Stanley Ayodeji

An Extract from the Preface to

By Stanley Ayodeji

To understand the intricacies of how a housing estate works, one needs knowledge of the residents and how they came to be. Without this, one will neither comprehend, nor know the protocol of, how things are done. Whether or not its residents are set in tried and tested ways is artillery one should be armed with. Change, where change is needed, is not something achievable over one night’s work and does not come without resistance. Oftentimes it takes eons to make an impact; sometimes it takes never at all. More often than not persuasion, coercion and manipulation are necessary, for to change a people the people must desire it. One does not change for change’s sake…

Most of the English families were born and bred in Bullingwell and, unfortunately, there they will live and die. According to the stars year after hopeless year, decade after evolving decade, it is fair to say their future is scribed to start and end no further than the estate. This said, is there an actual point in putting anything more than minimal effort into bettering one’s situation? If it does come down to a straightforward case of mind over matter then what a waste of time and energy that is also. They certainly do not mind and, in no uncertain terms, it most definitely does not matter!

There are set ways of doing things in Bullingwell. If there has not been employment in the family for a good while one continues this pattern for a few more generations. After attending primary school for four gruelling years followed by secondary school for five arduous lifetimes (barring suspensions and permanent exclusion) one leaves with the following folder of qualifications varied in grades: Work Dodging, Benefit Manipulation, How to Major in Neglecting a Minor, Cursing Detailed, Fighting Demonstrated, Coping with Incarceration, Rerouting Electricity & Generic Bill Avoidance, Shoplifting, Evasion of Facts, Life Untaxed, Living With Ignorance, Social Deviance, Making Mum an Early Grandma and, most beneficial of all, Sleeping In and Missing Stuff. With everybody leaving school with at least five of these credentials one can assume the locals have overachieved for a very long time.

Everything combines to suggest the chance of some serendipitous form of intervention lies between slim and none. It is no accident that all one has to pass down to a child is everything one does not have. The truth of the matter is what the devil could be easier?

After being stolen as a war prize by the British, having had her identity improved from Monte Rosa to Empire Windrush, this large vessel of a woman came to land on Tuesday the 22nd day of June 1948. It was packed with 492 unsuspecting passengers from the sun-soaked mento island of Jamaica, West Indies, who were plopped in the port of rain-drenched Tilbury, Essex, far away from their homeland, into a brand new world.

Each passenger had parted with twenty-eight pounds ten shillings for the privilege, an affordable sum, apart from the odd stowaway on board for free for the same reasons but in different circumstances. The journey turned out to be an epic and took at least twenty-two days due to a spot of bother with one of her fine engines.

It is fair to suspect the locals did not know what hit them when the big ship docked. Having thorough knowledge of the history of Tilbury - once governed under Roman occupancy - as vivid as if they had lived it themselves there existed a genuine fear their darling town was about to be overrun once more, this time by the Jamaicans. What a thought to be afraid of! As it turned out, these colourful islanders had no intention of usurping the nervous indigenous (they are far too laidback for strenuous transgressions unless forced). On the contrary, after many had fought, died, and triumphed in the RAF under the banner of the British Empire, they arrived in the hope of securing housing and employment whilst rebuilding the ‘mother country’ three years after World War II ended. In fairness, they did not ask for much.

Work was aplenty in manual areas like on the railways, in hospitals, with London Transport and the General Post Office, but good housing was scarce and dire in places. A large number of buildings were in a state of disrepair, virtually crumbling at the girders affected by the wounds of war inflicted during the blitz of German bombs. This was much to the abject disbelief of the Jamaicans who, not having completed any homework before they came, expected to see an all-conquering British Empire awash with lavish bounty and arrogant extravagance. How wrong they were!

