Authors: John Freeman
N
o one to greet us at Heathrow. We’d arrived from Bombay, via Prague and Beirut, my two sisters and I. A relative who had come to pick up a cousin travelling with us gave us a lift. We drove past dark, cramped buildings to an address in Wimbledon where two-storeyed houses huddled. Lord, I said, have we crossed the Arabian Sea to live in a place like this? But it was only the relative’s house. We saw Kensington Palace Gardens, the Albert Hall and the statue of Boudicca at Hyde Park Corner from the car window as we drove to Park Lane.
Our father and oldest sister hadn’t received our cable. They weren’t expecting us till June. They lived in a penthouse, with a sixth-floor view of parkland and hardly enough room for all. Our sister, who’d been in London for nearly two years and worked for the
Evening Standard
, knew the city centre well. She marched us around its bridges and alleys, stopping to buy us ices when we looked tired. We weren’t used to long walks in the heat. I was overdressed for the warm London weather. (My mother had said it rained all the time, and made me pack tweed jackets and woollen trousers.) My hair flopped over my forehead and was cut short behind; my blue linen shirt flapped around me in the breeze: all wrong. My sister bought me a purple shirt that clung to my bony torso.
May 1970. I was fifteen years and six weeks old.
London was a little shabby. I had expected skyscrapers, glass and steel among the grey monuments.
We lived across from Hyde Park. Pop singers held free concerts there, near-naked office workers took sunbaths for lunch. Hippies smoked marijuana, preachers ranted at Speakers’ Corner. Salvation Army Doris sang ‘Puppet on a String’ to the accompaniment of a tin can. If all that bored us, there was always the Serpentine to sail on.
Three or four cousins came over from Bombay and Karachi. We wandered around in packs, unaccompanied in the streets and public parks, for hours: impossible for them at home. Each day brought a discovery: fashion parades on Carnaby Street and the King’s Road, odorous cheeses and shelves of cheap bright paperbacks at Selfridges. London Bridge, the Tower. Bright skies till late – alarming for someone used to sunset before seven. No need to worry about being home before dark. We jumped on and off buses. We spoke fluent English but were unused to the ways of this city. We waved a twenty-pound note at a conductor who reprimanded us and told us to watch out for thieves. We discovered frozen fish and burgers. We broke bottles of ketchup and mayonnaise on Oxford Street. A passer-by told us in cockney: ‘You’ll have to clean all that up.’ We thought he was serious, and knelt down to pick up bits of broken bottle with scraps of soggy brown paper until a street cleaner shooed us away. My very tall cousin and I fell off a moving bus on the Strand.
On rainy afternoons we went to see
Anne of the Thousand Days, The Taming of the Shrew, Mary, Queen of Scots
. There was a Garbo season at the Classic, King’s Road. Films were expensive, but we sat in the cheap seats near the screen, which we never would have done at home. I always chose historical films. (I unconsciously identified Englishness with costume dramas.) The first play I saved to see at a matinee was
Hedda Gabler
, with Maggie Smith intense as Ibsen’s anti-heroine. Mahalia Jackson and Mungo Jerry performed in Hyde Park. At home, in the evenings, serialized on TV: Sartre’s
Roads to Freedom
, Flaubert’s
Sentimental Education
.
Summer. Grandes dames, gospel, pop groups, divas.
M
ight I remind you, you’re not on holiday,’ my father said.
He took me to Westminster, the public school he’d selected for me. (I was meant to follow him to Magdalen in Oxford, and study law there.) I’d spent a year and a half at an all-male school in India, suffering through science classes; when, at Westminster, they told me I’d have to repeat a year and study Latin and maths, I protested. I was sent instead to a tutorial college on the other side of the park, between unfashionable Gloucester Road and Earls Court. The principal, a grey-haired lady with fancy spectacles, suggested I attend a summer class in English before term began. I took the 74 bus from Park Lane to the West London Air Terminal every morning to attend lessons in a language that, although not my mother tongue, was the one I knew best.
