America: Glittering Towers & Dead Flowers

Friends tellin' me that maybe I need
Some psychiatric help
Yeah they're always so quick to tell you
Just how to get on with it
But I look into the mirror
And all I see is age, fear
And agony.

If I could just remember what it was like
When I was younger
Before all the joy and happiness
Was replaced with hunger
Now all I've got to show for the seeds that didn't grow
Is agony.

Eels (Agony)

I BELIEVE I FIRST WENT TO AMERICA in 1969 or 1970. I had to take several large envelopes containing typed copies of the financial statements of the company that eventually became American International Group from the Bermuda office where I was working to the offices of the company that was our largest shareholder, C.V. Starr, in New York City. The financial results were not produced on a particularly timely basis as the company was then a private concern and not beholden to SEC regulations and a large shareholder base. More than three months would pass after any reporting period before we'd finish consolidating the international operations and type the statements. These statements, an original and nine carbon copies, would be distributed to the company executives. Maurice R. Greenberg, the Chairman, in NYC, would get the original copy, Ernest E. Stempel, the President, in the Bermuda office, would get the first copy. As the carbon copies became less distinct, the recipients were of diminishing importance.

I was given a day's notice that I'd been chosen to take, by hand, the statements to Mr Greenberg and the C.V. Starr executives in their offices at 102 Maiden Lane. I think the trip must have been rushed as the company car took me to the Bermuda Airport at some speed and I went straight over to the departure gate and boarded my flight, clutching my envelopes. Two hours later I was at JFK feeling very much the foreigner. I got myself a yellow taxi cab and was taken to Central Park South and checked into the rather old hotel our company's lesser employees were housed in. I was on a floor which seemed like a long way up.

My reservation at the Barbizon Plaza had been for a single room. However, I'd privately arranged to meet a friend in New York City who would stay with me for my three days in town, then fly back to Bermuda with me. I changed the room to a double and charged the difference to the company. They never queried this. The next day my friend travelled over to Maiden Lane with me to deliver my envelopes; we were given a private tour of Greenberg's office as he was not in town. Then we went to see a risqué movie in Times Square. When in New York City…

As a schoolboy, ten or more years before, I had been warned, as all the male pupils were, never to sport a crew-cut or American-style haircut. Later, I was threatened with expulsion for having a Beatles' haircut. So it goes. If we used American spellings or expressions in our English classes we were automatically failed. We did have a few American pupils at Warwick Academy and I imagine they had a difficult time reinventing themselves to gain passing marks. Coming from an English family, it was normal for me to churn out the right stuff.

We had American friends as young children; all were from military families stationed at the US Air Force Base or Naval Operating Base. The neighbourhood in which I grew up had a number of homes let to the US Coast Guard, the folks next door were Americans. White, of course. The Bermudian children were always welcomed in the homes of their American neighbours, and we would be bundled in station wagons and taken to Horseshoe Bay for barbeques and beach parties. The Americans never seemed short of food, and a variety of it, and they looked a good deal healthier than we did.

Our American neighbours, the Coast Guard families, left in the early 1960s. I did write to one friend, Gayle Easter, for a few years, her family was relocated to the US Gulf Coast and then Rhode Island as I recall. My last contact with Gayle was in about 1974, she was working at the Doubleday publishing house in New York City. Where might she be now?

By the 1970s I had made other American friends outside the US military, I am still as close as can be to a few of them. These were friends I shared books, art, films and travel with, all rather international in outlook. They are in this blog, in some fashion, most of the time. In my mind, always.

I had American relatives as a child. My grandmother's cousin, Mrs. George Hill, who we called "Auntie Lily", had left Lancashire for New York back in the 1920s. Lily had red hair, was deaf as a post, and visited Bermuda from time to time. She lived on Staten Island and had two sons, Donald and Jack Hill. Lily's granddaughter came to Bermuda at least once, a bit of a hippie-chick. Where might they be, if they are alive?

In 1974 I joined that most American of religions, the Mormons. I travelled to Utah for the first time in 1978. I found, looking in the phone books, Lancashire surnames. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young sent many missionaries to England, in particular to the north-west, and the Lancashire folks took the ships from Liverpool to the USA and crossed the Continent, many on foot, eventually turning up in Utah Territory. My grandmother told me that when she and her siblings were small, in the very early 1900s, if they misbehaved their mother would threaten them: "The Mormons will come and take you away!" They took me 70 years later. So it goes.

