped his nose with his sleeve. Took the cigarette from his mouth with his thumb and first finger. Smoke wafted from the side of his lips. He coughed and spat on the ground before replacing the cigarette. He saw someone he knew and, smiling, he waved: ‘All right.’ And at that moment I longed to be once more in Jamaica. I yearned for home as a drunk man for whisky. For only there could I be sure that someone looking on my face for the first time would regard it without reaction. No gapes, no gawps, no cussing, no looking quickly away as if seeing something unsavoury. Just a meeting as unremarkable as passing your mummy in the kitchen. What a thing was this to wish for. That a person regarding me should think nothing. What a forlorn desire to seek indifference.

Seeing me, the young man approaching my van stopped dead. I greeted him with a smile. But suddenly his forehead was frowning – two sharp parallel lines dramatically creasing on his head. He pulled the cigarette from his mouth to allow it to open wider. Throwing it down he screwed it into the ground with his foot while looking around him to make sure I was not a joke played on him by his mates. He lifted his finger to point at me and only then did he shout, ‘What the bloody hell is going on?’

Some jeers carried through the air from the other men looking on at this comical situation. Oh, it was so funny – their friend has got the coon. I had got no time for this. ‘Come on, man,’ I tell him, ‘we have to go.’

‘I ain’t going nowhere with you,’ he say, before starting off back to the foreman.

The foreman took me off the run.

‘Why?’ I ask him. ‘I have been doing this run for weeks with no trouble.’

‘Because I said so. He don’t wanna work with you.’

‘But it is his job.’

‘And I don’t bloody blame him. I said you’d be trouble.’

‘I am not the one giving the trouble.’

‘One more word out of you, coon, and you’re out. You can pick up from King’s Cross on your own. Or get your cards. You got it?’

This was the first time I had been to King’s Cross. And standing by the trolleys of sacks that had been taken from the train it was not obvious to me which were for Post Office sorting. I did not want to mistakenly take railway parcels as this would cause great commotion.

‘Which ones are post?’ I ask a group of workers – four men – who were standing watching me.

‘Did I hear someone speak?’ one of them say. They looked as idle as layabouts, leaning on a wall scratching themselves. All began chuckling at this man’s funny joke.

‘Will you help me?’ I ask again. I got no reply but all looked to me mischievous like I was sport. Rolling their eyes around pretending they cannot hear where my voice is coming from. Ignoring them, I move to lift a sack.

‘Look, a darkie’s stealing from the railways,’ one of them shout. I put down that sack and go for another. As long as I take the right thing that is all that concerns me. As I pick up another sack I hear, ‘Oh, my God, what’s the coon doing, now?’ How many sacks I pick up and with all they jeer that I am wrong?

‘Can you please help me?’ I have to ask them.

‘Speak English,’ one of them say.

‘It is English I am speaking,’ I tell him.

‘Anyone understand what this coloured gentleman is after?’ More laughing.

But, man, I could not afford to get into trouble. ‘Could you please tell me what I am to take?’

‘All right,’ one of them say. This man pushing himself from the wall moved closer to me. One of his eyes looked at me while the other roamed in the socket like a lost marble. I am thinking maybe they had tired of this sport – after all, they had been playing with this coon for a long time now. But this cross-eye man just say, ‘I’ll tell you, if you answer something for me.’ His friends start chuckling again in anticipation of a nice piece of humiliation.

But I answer him civilly, ‘What?’

‘When are you going back to the jungle?’ Oh, man, this is the best joke these four men had heard today. They all laugh at this. A coon. The jungle. What a lark. Two of them light up cigarettes. Man, I am better than a tea-break. While the hands on the clock keep moving. I pick up another sack. ‘Oi, darkie, you ain’t answered me. When are you going back to where you belong?’

And I said straight into this man’s one eye, ‘But I just get here, man, and I not fucked your wife yet.’

‘What did you say? What did he say?’ He turned to his pals but they had not heard. ‘Fucking wog. What did you just say?’

‘Nothing,’ I tell him.

Then this man grabs a handful of my Post Office uniform to pull me to him. ‘Go on, hit him,’ his chums encourage. But this is one fool man. My arms are free. So, let me see, I could have whacked his nose until it cracked and bled. Or punched his stomach so his breakfast choke him. I could have pulled his head back, grabbed his throat and wrung breath from him. Knee him in his balls. Wind him with an elbow. Smash my forehead into his mouth to dislodge a few teeth. And all before his friends had time to reach me. His grip was not strong. This man was skinny from rationing. Come, let us face it, I could have just blown on him to push him to the ground. But if I was even to friendly tweak this man’s cheek, or matey pat his back, I knew I would lose my job. Three white men looking on would have the story – the day the darkie, unprovoked, attacked this nice gentleman. Savages, they would say. And all would agree, we must never employ any more of these coons: they are trouble – more trouble than they are worth. What else could this Jamaican man do? I dropped my head.

‘I said nothing, man. Nothing.’ And then I cringed craven until my submission cause this man to leave hold.

‘I’ll have to wash my fucking hands now I’ve touched you,’ he told me, pushing me from him. I stood pitiful as a whipped dog while this man said, ‘There’s decent Englishmen that should be doing your job.’ I kept my eyes at his feet while he indicated with his chin, ‘Over there, that trolley. Now get packed up and fuck off.’ And I went about my business with a gunfire of cuss words popping and pinging around me, while the postal sacks and an aching shame stooped me double.

Come, let us face it, I had forgotten all about Hortense by the time I arrive home from work that evening. All I am dreaming of as I climbed the stairs was to lie down on the bed and sleep. Perhaps dream of walking in the heat of the sun nyamming a mango. Or sipping sorrel with Elwood on the veranda. But I am woken rude as I opened the door of the room. Hortense was on her hands and knees there before me on the floor.

‘Get up! Get up!’ I shout. The anger so loud the force bounce from the wall to slap me back. She is startled. She jump and spill water from a bucket. She fuss to mop at it but I grab her arm. Enclose my hand round it and pull her from the floor. With the shock her feet make no struggle to stand upright. ‘Get up from off your knees,’ I tell her.

Suddenly she is looking in my face. Fear rounding and watering her eyes. She leaps away from my grip, her chest gasping for breath. ‘What is wrong with you?’ she say.

‘I am sorry,’ I tell her. ‘I am sorry.’ I back away from her to show her I am not a madman. To let her know she is safe. ‘But I cannot stand to see you on your knees, Hortense.’

‘But I have to wash this floor. The floor need washing.’

And I say, ‘I cannot see you on your knees so soon. I did not bring you to England to scrub a floor on your knees. No wife of mine will be on her knees in this country. You hear me?’

‘How you wan’ me clean the floor, then?’

‘Any way,’ I plead. ‘Any way, Hortense. But please, please, not on your knees.’

Thirty-one

Hortense

‘This is not chips,’ Gilbert Joseph say to me. ‘Your mummy never tell you how to make chips?’

‘My mother,’ I tell him, ‘taught me to be thankful for the food the Lord provide.’

‘But your mummy not here to eat this.’