I watched the television screen in front of me. I could see my plane traveling across the west coast of Africa on its way to London. The light from the screens on the back of the seats flickered into the night – miniature Boeing 747’s, sometimes flying over a pixilated sea, sometimes over the bulge of Africa.
As I stepped off the plane I breathed in the air that had filled the lungs of my forefathers, so cold it burned the back of my throat and I coughed like a newborn taking its first breath.
My Son had followed the path back to the shrine of his roots. Both his maternal and paternal great grandfathers and grandmothers lived and died on this Island of great medieval Kings and conquerors.
Jules lived in a small apartment on Kingsland High Road. We walked up the two flights of stairs, lugging my heavy suitcases behind us. I watched Jules as his fingers shuffled through his keys,
‘The one with the red nail varnish painted on it, that’s the downstairs key Mom. I can’t forget because it reminds me of the blood in the streets’
Before I could ask him what he meant, he pushed open the front door. It was dark inside. He opened the Venetian blinds and the London light streaked through in javelin throws of dull gray. The clouds shifted above chimney tops and satellite dishes and television aerials. Planes drew vapor lines across the sky
I looked at the clock on the wall. It was nine. Jules and I sat with our mugs of coffee between our hands, chatting while watching the day begin.
The metal doors in front of shop windows started rolling up – Enjoy Café, Olivia Ashley Shoes, House of Antoine Bridal Wear – with dummies in bridal dresses – bridesmaids in white dresses and red satin bags – their hair entwined with plastic roses.
Shop window
A group of school children walked past bundled up in jackets and scarves. They skipped, they screamed, they poked fingers into mailbox slots, they waited for the lights to turn green. The door of ‘Pier One Nightspot’ opened slightly. A tall man wearing a sweatshirt and tracksuit pants carried out a black plastic bag of rubbish and dropped it against a street pole. Scraps of garbage left over from the night before littered the pavement. Patches of blood from a street fight outside Afrikico Bar stained the flagstones. Pigeons pecked at the aftermath of Kingsland High Street nightlife.
Plastic packets glided in the wind as though invisible children pulled them on strings. They settled in winter trees.
‘Toast with your coffee Mom’
A string of chilli lights hung above Jules with photo’s between the lights – Christmas in the Transkei with the family, the dogs, the beach, the forest, the local people.
Chili lights
I turned back to the window. Pedestrians walked past, their images reflected in the shop windows – heads down, shoulders hunched, scarves pulled over their noses. The brake lights of cars flashed red between their images.
The rain came down.
We planned our first day and stepped outside into the cold. Jules walked ahead of me past mothers with babies in plastic bubble pushchairs. A man on a bike carried a steel sink under his arm. He rang his bell at pedestrians crossing the street.Afro World had a sale on all synthetic wigs – hair products cluttered the shop window – Milky Way, Strawberry Curl, Afro Curl, Deep Wave, Ripple wave. Stalls sold watches, cheap jewellery and international phone cards. A bus shelter had a billboard pasted on its side – Licky Sticky Happy Easter egg.
Julian took my arm, led me across the street. We walked down a small flight of steps to Regent’s Canal. The waterway flowed past in swirls of David Hockney brushstrokes, lined on one side by a concrete footpath. Dandelions and cow parsley grew between the cracks. Joggers hustled us and bike riders overtook to the right. Julian slowed down. We observed the tiniest details. I took pictures – a close up of a dandelion, a faded painting of a rainbow on a sewer pipe arching over the canal – the pillared remains of a dismantled railway bridge that seemed to be holding up the sky
A pink plastic glove floated on top of the water. Houseboats idled by or stood moored against the sides of the canal. A fisherman sat on a grassy verge with a flask of tea and a plate of sandwiches in front of him. On the opposite wall a tiled mural caught our attention. Ceramic butterflies and snails, birds and flowers, beetles and frogs.
Mural
We passed locks, arched bridges and gas towers that reflected in the water, their metalwork – giant spider webs rusty in the sunlight. It started to rain. We trudged home on blistered feet. Julian and I chatted into the night until our words grew thin with exhaustion. He went to bed and I read until my eyes closed, dissolving the images of the day.
We caught the fifty-eight bus to Church Street in Stoke Newington. Julian and I were going to look for angels. We walked along woodchip paths deeply shadowed by Horse Chestnuts. Abney Park Cemetery was overgrown with knotweed and brambles. The weather ravaged faces of angels looked down at us from ivy-covered tombstones. They held chiseled bouquets between eroded fingers – their wings torn off, their limbs broken free. Celandines made stars in the sycamore. A flock of blackbirds settled in the Yews – song thrushes pecked between the memorial plantings of snowdrops and crocuses. We were in the middle of East London with cars pumping lead into the clouds and we could hear Woodpeckers hammering on trees – we could see Orange Tip butterflies basking on garlic mustard – touch fungi growing on rotting wood.
