What prevented me most of all from trying, was the reputation that Black women (deservedly?) had in London of being whores, especially pretty black women who gave their profession as “model” or “actress”. From what I could see of it from a distance, it was an excitng life, especially for those at the top. Most of them that I saw seemed to have to be living 'dangerously' when they were not working, and I just did not know the rules of that game. So I was out of that.

I remember dreamy summer evenings spent sitting by myself on flat's window sills, dipping strawberries into sugar and thick cream, taking pleasure in the warm hum of the street below; or sipping white wine at a riverside pub full of self-conscious, happy people on a balmy summer evening; or visiting Indian restaurants and eating with fingers and chapatis.

There was lots that was nice.

But somehow the feeling of strangeness never faded.

Soon after I had arrived, Sally took me to a Steam Fair, a fairground where all the attractions consisted of Ferris wheels, merry-go-rounds and church organs run by steam engines. They played the most wonderful fairground music on these calliopes, and the place was a marvel to experience, but my own concern was to see if I could find one single other Black person in the entire acres of show ground. There was not one. Look as I did, nowhere was there an oasis of Black eyes on which mine could rest. Never had I ever had such a felling of total alone-ness, despite the vast crowd!

That feeling repeated itself to one degree or other in my life in England. Never quite at home, therefore never quite at ease, therefore never quite relaxed. The English were always watching you, smiling with their faces but not their eyes, studying intently to see if they could see into your depths.

All of this didn’t register at once, only the feeling of uneasiness one couldn’t quite touch, even beneath the most apparent sincerity. Roma had said with distinct distaste that the people were cold and simply didn’t like Black people. But how could they? Up to recent history, the English had been taught that the black man was in inferior creature, only recently removed from cannibalism and living in trees, rescued (although not without some minor suffering) by slavery, to be redeemed and made into “civilized, Christianized” human beings.

The sector of the English who best demonstrated how deeply this image had sunk in, were the poor white class. Since a black person could not be expected to have better housing than white, blacks were forced to live in sub-standard housing among the poor white class, who -- forced to live alongside and compete with a creature they considered inferior -- spared no effort to demonstrate how annoyed they were at having to rub shoulders with such “scum”, their frequent name for us.

Consider the effect of this sudden dose of high-voltage hate on a group of peasant-class Jamaicans, small farmers looking for a less-arduous life, some middle-aged, not-too-well-educated wives, and their assorted (and often unattractive) children. Dedicated to working hard, forlornly comparing the scabby slum walls and barbaric plumbing of their crowded shelter to their left-behind Paradise, unable to comprehend anything except the fact that the white slave master man, many times multiplied in this country, still had the right of rule.

Don’t disobey or buck the system, nigger, or I’ll whip you and put you in chains again.

Oh, some protested -- yes they did -- against this brutal reasoning.
They went to jail.
Some took the easy way out and became pimps and whores.
Most just bowed their heads and endured this new version of slavery, trudging to work in the mornings and bundling up to come home again at night.

Yes, there were some whites who were not like the others, some with genuine human feelings of decency; but oh, these were so few and far between that they seemed semi-angelic when encountered.

On the whole, we accepted our lot and tried to become what the English wanted us to be, Black English. This meant trying as best as possible to “fit in”, to be like Them.

Did we have an identity of our own? Not really. Not then.
We were what our minds had made us think we ought to be, to please Them.
The better one could succeed at being English, the better one would succeed.
Finding out was the key.

* * * *

It was the time of Swinging London, and I was glad and fortunate to participate in it. For the first time ever, a city became famous simply because of its lifestyle, its music, its fashions and its celebrities. One could bump into pop singers Sandie Shaw or Dusty Springfield buying a dress on Saturday afternoon at Biba – the shop for fashionable teenagers willing to wear the new miniskirt style, or trying on a new hat at Mister Fish boutique where glamorous, blonde Michael Fish made shirts for everyone, or strolling down Carnaby Street where the Union Jack had been turned into wearable Pop Art fashion.