I'd studied the American War of Independence at Warwick Academy, and wasn't particularly excited by it. I do recall that when the War was won and the American Founding Fathers were sorting things out, they offered to make George Washington their King. Washington declined, bless him. How things might have been different! Did he consider the fact that he had no son when he said he thought not?

George Washington's family comes from the north of England and the family's coat of arms, with its stars and stripes, was adapted for the American flag. I suppose that was a nod to the General that he was comfortable with. Thomas Jefferson used a coat of arms that he may well not have been entitled to. There are more than a few Americans in 2009 looking for their coats of arms, titles, tartans, castles and manor houses, and links to the British Royal Family, an entry in Debrett's. One might buy a peerage on E-Bay if one has the dosh. Do they want to be like us?

When many, most, people hear my accent they start to say: "Oh! Are you Amer…?" And by then I'm looking over the top of my glasses and flashing the message: "I dare you…" with my beady eyes. And the person offers: "Canadian?" hurriedly. Years of watching American television in Bermuda are responsible for my Amer… I mean Canadian… accent. I believe I still write in UK English, and I use English words and expressions. Why should I care?

I care because I'm no huge fan of America. From the get-go the Founding Fathers seemed to radiate a superiority (never mind Jefferson's hypocritical blathering about equality!) over their fellow citizens, friends and foes. The Electoral College was conceived as a way of keeping the riff-raff out. Their heirs seem little better. The phrase "We know better than you do what is good for you…" might be carved over the doors into the Congress. The current dictatorial Leader in Bermuda was a US Citizen until it was pointed out he could not also swear allegiance to the Crown as a member of Bermuda's Parliament. Nevertheless, he rules as an American president might. No matter how close equality seems, it is always wrenched away by those in power. There is little peace in the American system, there never has been, all is confrontational.

The Woodstock generation now bears arms because it is a right. Why not show Jesus carrying a gun? You know he would. Well, you follow him, act for him, so your teenagers get your guns from the locked cabinet using the obvious key and jump in a beat-up Ford and drive to the high school.

Wait just a minute! You say. We are a Christian people, we follow a God of mercy and compassion and love who says to all: Come unto me!

Do I have hope for the Obama Administration? Not a whole lot.

A few days ago the Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, granted convicted Libyan terrorist Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, responsible, it is said, for the Lockerbie airline bombing twenty-one years ago, an early release from his life sentence because al-Megrahi has terminal cancer. An action based on compassion and mercy. The American Government threw a fit before and after the release. President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressured the Scottish Government not to release the terrorist, and now that it has happened the Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, has blasted both Scotland and the United Kingdom Government. American citizens are being urged by some to boycott British and Scottish goods as a protest. Cancel the kilt, forget the Lairdship.

Back on 11 June of this year, a CIA aeroplane brought four Chinese Uighur detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they had been held for seven years as terrorists, after being captured in Afghanistan, to Bermuda under cover of darkness. Only Bermuda's autocratic Leader, Dr. Ewart Brown, and his unelected henchman Colonel David Burch knew about the Uighurs' transfer. Burch was on the aeroplane. The Chinese say that these Uighurs are members of an Islamist separatist movement that is listed by the United Nations as a terrorist organization. The USA apparently thought they were terrorists; why else hide them away at Gitmo for all those years? Why not invite them to Disneyland if they were pukka?

The British Governor in Bermuda, the British Embassy in Washington DC, the British Government in London, had been told nothing of the Uighur deal. One knows that the Americans are aware of the Bermuda Constitution which states that Bermuda, a British Overseas Territory, cannot discuss foreign policy matters with other governments without the British being involved. Obama and Clinton praised Bermuda for its compassion in taking in the Uighurs, ignored British protests, and said that America was a safer place with the Uighurs in Bermuda (they would not be permitted to travel to the USA, where they are not wanted). To this day, the Americans are stalling on giving the British authorities information on the four Uighurs dumped in Bermuda. Of course, the British have been left dealing with an angry Chinese Government. The Uighurs have no passports, the Bermudian Government doesn't issue passports that are non-British.