Child Angel
We imagined mourners placing wreaths of flowers below the memorial stone of Elizabeth Alice, dear little daughter, died February 23rd 1897 aged eleven months, also dear little son John Idris died September 27th 1897 aged seven weeks, also our beloved daughter Olive Charlotte. Lichen obscured the rest of the epitaph. We wondered how these children had died so close to each other. Jules took a picture of me standing next to a moss covered child angel.
“Mom stand so your profile matches the angel’s to catch the light between you – great, that’s going to be a cracker.”
And so we shared our love for photography, our love of light, observation, asthetics, art, design, philosophy, humour, streetlife or just simply chatting, sharing and loving.
Snowflakes crowded around streetlights. The sky was white – white rooftops, white chimney pots. Snow rested on decorative ledges of buildings – on patterns in the architecture. We walked to Ridley Street Market. The snow had calmed down and gently dusted the stalls. Chickens hung upside down from rails with butcher’s hooks through their feet.
Butcher shop
Sweet and seedless clementine’s sold for seventy-five pence each. A stall displayed fish, prawns, eels, pigs’ trotters. Baskets of shallots and purple onions stood alongside Ghanaian stalls with hair products, wigs, shoes, bags, Vaseline, boxes stacked with dried fish. Stalls sold plum tomatoes, ginger, okra, sugar cane, yams. I shopped at the Turkish supermarket and bought flat bread rolled up with spiced mince, diced coriander and onions.
Market produce
Market stalls were being dismantled – the remains of the day lay in the street. Old women scratched through discarded fruit and vegetables, stuffing them into plastic packets – a man poked his umbrella among the rotting piles – he picked up an apple here, an orange there. Ridley Street emptied – once the place where fascist Mosleyites shouted
‘Not enough Jews were burned at Belsen.’
That was enough to stir the angst of the unenlightened in a world where exploitation of the other was commonplace.Throngs of people drifted past us into side streets as mounted Bobbies watched.
Julian handed me a glass of wine. I picked up The Independent, the headline on the second page read
‘ANTI-SEMITIC ATTACKS RISE TO RECORD LEVEL’
The Chief Political Correspondent, Marie Woolf went on to say
British Jews were subject to a record number of anti-Semitic attacks last year, including a huge increase in serious assaults. The increase has been blamed on “the Middle East factor”, with a sharp rise in incidents rooted in hatred of Israel.
Under a photograph of Jewish servicemen’s desecrated graves, a list recorded incidents of attacks in 2004
13 FEBRUARY A London travel agency specializing in tours to Israel had “dirty Jew cunts, up the PLO” daubed on the outside)
1 MARCH A Jewish man was stabbed in his home by an assailant who shouted
“I’m going to kill you, you fucking yid”
APRIL Letters were sent to several synagogues in London reading:
“By almighty Allah you shall not escape Muslim justice with 1000 assassins ready to strike in places that you gather”
I stopped reading.
Jules’s three days off work were up. He gave me a local gazette to see what was on in the area. The first Hackney Literary Word Festival had been launched. I went to the Centerprise bookshop two blocks away to find out more about it. I picked up a booklet advertising different events.
Write To Ignite – Hackney Word Festival – February March April 2005.
My eyes ran along a line of books on a shelf. I touched the red spine of a book called The 43 Group. I hooked my finger over the top of the book and pulled it out of the shelf.
‘Who’s Morris Beckman?’
I thought as I looked at the cover. It had a picture of a couple being led away by two policemen. The number 43 was set in the middle of a Jewish star. I opened the book.
‘The crime of the Nazi leaders had squalid beginnings. Once a handful of policemen could have suppressed it. Instead it grew to its dangerous might through the wickedness of a few and the complicity the cowardice of many’.
This quote was taken from the Daily Express on the day of the Nuremberg executions.
I turned the page
Cover Story – The identity of the couple on the front cover had been discovered. They were Mick and Hetty Noble. Hetty told the story behind the picture.
The police had driven a wedge between the platform, surrounded by fascists, and the demonstrators, and had driven most of the crowd back from Ridley Street into Kingsland High Street…One young woman got very excited and while I was trying to calm her down the police arrested me. Mick shouted, “You can’t take her, she’s my wife!” So they said he’d better come along too. In the photograph, though it looks like I’m crying, I’m not – I’d got a punch in the face and was wiping the blood from my nose.