London became carefree, as girls raised their hemlines, men wore brightly-coloured shirts, and everyone let loose of the English stuffiness. There were a lot of changes, especially in attitudes, as young people’s values took over and became the dominant emotion of the country. The Beatles were playing a never-ending procession of hit songs, all of which spoke directly to these emotions, and the country began to be a nice place to be.

It was nice to be young then, feeling light-headed on wine at some party, excited at the clothes on a Saturday morning boutique safari, happy laughing with friends. It was just nice. Life didn’t seem to have a precise goal, but to be happy was the best pleasure of all. I did a lot of laughing.

Secure in my Ebury Street flat, life was sweet. There was a small would-be gourmet restaurant down the street called “The Jaberwwocky” after a character in “Alice In Wonderland”, which served French cuisine and attracted a slightly-above-middle-class clientele, as well as the occasional eccentric. It was a small place owned by a pleasant white man, and I felt no shame at accepting an invitation from Pauline, the girl living in the flat below mine to work -- as she did -- as a waitress there one night a week.

Knowing that I would make ten percent of the night’s takings as my income just by taking and serving food orders for never more than four tables at a time, was sufficient incentive. In time the job taught me how to cook a great steak in red wine, cream and mushrooms just from looking on and eating the chef’s handiwork.

He was from St. Lucia, while his wife who washed up was from Mauritius. We served red wine, white wine and, when customers ordered rose wine, we just mixed some red into the white and brought it upstairs. No one ever caught on. Instead, their feigned sophistication often led them to comment on the “excellent bouquet” of our hand-made rose wine.

Life became a procession of flats and jobs. I moved from the cosy Ebury Street flat that Carl had found me, for reasons which escape me. Lord, can I remember the other flats before Chepstow Road, the one place of rest I truly enjoyed living in.

I’ll never forget one in Ladbroke Grove, can’t even remember the name of the street where I lived for several months in a state of total revulsion, with a houseful of young Indians, relatives of an Indian girlfriend I had met at work. I shared my room with a white girl who I think was recovering from childbirth and adoption -- a coloured child, certainly.

That house had the filthiest bathroom I ever had to use in my life. Whenever I had to take a bath, I would first have to spread newspapers on the floor to make a clean pathway in, then scrub the bath out with a long brush while holding down my revulsion, then stand up in it (once with my sandals on, I couldn’t bear it) and throw water over me. How they used it, I don’t know. I didn’t live there long.

Long enough, however, to realize that as much as my girlfriend liked me (she taught me how to cook real Indian food, chaptis and all), her relatives considered me practically an untouchable and scorned my blackness -- even though my skin colour was a few shades lighter than theirs! Crazy, eh?

I had little time to consider such reverse racism, however, but it all added to my feeling of strangeness.

Best of all flats was blessed Chepstow Road, a small -- no, tiny -- two-bedroom haven where I lived for more than five years on the road which connected the true black ghetto of Ladbroke Grove with trendier Notting Hill. It was a melting pot area of hipper West Indians and whites, hippies, artists, young rich, all mixed together. It was a way-out, no-man’s-land community with a character all its own. I was comfortable here among others like myself.

The Portobello Market was within walking distance, a good place to buy good vegetables including Jamaican items such as sweet potatoes, plantains and yam, as well as clothes and antiques for tourists. There were some shabby streets in the neighbourhood, as well as streets with lovely houses and gardens, pretty parks, friendly pubs, all within reach of the main London centers of Hyde Park, Piccadilly, Oxford Street, etc. It was a “good” place to live, and I was fortunate to have found an empty room in a white girl’s flat, thanks to another white girlfriend.

Having a black girl share a flat with her, certainly fitted in with the lifestyle of Caroline, daughter of an Anglican priest and newly graduated from Cambridge, where she had studied Persian and Arabic. She was blonde and slightly daffy. She worked in a library, played classical music and eventually married the current Earl of Sandwich, thus becoming a Lady -- a fact which never fails to rouse a smile in me when I remember the usual state of her stockings.