Where are the Americans? Praising Bermuda's compassionate acceptance (albeit illegally manufactured by Obama, Clinton and the CIA and FBI) of dodgy Uighurs that the Americans dare not permit on US soil. And criticizing the Scottish and British for the compassionate release of a dodgy Libyan who has a few months, apparently, left to live. Last week the new American Consul General in Bermuda, Ms. Grace Shelton, when asked if the Uighurs might be taken to the USA and resettled in a Uighur community near Washington DC said: "I think they are working and doing well here in Bermuda. We are satisfied with that." How dare she be so patronizing!

Should the Uighurs have been spirited into Bermuda by the CIA? No! Should al-Megrahi have been released early? No! His case was on appeal, I think that process should have been completed before any release was considered. Should the Libyans have thrown such a party for al-Megrahi on his return? No! Three wrongs don't make a right.

Promises, Promises (Hay Among the Lovestacks)

The bloom that promiseth a mighty fruit.

William Shakespeare (King John, Act II, Scene I)

ONCE UPON A TIME, no doubt, one could live off the berries, roots and fruit growing by the footpaths in this part of England, if one could dodge the henchmen of the Dukes of Northumberland. Dukes who seem to have owned (and still do) vast acreage attached to an inherited family title. There are things to pick and eat, to this day, in our hedgerows, in their due season. If one fancies meat, there were, and are, plenty of bunnies, and pheasants leap out of the fields into the paths of oncoming traffic, foot or motor. I've even had a red squirrel commit suicide under the wheels of the vehicle I was travelling in. Can one dine on Emily Wilding?

Given our chilly climate in Northumbria, Scotland just a few miles to the north of me this afternoon, a line that has moved over the centuries, I imagine that the secret of successful dining and surviving before TESCO came along included putting on several layers of insulation: Leathers and furs for the outside, fats within the body. The Duke's venison. Some long-haired highland cattle. A woolly ewe. An anxious lamb. Whatever one could nick.

As a very young boy, I was always amazed to find apples, plums, greengages and pears ripe for the picking when I went walking in the orchards of Kent with my cousins. We didn't pick them, of course, much as I longed to, for they belonged to some farmer or other. I have picked and eaten fruit directly from the tree since then, ignoring the word of the Lord a few times, paying heed to the Snake. The fruit tasted no better than the packaged variety, perhaps tarnished by guilt. Do you suppose that Eve, after her bite (and did she have but one nibble, or chow down on a bushel basket of fruit?) went directly to Adam and said: "Husband, these are truly champion … There's nothing like them! I tell you, these are to die for!" And Adam replied, reaching for a plump specimen, "Wife, that was Elohim's point. We're going to take up wearing clogs, and then pop them."

In Bermuda, I recall trying the then-ubiquitous Surinam cherries and loquats when they were fruiting. I disliked the raw flesh of those two then, and still do. However, the cherries make a wonderful jam, and loquat chutney is delicious. I believe the prickly pears one could find in Bermuda near the shoreline could be eaten, though I'm not exactly sure how one might prepare them. Other than those, roadside vegetation wasn't particularly palatable.

Our garden in Bermuda was rather barren. My mother had the opposite of a green thumb. This affliction extended to her cooking: I don't recall a single tasty vegetable (or meat) dish prepared in our home. Everything was average, plain, boring. We could have, assuming the earth, moon and stars had been differently aligned at my mother's nativity, grown various fruit and vegetables in abundance in our back garden as there was some red soil there. Our front garden grew only rocks and a Poinciana tree that clung to them. We tried to grow beans. Can one go wrong with a few beans? Well, yes. Carrots and potatoes also came a cropper. Tomatoes, that most delicious fruit to my mind, simply withered at the surface.

We had banana trees in the garden and most rarely a small bunch would appear. This when my mother's brother had a banana patch next door to us so successful, so bounteous, that he sold the bunches to the Friendly Store supermarket. Occasionally we'd be given a hand. My uncle also had orange, tangerine and pink grapefruit trees in his orchard. I'd gather up some of the windfalls for fresh orange juice or broiled grapefruit. We took most of these to my grandparents.

