The Pure Gold Baby (6 page)

Jess liked best the episode when he was denied hospitality and shelter by the suspicious king of a tribe near the Niger and forced to sit hungry all day beneath a tree, and to take refuge at night in its branches from wild beasts, as nobody would give him food or accommodation. But he was befriended by a woman returning from her labours in the field. Observing that he looked weary and dejected, she heard his story with ‘looks of great compassion’, took him to her hut, lit him a lamp, spread a mat for him and fed him with a fine fish broiled on the embers. She assured him he could sleep safely in her hut, and during the night she and her female company sat spinning cotton and singing an improvised song:

The winds roared, and the rains fell. The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree. He has no mother to bring him milk, no wife to grind his corn. Let us pity the white man, no mother has he
 . . . 

This song can bring tears to Jess’s eyes whenever she wants.

The less friendly and more avaricious Moors were puzzled by Park’s pocket compass and the way its needle always pointed to the Great Desert. Unable to provide a scientific explanation comprehensible to them, Mungo Park told them that his mother resided far beyond the sands of the Sahara, and that while she was alive the iron needle would always point towards her. If she were dead, he said, it would point to her grave.

As it happened, his mother outlived him. He came to a sad end, though not on this recorded expedition. He pursued his fate.

Jess found these stories deeply touching.

Mungo Park didn’t think much of the slave-trading, intolerant and bigoted Moors, who hissed and shouted and spat at him because he was a white man and a Christian. They abused him and plundered his goods and refused to let him drink from the well. He had to drink from the cow trough. They ill-ireated their slaves and their womenfolk.

He preferred the native Africans with their simple superstitions and their kind hearts.

Mungo Park was an Enlightenment man.

Who could have foreseen what would happen to the Blackstock Road in the next millennium? We didn’t. Nobody did. The mosque and the halal butchers took over from the barrels of salt pork, and young men with beards from the West Indians and the Irish. The friendly Arsenal at Highbury, home of the Gunners, moved to the glittering Emirates Stadium, built and sponsored by money from the Middle East, and Miss Laidman married the head of a college of further education and went to live in North Kensington. The balance of power and the balance of fear shifted. But by this time many of us, like Miss Laidman, would have moved on to more up-market neighbourhoods. Some of us are still there, in the old neighbourhood, and our properties have appreciated a hundredfold, as properties in London do, but the area is still not what you would call fashionable. Those of us who are loyal to it appreciate it, indeed love it. Some streets, with their modest little mass-produced brickwork and tile decorations, have hardly changed at all. There are old lovingly pruned rose bushes growing still in small front gardens. They predate the booms and slumps of property.

Blackstock Road has not yet, as I write, become gentrified, and may never become so. It was peaceful then, when we were young. Shabby, but peaceful. There were little shops, selling small cheap household objects, bric-à-brac, groceries, vegetables, stationery. Locksmiths, hairdressers, launderettes, upholsterers, bookmakers. A lot of people taking in one another’s washing. It is much the same today, although most of the shop-owners now come from different ethnic groups. There are fewer of the old white North Londoners. They are dying off, moving out. It remains on the whole a peaceful neighbourhood, though there have been eruptions of violence and suspicion, and one spectacular police raid by hundreds of uniformed officers that revealed, I believe, a tiny cache of ricin.

Even a tiny cache wasn’t very pleasant, some of us old survivors thought, although we made light of it, laughed about it. It’s not nice to have neighbours who are trying to kill you, even if they are not trying very hard. We tried to be tolerant, but it wasn’t very nice.

There was a time, not so long ago, when hatred was preached by a man with a hook for a hand from the redbrick mosque of Finsbury Park, the mosque that Prince Charles, Prince of Many Faiths, opened with such conciliatory optimism in 1994. It’s quieter now. It’s not a very big mosque, not one of those extravagant imposing new mosques with great golden domes, and its minaret is made of cement and pebble-dash. It is well guarded by spiked walls and CCTV Suburban net curtains drape its windows, with their green-painted frames. It doesn’t look much of a threat. As a mosque, it is a far cry from the glories of Isfahan and Samarkand and Cairo, and I’m not sure who is watching what on that CCTV

You can’t tell what will happen to a neighbourhood. Jess studies its evolution with an expert eye. Her eye is better than mine, but we discuss its progress. I’ve learnt new ways of looking from Jess. She continues to find ways of employing her sociological and anthropological expertise.