Morris Beckman, the author of the book had grown up in the East End Jewish community of the Twenties and Thirties. Vidal Sassoon who wrote the forward stated
“As a child I had no concept of hate, its depth and the place it commanded within human feelings and the history of mankind. In the confines of Pettioat Lane, my family lived on the fourth floor of the grey tenement building which housed Mrs. Cohen’s baker shop, and it was her bagels that sustained us when we were hungry My whole world was Jewish; from the barrow boys with their cockney ‘schpiel’ to my uncle, ‘Kosher Jack’ as he was called, who worked in a butcher shop on Middlesex Street. The salon where I eventually started my apprenticeship was at 101 Whitechapel Road, and ‘Professor ‘Adolf Cohen, the hairdresser became my mentor. How could I forget Petticoat Lane, especially on Sundays? It was a maze of colourful humanity, a kaleidoscope of people wanting to buy and to be amused. Love could be bought with kind word and hate was for sale on every street corner.”
I read the credits on the back page.
Oswald Mosely decided he could carry on where Hitler and Mussolini had left off.
In a ferocious, bloody, yet brilliantly covert five-year campaign, The 43 Group destroyed the Mosleyites and everything they stood for.
And all this had happened right where I was staying. I had seen the street sign Balls Pond Road and remembered reading somewhere that a derelict chapel at no 49 had once been the headquarters of Oswald Mosley’s Legions. I walked a few blocks from Centerprise then turned right into Balls Pond Road. I walked up the street and down again. I went into a pub and asked about the derelict chapel – no one knew about it and no one had heard of Oswald Mosely. I passed a wall covered with graffiti and began to read the aerosol scribbles
No woman no bills
Rules R for fools
If there was a god drugs would be free
I looked closer and saw a faded swastika and a sign which read
Anti Nazi skins.
Evidence of hatred defaced the walls that had survived the Second World War bombings.
Of all the horror I saw at the Holocaust Museum the next day, I was not prepared for the impact of seeing the personal possessions of the Jewish people who died in concentration camps. Behind a glass cabinet, shoes had been stacked up like bricks in a wall. Those were the shoes that mothers and fathers, daughters and sons had worn as they walked into the gas chambers. I saw the scuffmarks on them – I saw the worn heels and the holes in the soles. I put my hands on the glass that stopped me from tying a shoelace on a boot in front of me. I felt my South African guilt reach out and try to tie up the wrongs that had been done by so many of us in so many different ways…
‘Today I am going to see the Joseph Beuys exhibition at the Tate Modern Museum’
I said to Julian as he grabbed his bunch of keys, pulled on his coat and pushed his cell phone into his pocket.
‘See you later Mom, have a good time. I’ll text you during the day’
‘Cheers Jules, wish you could be with me. What bus do I catch to get to London Bridge?’
I didn’t hear him; he was busy stuffing the last of his toast into his mouth as he walked out the door.
Bus Stops are a good place to pick up colloquialisms. A boy walked past the queue. He was wearing studs through his ears, his nose, his eyebrows, his tongue. He recognized a girl standing in front of me.
‘Hey fucker,’ he said, patting her on the back. ‘Long time no see. How are you strawberry, wild one man.’
From the upstairs window of the bus I looked down on the streets of London. We passed The Fox Bar and Kitchen, Angel lettings and a tyre shop with piles of wheels stacked against the yellow walls.
The law should protect us – not burglars was written on the side of a building.
Wax Arser! covered a bridge in front of us. We passed Old Street. On the corner was a tattoo bar called ‘Prick Tattoos’ and ‘Back the Bid’ soccer posters hung from every lamppost. Someone was buffing the brass letters on a plaque outside Lloyds Bank
I stopped in at Starbucks for some coffee. Fleetwood Mac was playing
You can go your own way
Funny how a song can bring back memories in an instant.
I listened to the words above the sounds of clinking cups, soft voices at the tables, footsteps coming and going.
You can go your own way
rose up above the purple velvet armchairs.
A woman asked for a cappuccino.
Its gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day
People queued, they had scarves wrapped around their necks, they wore long coats.
It was cold outside.
From under the brim of my woollen hat I saw a bouquet of red carnations floating to the edge of the river. Two pigeons watched it lap up and down as boats went past. I imagined a woman standing on the bridge, tossing her bouquet into the water. I walked into the Turbine Hall of The Tate Modern. It was filled with voices, some were coherent, others were difficult to understand.
This is to mask the cover of need
Nothing and no thing and no mask can cover the lack
Lack before love
Paper covers rock
Rock breaks mask
This is the need that contorts my pain
I saw the name Bruce Nauman on a brochure. I picked it up and read it.
