She’s been a member of Star of Bethlehem Lodge since 1960 when she first arrived in London. Now, aged 74, she has the honour of being Matron of her chapter and I have the honour of being her son-in law. From beneath the well-dressed dignity of a mature lady, an outrageous saucy wit keeps popping out. She’s a great gardener and I have helped dig fresh ground with her, preparing it for planting callaloo, pumpkin, corn, and peas. Not ganja: respectable these days.
On Sunday we went on a coach trip she’d organised from Brixton to Folkestone, and though I had the only white skin of 180 in the party, I didn’t notice it, being on the inside looking out. We danced to the throbbing reggae sounds of Lappy Ding Back. We went to the beach to bathe, and my young nephew Afam had his spectacles ripped from his face by a powerful wave. We looked for them, but gave up as the lenses would have been pounded by the restless pebbles till they became
pebbles themselves—fragments of glass ground to cloudiness on all sides. He feared for the wrath of his Mum when he got home, and so did I!
The dance floor was in the Sports Centre, in a basketball hall. The greenish light and strange acoustics gave the hall an underwater feel, but with the powerful sound-system instead of pounding waves, while just outside, the strong whiff of chlorine from the indoor swimming pool brought back childhood excitement.
The day was a pell-mell of impressions and memories. I’d once worked for two years at Eurotunnel, based in Folkestone and Calais, France, so this was a trip down memory lane. But it was also the next best thing to a Caribbean adventure. We had the sunshine and we had the people, so much more attuned to their own physicality than the pale Caucasians, of the southern English tribe, who are so wary of one another, so class-ridden.
Mom produced from her capacious bag bottles of Bailey’s Irish Cream, whisky, wine, sorrel—a fruit drink flavoured with ginger and preserved with wine and rum. She passed round plastic plates heaped with rice and peas, jerk chicken, fried fish. Our ears and limbs were aroused by the extraordinary rhythms of Soca, Ragga & Reggae, which emphasise the off-beat and intoxicate you with their sweet insistence. Our eyes were enticed with the antics of dancers. A young woman of
stately and generous curves showed how to “shake your booty” whilst her other convex parts gyrated in harmony. She was joined by two other young women, less substantial but almost as skilled in this particular dance style. All shapes and ages from five to eighty were represented in
our party, each happy in their own skin.
Caribbean immigrants have been in the UK since the nineteen-fifties, with the biggest influx in the sixties and seventies. Unlike those from the Indian subcontinent, who have their own languages and ancient cultures, they came speaking English, or at least a patois thereof, with English surnames, adopted from the slaving plantation owners who’d bought them in past centuries. Despite racist history and sometimes actuality, they respected the British and now are British, having made it their home, now that their grandchildren are here too. Forty years! Have they been wandering in the desert, looking for their promised land? No,
they aren’t God’s specially chosen people. They’re part of one worldwide brotherhood of humanity, as celebrated in the Rasta cult which provides counterpoint to Jamaican hell-fire Christianity, which itself provides counterpoint to Jamaica’s undercurrent of lawless violence. West Indians have brought their own kind of sunshine into their adopted country. I say “their”, but I want to say “our”. I’m an immigrant too, and linked to them, via roots (we all originate from Africa, if you go back far enough), through marriage, and through shared citizenship of the world.