My father's mother, my Nan Eldridge, did have the green thumb. Green fingers, if that is possible. I don't ever recall Nan buying food other than bread, biscuits, orange squash, a rare bottle of sherry, and the dreaded roasted chicken. Nan's chickens were dreaded because she could make one last for a fortnight or longer, even without benefit of a freezer or even a refrigerator. In Nan's Garden of Eden, it could be a taste of the chicken that might make one surely die, or surely have a case of the trots. If one wanted meat with a meal at Nan's, the only safe way to have it was to purchase it on the way there and serve it up. Tell her that last month's chicken will keep …

My Nan grew vegetables, rhubarb, tomatoes, currants, vines and flowers. Anything she had a mind to grow, she did very well, thank you. I wonder if her parents had that gift. I saw my great-grandfather Crow's terribly overgrown garden in Uxbridge as a boy, when he was months from dying of old, old age, and, looking back, appreciate that it must have been quite wonderful in its day.

I have had a little experience of gathering in crops, though I do not look back on most of it fondly. In southern Utah the Mormon Church had farms that grew, at least where I was living, peaches and apricots. When the fruit was a-growing, it would have to be thinned out. If a branch was too overloaded, some proportion of the fruit would be plucked off and flung to the ground. And then harvest time would come along. One would wear a brown sack strapped so that it opened on one's chest. Up a ladder and the ripe fruit would be picked and dropped into the sack, which would get pretty heavy pretty quickly. I'm not much for heavy, or ladders, and I certainly was put off by the warnings to watch the long grass below the trees as there were rattlesnakes. Every Eden has them. That's what Eden is: A snake's den.

A little over a year ago, I went gathering apples here in Northumberland. Most were windfalls, but a few were pulled down from the lower branches. I wasn't going up a ladder at my age. No way. No burlap sacks round the neck, just plastic bins on the grass. The fruit was eventually used to make a winter's worth of filling for apple and blackcurrant pies and crumbles at Alnwick Day Services.

I did make my own apple and blackcurrant crumble this winter. Apples from friends a few streets over, blackcurrants from a hedge on the street across from me. And, this morning, I noticed the first few flowers on the blackberry bushes. No telling if they will survive the frosts, snow even, that are still likely (for it is only mid-January), but Nature is moving in her gentle way, seeking the sun, the warmth.

Will there be fruit in the hedgerows in 2009? Will the fields produce the tatties we love up here? And the parsnips and turnips? Will there be wheat, rye and barley at the right time? Will the lilies of the field and the daffodils around Warkworth Castle outshine Solomon once again? There is the promise of all that. We must prepare ourselves to actually receive the benefits of these promises. Even the gifts of the hedgerows must be sought out, gathered in, and prepared for the table; they do not drop onto our plates like a micro-waved packaged-dinner from Sainsbury's.

In a few days there will be a new President of the United States of America. Some years ago I first saw Barack Obama on the telly giving a speech at a Democratic Party Convention and I had an understanding, sure as anything, that he would be the next President, odd as it seemed. I told a friend about that and he pointed out that a black man could never become President. America's not like that.

Apparently, fortunately, after all, America is like that. There is not a black man, to be truly accurate, only hours from taking charge of what the Americans at least think of as the most important nation on Earth, for Barack Obama is biracial. I think that's terrific. He also has a background culture that is both western Christianity and Islamic. That's terrific. The new President will be quite a bit younger than I am, and a good deal smarter. That's not a bad thing. But can he pick up apples? I bet he can. Can he share them out so that the hungry receive what they need, and the over-fed be put on a ration? Let's hope so. Warehouses of rotting apples we don't need.

Barack Obama is a man laden with promises. No doubt he has made some, perhaps many, which we do not know about yet. Unlike Abraham Lincoln's presidency, Barack Obama's had to be bought at a huge price and must be paid for.

One wishes Obama well. One wants to love America. It has been most unpleasant simply hating the American Government, especially the President and his Cabinet, for the eight years of George W. Bush. There was nothing to like about Dubya: His never-ending slip-ups and inability to make common sense of issues, or to portray himself as a man of good character and wisdom belittled a decade of Americans. It was embarrassing to watch him fumbling. He even made our Tony Blair and Gordon Brown look sharp.