My classmates were Japanese, Greek, Venezuelan, Nigerian, Persian. A curly-haired, bespectacled boy called Giovanni sat next to me. He’d ask me to walk with him to Earls Court station. Though I preferred to take the bus, I’d go along, to be companionable. On Fridays he’d borrow two shillings from me. ‘I go to the seazside to zleep with de girls. You come with me? Do you zleep with de girls?’ I didn’t sleep with girls, not yet. I did fancy one, Kumiko, a very pretty Japanese girl who sometimes rode on the bus with me to Hyde Park Corner. But I soon found out she had an Iranian boyfriend – older than me, and, I thought, better looking.
I didn’t make other friends in the summer class. My cousins went home, one by one. I depended on books for company. I read about the opera and the theatre in the public library, borrowed, one after the other, Yukio Mishima’s cruel tales, Cyprian Ekwensi’s lowlife chronicles of Lagos, Baldwin’s sexual jigsaw:
Another Country
.
S
ummer ended. The family moved to a first-floor apartment in Hyde Park Place, with picture windows looking right into the park and enough rooms to house all the relatives who wanted to visit. My mother had joined us and for a while all six of us lived there. Then my mother and one of my sisters went off to Karachi for several months. I had my own room, space to read quietly. I learned to fry frozen fish and burgers, eat stuffed vine leaves from cans, make hummus and pitta sandwiches and cups of good instant coffee.
Late at night, I watched films on TV,
Yang Guifei
and
Onibaba
. Polanski, Antonioni, Wajda. Sometimes, on Sundays, my sisters and I watched Indian films at Her Majesty’s, Haymarket. I didn’t enjoy them as much as I once had. I wasn’t homesick. I’d left Karachi and the sea before I was thirteen, to spend two years in small-town India and holiday in Bombay: I couldn’t say where home was any longer. Perhaps the films reminded me of what I didn’t want to lose: I enjoyed speaking and listening to my mother tongue, but I had no need to be English or anything else. London was just another place I’d landed in.
Classes began in September. I still took the 74 every day, but from another stop. Along with English grammar and composition, I studied biology, history, scriptures and literature. Our teacher of English literature was an elderly dyed blonde who said she was descended from an Indian princess. I found her inspiring; the others laughed at her. I made friends: Lamie, the Palestinian boy; Japanese Naoko; and Yunie, the Korean girl. Naoko, like me, lived with her family; they had a ground-floor flat on Exhibition Road where she sometimes served us Japanese tea and bean cakes. Lamie and Yunie lived in bedsit land around Kensington where foreign students rented narrow single rooms, cooked on single gas rings, shared bathrooms and were allowed two baths a week (no showers). Lamie wanted to be a doctor. He often took me to his room behind our school to share his supper of fried cheese and bread with oil and thyme, while we listened to the plaintive songs of Lebanon’s Fairuz. Yunie’s Earls Court flat was full of friends who brought bottles of cheap wine to supplement the tea, biscuits, crisps and cigarettes she served in abundance.
Through the autumn, I wrote poems about Naoko, because I needed someone to write poems for. I showed them to Yunie. But that was only after Naoko left for Tokyo in December. Yunie told me that Naoko wouldn’t have responded to my interest: she was dating Lamie and didn’t find me very interesting. Yunie was two years older than I was, and had two boyfriends she couldn’t decide between: one her age, the other ten years older.
I’d never known leaf-piled pavements and slate-black afternoons. Sometimes I spotted a pale moon rising at three.
News that winter:
JAPANESE NOVELIST MISHIMA COMMITS SEPPUKU, RITUAL SUICIDE
.
Because I’d read so many of his books I felt, somehow, tainted.
At Christmas, snow: as if London had staged a white pageant, become an ice rink for newcomers. I wore a sheepskin coat and didn’t mind the cold that first year.
N
aoko, before she left, had introduced me to her best friend. Norma was a Colombian with a warm Hispanic manner, near-perfect English and two other languages. She wanted to be an interpreter. Her mother made Japanese prints and sketches.
I picked up Norma from their maisonette in Olympia, took her for walks in the leafless park. We kissed by the frozen pond in Kensington. Neither of us had money. Easiest to talk in my room, but my sister didn’t like that. ‘Norma has a lazy left eye,’ she said. ‘She wears ugly fur-lined boots and I bet she washes her frizzy hair with Fairy Liquid.’
We dated through January. Then Norma said she didn’t think we could last as a pair. ‘You’re a good-looking guy but you’re a virgin. You need to learn how to kiss. Let’s just be friends.’ I didn’t really want that, though in some odd way I was relieved.
