No Win Race. Derek A. Bardowell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ DRIVEN TO THE POINT OF MADNESS

       10. MORE THAN MAGICAL

       11. IS IT IN THE BLOOD?

       ENDNOTES

       ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

       ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

DEDICATION

       To Elle & Keithus

       For Meadow & Marlowe

INTRODUCTION

      MY TWO KIDS RAN UP the stairs to wash their faces, clean their teeth and put on their pyjamas while I stayed downstairs to pour a shot of rum. I turned on the television. A documentary about Margaret Thatcher had just started. Couldn’t think why she’d be on the telly. Had a feeling she’d died. So, I grabbed my iPhone to find out if that was indeed the case. She had died of a stroke, aged 87.

      It had been our first night on holiday in an old cottage in Suffolk. The cottage, beautifully worn with creaky floors, low-hanging ceilings, stained rugs, and dusty, stale smells also featured all the modern trimmings required to make it a contemporary holiday retreat for kids, like a PlayStation and an iPad docking station.

      I stood, ceiling hovering close over my head, watching the documentary, which covered Thatcher’s unlikely rise to Conservative Party leadership in 1975, her battles with ‘Heathite’ Tories, her election victory in 1979, Bobby Sands, the IRA, the recession, the Brixton Riots, the Falklands War, the Miners’ Strike, her battles with the trade unions, the breakthroughs she made for women in politics, the grinding shift from ‘society to self’, her loathing of the European Community, the end of the Cold War, the introduction of the Poll Tax, the Poll Tax Riots and her eventual downfall at the hands of her Tory Party colleagues.

      My son, two and a half years old at the time, cute and rashy, smiley and whiney, came down the stairs, walked up to me, rubbed his eyes and said in a dull voice, ‘Take me [to] bed.’

      He put his arms up, so I picked him up.

      ‘You watching TV?’ he asked.

      ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘it’s about Margaret Thatcher.’ Didn’t elaborate, eyes barely shifted from the television screen.

      Paused.

      I realised I had started to squeeze him tightly. The back of my throat had started to tickle. My hands and my toes were cold and clammy. Not the rum. Should have been thinking about the immediate future, like playing games with the kids in the morning, country walks and beautiful landscapes. Instead, my mind was situated in the past. Always is. I took my son upstairs to bed, the documentary swirling through my head. I thought less about Thatcher’s death and more about her legacy.

      I remembered what it had been like as a child in the eighties. I grew up in Newham in the East End, which for many black and brown folks meant racially motivated attacks and police harassment, and a general denial that these problems existed from the services that were there to help you. It had been a time when fear, paranoia and insecurity consumed me. From a young age, I felt like an outsider. Felt as if my options, crafted by the grit and hard work of my Jamaican parents, were impossibly narrow. Felt like a problem to the state. Never knew comfort. Never really felt at ease. Bus stops, shops, school, trains, my everyday spaces, brought conflict, stares, stop and searches, anxiety, false accusations and a fear of other people’s fear. I liked my home, my birthplace. England. But never quite felt at home in my birthplace. Never made to feel at home in my birthplace. It had been difficult to feel like a true citizen in a place where you were considered an outsider, in a place where many of the nation’s heroes were often my forefathers’ oppressors.

      Too late for me, I thought. Always be this way for me. Caged, enraged. But what should I tell my son? Things have changed. Things have improved. He is unlikely to experience racism in the same way I had when I was growing up. So how do I prepare him without infecting him?

      For me, sport had always been a great leveller. Something that brought me solace, an escape in times of trouble.

      It was how my father, Keith, and I bonded. Before I could grip a mug, my father had already shoved a cricket bat and ball in my hands. We would go into our 30-foot back garden and play, my father bowling, me batting. He’d always bowl googlies at me, a deceptive delivery where the ball spins into the batsmen’s legs instead of going straight. A magic trick. As my father watched me swing wildly, and miss, his shifty eyes would tighten, and his soft, narrow, light-brown face would break into a cheeky smile before he’d launch into a story about ‘back home’ – in Jamaica. My father’s yearning for Jamaica and the role cricket played in transporting him ‘back home’, albeit for brief moments, made me recognise that sport was more than a game.

      It had often been the case that white people assumed that the colour of my skin and my height ensured athletic excellence. Upon first meeting me, most would ask, ‘Do you play basketball?’ ‘No,’ I’d reply, never knowing what else to say. I would later come to realise that, for well-meaning white folks, in bowing to a more favourable stereotype (black people being good at sport) they were addressing their own discomfort. For them, a conversation starter and some solace. For me, a conversation closer and anxiety.

      Sport offered positive images of black folks at a time when we were bombarded with negative images in the media. Back in the seventies and early eighties, the few shows that featured black actors like Mixed Blessings, Rising Damp and Love Thy Neighbour always emphasised the difference between Caribbean or African culture and the English. They forever depicted us as aliens – sources of fundamental difference, conflict and unrest. The gags were often cheap, cruel and exploitative. Sport, to some degree, balanced out these negative images.

      It has always been difficult for me to separate ‘race’ and sport. Alongside music, sport has for many years been a platform where blacks have excelled. Where we’ve been allowed to excel. Whether you liked sport or not, black athletes were the most visible contributors to British society. Black people had of course built Britain, literally. We had constructed, supplemented and indeed strengthened the country. We had done so under forced labour, under poor conditions, with little or no rights, little or no credit. The black athlete’s impact had been more difficult to conceal, their contributions measurable. Goals. Runs. Times. Wickets. Knockouts. Tries. This led to wins, which led to larger audiences, which led to more money, which led to more media coverage, which led to more sponsorship, which led to a higher profile for the black athlete. They were symbolic. Symbolic of everything we had achieved in this country, for this country. In addition, they seemed to be the only black people in the public eye who were embraced by whites, even if they had to win adoration through a torrent of boos and unconditional allegiance to Jack or George.

      Yet at the same time, so much of what happened to black athletes on the field of play reflected the issues faced by black people in British society.

      Growing up in the eighties, the popular racism being trumpeted by the mainstream media – moral panics about blacks being a threat to cohesion, to jobs, to safety – weaved its way СКАЧАТЬ