If George W. Bush let a generation of Americans (and, frankly, the Free World which he'd like to think himself Leader of) down, it seems to me that the American people, and all of us out here must make sure we don't let President Barack Obama down.

So many of us feel good about this man, so let's treat him well, and make it happen.

Just a few flowers in the hedges. And spring is coming

Revolution Revisited

Protestors. Grosvenor Square, London. 17 March, 1968

This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a

foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures,

shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions,

revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of

memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and

delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the

gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am

thankful for it.

William Shakespeare (Love's Labour's Lost, Act IV, Scene II)

I HAVE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS. Do people who work the night shift ever suffer from sleepless days? Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on my mood, these hours awake when others sleep are not so regular, so frequent, as to render me useless most of the time. Four or five times a week I can get safely to the minimart for milk, to the greengrocer for broccoli, and to Roland's Butchers for a bit of fresh lamb's liver for Cailean, and not be standing out on the street wondering whether it is Thursday or Norway. When I am truly knackered in the daytime, I try not to stray past the pages of the book I'm reading. Cups of tea and a blanket over my legs on the sofa, and the dog kipping on his back alongside me.

When I become the vampire, the creature of the night, I usually have fallen asleep in the early evening, as early as tea-time, and wakened by nine o'clock. From that hour my mind races, I often pace the floor, and have to fight the temptation to leave the flat and go walking in the mists that this seaside village hides in every night. Fortunately for me, Cailean is not much of a werewolf, and he doesn't often care to go outside after dark, except for pee breaks in the courtyard, and snappy ones at that.

I did actually take him for one late night walk recently in the moonlight, near the River Coquet, and very nearly had to carry him home: hooting owls, barking dogs, splashes in the water, rather a lot of bunnies, and the clanking of cables on the aluminium masts of the sailboats. Oh, I think Cailean would have stayed by the river, but I was scared shitless and couldn't get home through the heaped autumn leaves fast enough. We were like two protons in the Large Hadron Collider!

Back at home. I find I can watch the television comfortably until midnight, and can push on for another hour if there's a good film showing. I rather like weird foreign films with subtitles; T-rated films: transvestites, transsexuals, tortured priests, twinks, trolls, tits, theatrics, twists in the plot, therapy, trench-coats. Well, anything by Pedro Almodóvar.

When I've had enough of the telly, I read for a while. Cailean, for many hours by this time, has been asleep under several blankets with all his toys. Approaching two-thirty in the morning, bladders must be relieved, mine first. Then out into the cold with the pup. The security light blazes and any inclination to sleep is blasted right out of me. We run back inside, switching off any lights, stand-by switches and the heater if it has been on. Cailean vanishes under the covers with "Snakey", a favourite stuffed toy that is a good deal bigger than he is. I pull the blankets up, face the ceiling, and start thinking.

Some years ago, I wrote a newspaper column that tended to be about days gone by, which were sometimes the good old days of my youth, sometimes about the travel I'd managed when my health and finances permitted, about people that I'd met, books I'd read, things that influenced me, the shitty experiences of childhood, conversions and diversions. My therapist thought I was getting all the past out of my system. I kept a journal for over twenty-five years, scrapbooks as well, and photo albums. Everything was on paper, somehow. As we carry the past along with us, perceiving time as we do in these dimensions, I hardly expected to get everything out of my system!

Three years ago I took all my journals to an industrial incinerator plant, along with my scrapbooks. So much for what I did in 1980; so much for the newspaper clipping of my mother's funeral notice; so much for important telephone numbers; so much for jokes that were so funny when I heard them that they had to be written down; so much for my thoughts on 11 September, 2001; so much for theatre tickets, and an address blotchy on a beer-mat, and a coin I picked up that I did not recognise. Into the fire.

I left my photo albums (and I'd been the keeper of the family photographs among my siblings), my personal papers, my newspaper columns, my reference books and notes, everything that I'd written, in an old cargo container in a damp field in Bermuda. When I turned my back on it, I knew that I'd not pay the storage fees after the first six months, and I didn't, and that was three years ago. Those things have gone. Apparently, as of three years ago, I'd pretty much dumped the baggage of my past, mentally, and the physical followed.