Finsbury Park tube station hasn’t seen much improvement. At our age, most of us tend to avoid it at night. It presents a small challenge. Too many drug-dealers. They’ve moved up the line towards us from King’s Cross.

I visited a great and famous mosque in Cairo once. I forget its name. It was unutterably grand and sacred, lofty and empty, austere and sombre. It reared up from the deep ravine of the sloping street like a cliff face. I wandered round its solitude in silence and in awe.

The Finsbury Park mosque is small, domestic, suburban. Rather English, really.

Jess’s thesis on contrasting perceptions of witchcraft and disability in pre-i mperial and post-i mperial Africa was disputed, and she was rightly accused by some of having bitten off more than she could chew. She was also accused from a diametrically opposite angle by one of her assessors of having failed to include any mention of the superstitions surrounding the birth of twins in West Africa, and the heroic work of Scottish missionary Mary Slessor in rescuing some of these twin babes from being exposed at birth in the bush. (Jess had not mentioned Mary Slessor and the twins because she had never heard of them. Her knowledge, although arcane, was very patchy. But she was still very young. The assessor had himself specialised in Mary Slessor and twin studies, and if Jess had known that she might have been more diplomatic in her selection of material.)

Theses were not nearly as rigorously overseen in those days as they are now, and the maverick globe-trotting conference-attending field-work-dabbling Guy Brighouse had been somewhat nonchalant about his duties towards her. You could get away with almost anything. You didn’t have to tick so many boxes.

But her efforts, although criticised, were also moderately applauded, and she became Dr Jessica Speight. Her father, plain Mr Speight of Broughborough, was proud of her. And he loved his special granddaughter, Anna, although he was shy about paying too many visits. He told me this one cold afternoon in Clissold Park, as we sat on a bench together, while the children watched the mynah birds and listened to them screech and chatter. One of them had been taught to scream ‘Arsenal! Arsenal!’ My children thought this was very funny No longer children, they still support the Arsenal through thick and thin. This weekend, as I write, it’s a bit thin.

Philip Speight hoped Jess’s small and eccentric little family would prosper. Maybe, one day, Jess would find another man, a better man, a husband, a father for Anna.

Anna loved her grandfather. She was lucky there. She was a lucky child. She called him Gramps, and he liked that.

Anna’s grandfather was much more attentive to Anna than Anna’s grandmother. We speculated (but not in Jess’s hearing) that this was because Anna’s grandmother feared the suspicion of a hereditary taint. Women, irrationally but not surprisingly, tend to take the idea of genetic blame more seriously than men.

And, in the cause of mitochondrial disorders, they are right to do so. Although we did not know that then. And it doesn’t do us much good to know it now.

Jess’s sister Vee avoided Jess and Anna, possibly for the same reasons. Or maybe it was just common or garden sibling rivalry that kept them apart. Jess was, despite the difficulties, a formidable sister.

The story of Anna unfolded peaceably and uneventfully over those early years of nursery school and primary school and caused, as such stories do, both happiness and anxiety in almost equal measure. Anna was a fact in all our lives, and a part of our mapping of the world.

The birth of children such as Anna may become rarer year by year. And that would be a loss, though the nature of that loss is hard to describe. It is important to recognise it as loss, although we cannot describe it.

An innocence, with children such as Anna, would be gone from the world. A possibility of another way of being human would be lost, with all that it signifies. They are God’s children,
les enfants du bon Dieu
, we used to say, but now we no longer believe in God. Their lives are hidden with God, as Wordsworth wrote in defence of his Idiot Boy, but God himself is now hidden. God has absconded, but he has left us his children.

Anna had no father to miss or mourn, as she had never met him. But she had a loving grandfather and many willing surrogate-father figures in our little neighbourhood community. She knew what fathers were. There were several happy to take her on their knee with a storybook, to pick her up from school, to make sure she got her fair share of the sandwiches. Even the irresponsible and frequently absconding Rick Raven was respectful to Anna, when he was around. She provoked good behaviour.