We got along well together, such different people. She originated our regular spaghetti-bolognaise-and-wine dinner parties for her fellow graduates, which is how I came to meet a lot of nice young English people, determined to change the world -- especially its racial perspectives. I also met several intelligent members of the English upper classes. Through Caroline's Oxbridge friendships, I got to know members of the young television comedy crew who, with David Frost as its leader, was budding on the British scene and was to change British TV through comedy as radically as music of that era changed England. In those days Frost hosted a wickedly funny satirical TV show, giving us jokes rather than the serious interviews he is now known for.

He depended largely for his humourous skits on the work of a group of Caroline's Oxford and Cambridge friends who are now internationally known personalities. There were young men like Eric Idle, John Cleese, Graham Chapman -- members of the team who created that funny TV series “Monty Python's Flying Circus”, which made them international comic celebrities, and Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor who became “The Goodies” -- all of whom were then turning their backs on their excellent degrees in Medicine and the Arts to begin careers in TV comedy.

This group of new Ox-bridge graduates included theatre director Richard Eyre -- whom I didn’t then know was a descendant of infamous Jamaican Governor Eyre who callously sentenced to death 400 ex-slaves led by Jamaican National Heroes Paul Bogle and George William Gordon in the Morant Bay Rebellion -- paying his dues working in as many small theatres and productions as he could, his eye clearly on the prize he later received of the Royal Shakespeare Company directorship and a Knighthood. There was also Daniel Topolski, son of the famous artist Feliks, who had made a big name for himself at Oxford in rowing, coached the University’s teams for many years after and is still a famous rowing authority.

I am glad to see their success since then, and smile at the memory of them all -- pennilessly contemplating their future as we shared spaghetti bolognaise and red wine with their girlfriends on the carpet of our Chepstow Road flat. We all remained friends through the years, as they grew in fame and wealth.

Caroline’s set of television and comedy personalities overlapped with the stars of music and fashion I was getting to know through my own circle of friends -- not frontliners necessarily, but part of the machinery. My friends and I went to listen to jazz at Ronnie Scotts Club in Wardour Street, and to concerts by artists like Jimmi Hendrix, Al Green, Ritchie Havens and James Brown. These were our ways of fun. In those days it was enough to like white wine, Beatles music and the philosophy of Flower Power, to be able to participate in a world in which those involved were devoted to giving of the best of their knowledge, their vitality and their emotions.

With Notting Hill Gate a center of the new culture, Chepstow Road was the perfect diving board for me into what became the famous Hippie, Love Generation which flowered on both sides of the Atlantic in the 60s, and I gladly embraced its beautiful, warm and love-filled philosophy.

Why not? It fitted in perfectly with my view of life as the essence of love, instead of racial hatred.
Music, colours, smokes.
Little did I know that I had originally invented the philosophy.
Black me, and all Black people.

* * * *

Chepstow Road was heaven. Situated on the first floor, the flat was really small. The second bedroom could only hold a single bed with enough space for person to stand beside the bed -- that was all. The living room and kitchen were equally small while the second bedroom could hold a twin bed as tightly as the small one held a single. You could hear the footsteps of people walking in the flat above. Every time the people upstairs moved out, I lived in terror of who would replace them and how heavy they would be. Once for a year or more life was made miserable by a clumpy Scandinavian couple upstairs -- I was constantly having to knock on the ceiling with a broom to quiet them.

But it was a loveable flat, and I made it pretty after Caroline moved out to marry her Earl. I moved into the larger bedroom and hosted a succession of flatmates who occupied the little room, some of them men. This was quite permissible in a city like London, especially as I made no bones about the fact that living in my flat did not give them access to my bedroom. Friends acknowledged that these men were simply flatmates, paying half the rent, who were often better to live with than temperamental females who would make passes at my boyfriends.

(I took such a situation so much for granted, that once when a male flatmate with nothing better to do for summer holidays came to Jamaica with me as his vacation, it took me by surprise to hear that everyone translated this to mean that I had brought my fiancee home with me. Jamaica did not know about platonic relationships.)

I had a number of good men friends like these who would take me to dinner, or I would cook for them. We would go to parties with friends and talk about life, like all young people do.