Yunie, who didn’t like Norma, found the story of our relationship funny. Yunie was with me in A level English lit now. She had a mysterious way of disappearing for weeks, but when she was around we were best friends. We’d spent hours listening to her favourite singers. Janis Joplin. James Taylor, Carole King, Melanie, Cat Stevens, Leonard Cohen.
I went out with other friends when she wasn’t around. Lamie surfaced at Easter and competed with me for girlfriends. We saw
Ryan’s Daughter
and
The Music Lovers
in 70mm. We both dated a Thai girl for a while, who dumped us in turn for an older Iraqi boy. Then Lamie heard that his sixteen-year-old brother had been imprisoned and tortured in Israel. He left our company and moved to Manchester.
Another summer. Yunie went away again, leaving her stereo and albums in my room. I read less now, and spent more time listening to her records. I saw
Hair
and
Oh! Calcutta!
at the theatre with visiting friends. I was sixteen and my hair was shoulder-length. I smoked cheap Player’s cigarettes, offered them around. I walked barefoot by the Serpentine, with friends or alone.
T
he library had a collection of Urdu poems by Faiz, who’d lived up the road from us in Karachi. They’d called him a dissident, an internal exile and a communist. He wrote better about restlessness and loss than anyone I’d ever read. One of his prison poems had been set to music; my sister used to sing it when we were children, and we’d imitate her.
Though I spoke Urdu well, I’d been forced in India to do exams in Hindi, which now I read and wrote much faster. The Faiz book had poems in English and Urdu on facing pages. It helped me to relearn my native script.
Pakistan divided. East Wing, West Wing, we’d called its distant limbs, but the body that lay between them belonged to another vehicle, almost all of India: and how long could we fly together with unmatched wings?
My mother left Karachi before war broke out. My sister returned to London while it was raging. Friends turned their backs on one another, and a few swore enmity.
At the end of ’71, when Bangladesh declared its independence, I joined a rally at Trafalgar Square, but that was my protest against the role General Yahya, who’d only replaced Ayub as President a couple of years before the troubles began, had played in the conflict.
Soon after Trafalgar Square, a pneumatic pothead from Boston took me to her bed after a matinee performance of
The Devils
. (An arranged seduction, I later discovered: a Bangladeshi boy had bet her she couldn’t have me.) I’d thought, as I told Yunie later, that I should rid myself of my irksome virginity with someone willing to teach what I needed to learn before I turned seventeen in April. Not that I’d needed to learn much. Yunie laughed, but I think she found it less amusing than she pretended to.
A few days later, Yunie and I spent a whole night in bed together after a party, kissing and touching. It was only the second time I’d tried alcohol. I was high on champagne, she on hash cookies. Santana music played in the background. I assumed she wasn’t ready to go ‘all the way’.
S
he came to stay in my flat for two or three days at a time. We’d end up in bed, in each other’s arms. At some climactic point, she’d push me away.
‘I love you, Yunie.’
‘I don’t love you. Oh, not in that way, you’re like a brother. We’re just randy.’
She left for Boston in March.
I sat my English A level in summer; I’d been in hospital with mumps when Yunie left, and only got a B. I failed history. We gave up the Hyde Park Place flat. (My father was travelling, two of my sisters studying near Nantwich, the third with my grandparents in India. My mother and I were lost in its corridors all winter: there were never more than three of us living together at any given time.) We moved a mile down the road to Sussex Gardens. My English teacher suggested I read literature at Sussex, but my father insisted I prepare for law at Oxford.
I shifted to a college in Bloomsbury, danced away Saturday nights at parties with my journalist sister’s friends, and drifted away from Kensington.
I
wrote poems for Yunie, but I had a new girlfriend: Pakistani, she lived across a bridge over the Thames. She played piano and guitar. We sang duets, tried to set Faiz to guitar music, performed at a club together. We stayed together for a year. I didn’t learn to love her.
After classes, I wandered from store to store in Soho, searching for the music that echoed in my head, spending my pocket money on songs in distant languages: Turkish, Malay, Xhosa, Catalan. At home I’d listen to the singers’ soulful voices and sing along with them, though I didn’t know the lyrics or understand the words.