The Professor as father and, we may assume, as lover proved disposable, as his emotional and intellectual limitations became more and more obvious to Jess, and off he went, unregretted, with his professor wife, to a year’s fieldwork on the borders of Manchuria. He was something of a fellow-traveller, the Professor, but Jess was beginning to think he was also a bit of a fool. She began to wonder what she had ever seen in him, apart from the size of his penis, and it sometimes crossed her mind that he had behaved rather badly in seducing her when she was still a student in her early twenties, though she tried not to allow this suspicion to linger and fester. She brushed it away. Looking after Anna had enabled her to see the Professor as an undeveloped and childish person. She was well rid of him, and, after several years of him, she was ready to move on.

The two professors went off to make a study of child rearing and infanticide in agrarian communities in a remote Chinese border community. The two professors were prepared to consider infanticide an appropriate response to many family problems, or so it seemed to Jess. They had no children. (Anna did not count.) Sweden, as Jess did not then know, as not many people in Britain then knew, practised compulsory sterilisation of those with learning difficulties until 1975, which seems a long-lasting anomaly in what is rightly held to be a tolerant, liberal egalitarian society.

Anthropologists are a strange breed. Jess didn’t like it when outsiders made fun of them, but she couldn’t help noticing that some of the most celebrated anthropological narratives have curious gaps in them. You read hundreds of pages of observation and analysis, and are suddenly made aware that the observer was, all the while, not embedded lonely in an alien tribe living on worms and bats and insect stew, as he appeared to be and indeed as he frequently suggested he was, but living near by in semi-comfort with his wife and a servant or two in a de-luxe tent or a mobile home, with access to the highway or the helicopter. Much work, of course, has recently been done on deconstructing anthropological narratives, and it is sometimes hard to tell which revisionist readings are true, and which malicious. But some primary and very famous accounts are, for sure, misleading.

Living amongst the Nambikwara in Brazil, Lévi-Strauss describes a meal consisting of a few fruits, two fat poisonous spiders, tiny lizards’ eggs, one or two lizards, a bat, palm nuts and a handful of grasshoppers. He claimed that the group gobbled these up cheerfully, and that he happily shared the repast.

Maybe so, maybe not. When his wife developed an eye infection, she was evacuated very promptly to the nearest hospital.

However hard we stare at Lévi-Strauss’s photographs of the Nambikwara, we can never read them. Are they human? Are they of the same human species as ourselves, are they of the same branch of the family of man? What did these people make of Lévi-Strauss and his low-profile but attendant wife? We stare at them as adolescents in a more sheltered age used to stare at photographs suggesting or partially disclosing nudity: hungry for knowledge, hungry for revelation. As Jess as a child stared at her father’s kid-bound booklet, as Jess as a mother stares at the photographs in Lionel Penrose’s classic books on Mental Defect. She gazes at the High-Grade Feeble-Minded Girl, so demure and pretty with her dark dress and wide lace collar, at the physically less appealing Laurence-Moon syndrome man with retinitis pigmentosa and six toes on his right foot. But you can never penetrate the photograph. They do not reveal more, however long you stare at them. They remain static, frozen, sealed. They do not, cannot move. They cannot speak to us.

On the new medium of television, to which we were all beginning to succumb, the images moved. They seemed to tell us more. They seemed to be three-dimensional, those animals in the savannah, those tribesmen in their shacks and huts, those patients with rare diseases, those travellers in the outback. But you can’t believe anything you see on television, ever. You seem to see more than you see in an old-fashioned ethnological photograph, but you don’t. We all know that now. Look for the shadow of the cameraman. Look for the footprint of the cameraman.

It wasn’t quite as bad as that in those early days. Television wasn’t either as smart or as stupid as it is now. It was simpler.

Katie’s Jim in the sixties and seventies worked in television for Granada. He directed a current-affairs programme. He worked very hard. Those were the heroic days of Granada, when it was inventive, investigative, radical. Katie worked part time at Bush House for the BBC World Service, reviewing new poetry from the Commonwealth and chairing a poetry quiz. This was a characteristically gendered division of labour in those days.