I went out with a lot of guys. Perhaps because of being brought up by a father only, I am the kind of woman who needs always to have a man in my life especially for companionship, so apart from times when I purposely wanted to be by myself, I usually had a boyfriend. Sex was often not the most important aspect, in fact many of my boyfriends had to be content to wait and wait and wait until they gave up trying to bed me, and became instead really good male friends.

Truly.

In England it was possible to have male friends who were just friends. I did. One would take me to the AdLib disco, the first trendy disco in London’s Swinging Sixties, where I would sit in awe as beautiful women glided past laughing with one of the Beatles, or a movie star, or a rich playboy. Just reconsidering such a scene makes me really shake my head with a smile. I was just a gutsy little baby, on my first steps into the world out from behind the wall of parental shelter. I had dived off into the deep end of the black pool of the Outside World. Inside I was terrified.

I can remember that first night at the AdLib, when a man had glided up to me in the darkness and whispered: “ You are the most beautiful woman here.” I had been shocked, thinking he was trying to pick me up in front of my date. But perhaps he was simply seeing a beauty that I was unaware of, coupled with the calm exterior under which my fear-filled person was hiding; behaving like a swan gliding serenely on the surface, but paddling like mad under water.

It was easy to refuse sex on these dates, upper-class types who were persistent in their requests, aware that being seen in the company of a Black girl made their friends think they were great lovers, men who expected me to be the first to make a passionate pass at them (remember the reputation of Black women), and who did not know what to do when I did not. At the height of those English circles, homosexuality was the norm and most men had not a clue what to do with a woman, other than the courtesies of dinner dates.

But this was not so with all, I confess. I am human, after all.

More to my taste were the freer spirits with tender faces who took wine under trees, played Beatles records, and arrived on doorsteps with baskets of ripe strawberries. These were an education in so many subjects and they were fun to be with. We would meet at parties with winter cold outside frosting the windows, glasses of half-drunk red wine covering every flat surface, cigarette smoke, the floor sagging under the weight of dancers, a disheveled girl crying in the passage....
Meeting someone new who might, just might be.... ah well, .... perhaps next time....

I had boyfriends, of course, enjoying the beginnings, floating through the in-betweens, feeling perplexed at the ends and enjoying the next beginning, like all the other girls around me were doing.

Yes, the men were all English, and therefore all white. I had not yet found a Jamaican man in England who interested me. The few from my social group who were living in London in the 60s, were either students decidedly not doing anything else than getting their degrees and getting the hell out of the damn place (who mostly preferred white girls, anyway), or political-leaders-in-training who did nothing else but discuss how they were going to run the country when they returned – and mostly preferred white girls, anyway. I knew nothing about Jamaican politics, and was not interested then.

At the other extreme were the bus conductors, factory workers, or the pimps. I was then too tender a shoot to even begin to fathom these types, whom I had never before encountered in life.

There was not much choice, unless one accepted the much-offered invitations of the African students, who would quite seriously accost a girl on the street and state: “I want you to be my woman” in a pronounced African accent, which was enough to frighten a person into running screaming in the opposite direction, away from round, tribal-scarred faces, ill-fitting English suits and obviously painful shoes encasing huge feet. In 1966 no one was explaining that there might be a similarity between Africans and Jamaicans.

Garvey, who was he?
Get me away from these Africans, they’re crazy!

No. My conditioning had instead prepared me to unquestioningly accept the naturalness of giving myself to a man like the man in the movies, the white man. Just like straightening my hair, picking a white partner was definitely the accustomed pathway.

Crazy, eh?
No, not crazy; strange.
Strange to understand that the crowning aspiration drilled into the heads of the best of our race was, and still is, to look to white values and ideals. Generations and generations of beautiful Black women, denying their best to the best of their race.

No, I don’t feel guilty about my history. I had no control over the conditioning I had received all my life, and as yet I had no information of an alternative viewpoint. As I said, I simply accepted as natural the fact that my sleeping partners, my emotional companions were all white.

They were all just as nice as they could be.

TO BE CONTINUED.....

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