Language has always played a central role in Bruce Nauman’s work, providing him with a means of examining how human beings exist in the world, how they communicate or fail to communicate. For Raw Materials, he has selected 22 spoken texts taken from existing works to create an aural collage in the Turbine Hall. …Nauman has transformed this cavernous space into a metaphor for the world, echoing to the endless sound of jokes, poems, pleas, greetings, statements and propositions.
I looked at twenty-four sledges. They each had a survival kit made up of a lump of animal fat, a roll of felt and a torch. Joseph Beuys used felt in many of his sculptures and in contrast to Neuman’s projection of sound; Beuys used felt as a symbol to muffle sound.
I looked at Chris Ofili’s ‘No woman no cry’ painting and thought of Picasso’s Weeping Woman. How many other paintings had been done of woman crying I thought? I went up close to see the layers of paint and the poured resin with glitter in it. Embedded between the layers were the words R.I.P. Stephen Laurence in luminous print. His face could be seen collaged onto each of the crying woman’s tears. The painting was named after the song by Bob Marley as a tribute to a London teenager murdered by a racist gang.
I sat at the back of a Gothic Cathedral listening to an orchestra practicing for evensong. The conductor’s shirt was soaked with sweat. It stuck to his back. Choral voices filled the arches – they rose up to the domed ceilings. I could hear cellos, violins, trumpets.
As I got onto the bus to go home, my scarf fell into the isle. A little boy picked it up, he handed it to me and smiled – a smile that made his eyes shine – I wondered if he was Jamaican or Indian or Pakistani – it was hard to tell, his hat covered his head. Then he spoke to me.
‘Is this your scarf? You will need it, its cold outside’
That’s when I knew he was British.
I looked up at a bridge spanning the road. Four neon doves spread their wings and lit up the darkening sky.
Peace doves over a London bridge
A woman jumped out of a car in Kingsland High Street. She cried, she screamed. A man screamed back at her, he swore at her, pushed his fist into her face. I ran towards them – I wanted to shout out ‘Where is your respect?’ I wanted to go up close to him, to look into his eyes so he could see my contempt. And the street full of pedestrians and the road full of cars and the busses full of passengers and the shops full of sales assistants watched. The man continued to abuse his wife and the children were silent in the back of the car.
They say in London it is none of your business but I know that deep in my Son’s heart, he knows when he looks at a woman who cries for help in the street – it is very much his business. I know, when I look into his eyes, he is as soft as his heart will allow him to be and as tough as he needs to be. His heart conveys the passion only someone who has lived in a confluence of nations struggling to find an identity can understand. He is a foreigner, lost in the sinewy womb of another land.
My son Julian. When I think of him I feel a surge of love flood through my heart. I feel the pull of his emotions – strong as a spring tide today – frail as a neap tide tomorrow. I look into his eyes and see his pain – pain of being without his family – pain of a culture that is in his blood but not in his heart. He has the warmth of the sun but lives under the clouds. He can hear the laughter of his people growing softer in his ears until it disappears and he hears English spoken in many different tongues.
As my plane hurtled into the smog and smoke and steel clouds of a nation throttled by xenophobia, prejudice, elitism, guilt, racism, oppression, I closed my eyes and saw Nelson Mandela shake the hands of the people of South Africa, I saw a nation rejoicing in the Grand Finale of apartheid and all it stood for.
I began to read a book I had bought in Ridley Street. Time to be Bold – Poems by Lotte Moos.
IF YOU THINK
If you think
Blows
Struck in Ireland
Won’t hurt you
Think again
If you think
The Knife
Slid between the ribs of a Pakistani
Will glance off your lighter skin
Think again
If you think
Bullets hissing towards beating hearts
In some country we know nothing about
Will miss you
Think again
They will not miss your beating heart
If you think
Needles
Jabbed into veins
To make the blood run docile
Won’t prick you
Think again
They will hurt you, hit you, prick you
And they will not miss you
We are all one
One trembling human flesh.
I do think – after ten years I have reason to think and remember we are all one, one trembling human flesh. I hold an ancient fungus in my hand, each layer representing a year of it’s life in the rainforest. I cup it in my hands, draw it up to my nose. I breath in deeply. This is not just a fungus, it is the whole forest. I smell the forest, the moss, the soil. I feel the trees, the elephants, the falling leaves, the rain.
I embrace the fungus and the forest and know as the Ancient Chinese did 2000 years before me that it will gather up the whole forest with its creatures, its animals, its birds, its rivers and streams to heal me, destroy the tumours in my body. I know it will restore me to the state of oneness with humankind, with nature with my self.
If you think Chemotherapy cures
Think again
If you think the needles
That poison your body
Will save you
Think again
They will kill you
If you think nature can’t heal you
Think again
It is time to be bold.
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