After being housed temporarily in an underground air raid shelter at Clapham Common many settled in Brixton because it harboured a Labour Exchange for those eager to work, which meant just about everybody. If one was willing to leave a country in search of opportunity and a higher standard of living it was relatively easy to branch out further than the London boroughs. Subsequently, a number of them promptly dispersed handsomely packed luggage around strange communities up and down the United Kingdom, inhaling the rich atmosphere of alien places called High Land Green, Rising Park, Saint Catherine’s, where they would come to settle. Later on, they would venture to suburbs they had been told about and end up with permanent council property in places like Bullingwell.

It would be a short matter of time before they would uncover, not a land where friendly streets lay in glistening gold, but a run-down estate where employment took the form of unskilled manual work, lodgings were rated between unsatisfactory and insalubrious, and the overall welcome was cold and changeable like an unfair amount of people and the coarse weather. As diverse symbols of all that was British they had become the natives usurped in inventive methods of discrimination unimagined in idealistic dreams about life under King George VI.

On Sunday the 1st of October 1961, one year to the day since so-called independence from British colonial masters, an unnamed ship set sail from the bustling Lagos Port, Nigeria, West Africa, to embark across Atlantic waters for six uncomfortable weeks, docking in the windswept but interestingly named Port of Plymouth, Devon. She did not travel carelessly; within her hull jostled a strategically concealed cargo of borrowed terracotta and bronze sculptures, masses of rubber and cocoa, and a few hundred unsuspecting passengers packed tighter than plum-peeled tomatoes in an airless tin (as an aside, a few barrels of oil were thrown in for the captain’s personal consumption!).

Their position differed from that of the West Indian brothers and sisters who had made a similar journey a few years before the Africans, this time around. There had been no distribution of advertisements in local newspapers equivalent to The Daily Gleaner, no jazzed-up announcements on the radio, no affordable tickets provided. You would either afford it by whichever means, or not.

The severest sacrifice was worth trading in for the dream trip to ‘London’. Some managed on one good meal as an act of parsimony; one could not afford to be wasteful with the scant amount of money earned in a day. Children, who should be playing and schooling, treaded the streets hawking their wares amongst bustling traffic that screamed about its trade at reckless speeds, disrespecting life. Shoes, old or new, were a luxury one could do without. Anything broken was mended until it broke again. Then it would be mended, until it broke again. Everything was kept or passed on. Everything had its use. Nothing was wasted. What one did not have one managed without. Life was hard to say the least. So was just living.

After years of surviving every last coin, odds stacked heavily against favour, one can now afford three commodities. With just one of these elements missing, just about everything planned is impossible: 1) Passport 2) Papers 3) One way ticket.

They too did not really know what to expect; some came to be reunited with husbands and wives who had left Mother Africa to attend British universities. Children were sent for by parents and guardians. Nothing is ever that straightforward.

As well as menial tasks somebody has to do for society to function in any kind of order, they would train to become nurses, doctors, accountants, lawyers. Professionals also came to find their qualifications and skills were totally worthless. They therefore had to retrain to meet the good King’s standards of expertise. To fund evening studies unskilled roles were taken up to offer little income, but the cost of living went about its usual business and got in the way. Study? Live? One of them had to go. Yes, sacrifices had to be made – more painful on the realisation the king they had come to serve passed away nearly ten years before; his throne was now occupied by his dear and eldest daughter, Queen Elizabeth the Second!

They would meet the Jamaicans for the first time when they took up employment within factories, on London Transport, in the General Post Office, with the relatively new National Health Service, you know the story. Of course, they did not always see eye to eye; the Nigerians could not decipher the Jamaicans and the Jamaicans could not fathom the Nigerians. However, ultimately, whatever it is they were fighting for they were fighting for it together.

Every single one of them had a foolproof plan: to earn enough money to send back to their families at regular intervals, and to return home for good when they had saved an amount that might alter their lives forever. Nobody wanted to die here. What could be simpler?

In a nutshell, this is the type of estate I was by chance blessed to grow up on. An estate where out of the twenty or so households running along the bottom row of maisonettes, twenty or so were incomplete homes broken by absent fathers where mothers called on instinct to stab in the dark at raising rejected children alone; predominantly sons as it were.