Back in England, I found I was unable, couldn't be arsed, to write about schooldays and fishing off the rocks and climbing Mount Pisgah on Beaver Island, though I was vaguely conscious of those times. Instead of panoramic views of driving through the Grand Tetons that just go on and on, I have a little, the smallest, Post-it Note reading "Saw the Tetons". Enough seen, enough said.

I'm tending to write about the moment, or at least last night or a day or two ago. I've taken up photography, I see something interesting, camera always at the ready, I get my snapshot, and I write about it. Or delete it. I don't save it.

And, in the night, in the last few hours before sunrise, my mind races. Something I saw the day before. I have a tiny torch, the sort that one might attach to a key ring, and I reach for it, my biro pen, and a jotter pad (they are scattered all around the flat), and I write down my great thoughts. Light out. Another thought. Light on. And through the night. Light off. Light on.

Sometimes I sit up completely and my thoughts become visual. In the room, awkwardly manoeuvring around the clutter, walk people and animals, sometimes flags flutter, things blow across the carpet which has become a street. There is no sound, unless I make it, and I don't want to disturb Cailean by talking to short-term memories.

Last night, I watched water cascading downwards through what should have been the carpeted floor, only it had become a rough path down a mountain, and pine trees hovered behind the furniture. It was quite remarkable; I made a note of it on my jotter pad. Had there been full sound, I imagine I might have been frightened.

Cailean only needs to pee once in the night, but I must go two or three times, so I got up from the sofa-bed and walked out of the woods, down the hall to the bathroom. When I came back, the room was a room again. I decided to make a large mug of coffee, which I do using skimmed milk rather than water. Four minutes and ten seconds in the microwave does it exactly. And I sit in the dark and drink the coffee and listen to music playing in my head. Coffee does that to me. Indie and Brit Pop.

Coffee also makes me sleepy at five in the morning. This morning, I wrote a few more notes and then rolled over in the bed, felt Cailean curl up behind my knees, closed my eyes, and then it was eight-thirty. Cailean was playing with Snakey on top of the blankets; the room was so bright that I knew it was a sunny day outside.

I do my house-cleaning chores on Friday, and I made beef stew from scratch, which takes two hours, not including the suet dumplings. So, I've done all that, it's Friday evening.

Just now, I had a look at my jotter pad. It reads, in part: "Revolution revisited before 2008 has passed!"

I must tell you my mind is not so far gone that I cannot figure the line out. You see, 1968, exactly 40 years ago, was quite the year for social unrest and upheaval, assassinations, invasions, riots and beatings and strikes.

The Rolling Stones sang their take on it, their anthem, Street Fighting Man, which is a shit song as far as music goes, but it included the lyric: "Summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy..." which is memorable to an old Stones fan such as myself.

John Lennon wrote one of my very favourite Beatles' songs, Revolution, which includes the lines:

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out

On 17 March, 1968, which was a Sunday, I was in London with a dear friend of mine, who reads this blog from time to time, he's still dear, and we saw crowds in the streets heading for the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square to protest against the Vietnam War. The riot that followed kicked off the revolution season that year.

I was into all that Peace and Love business back in 1968. However, I am looking for some evolution, some revolution, in 2008. In international finance, in coming to grips with hunger and pollution and terrorism, in international political relations. I am hoping that a revolution of common sense over prejudice will see Barack Obama become President of the United States of America. The election of John F. Kennedy back in 1960 broke the evil spell over Roman Catholicism, and I imagine only those hillbillies and crackers in the USA give a hoot about the Catholic influence now. Can Barack Obama, even if he is only half a man of black African blood, if elected, contribute hugely to a decline in institutionalised racism and prejudice? I think so. I hope so.

I'm afraid, for me, Obama's opponent, John McCain, is the hero from the Vietnam War. Can a war that should never have been (and that was ultimately lost) truly have great heroes? I'm not sure that suffering, which McCain certainly had his share of, can be equated with heroism. Many would disagree with me across the Atlantic.

Struggles against suffering, however, can be heroic at times.

I say I want a revolution. I do!

The Banana King's Progress

Most people are other people.
Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
their lives a mimicry,
their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde (De Profundis)

UNTIL THEY ARRIVED in Bermuda in the first week of August of 1925, my mother's parents, from Harle Syke, Lancashire, near Burnley, had only seen one person of colour. For the first quarter-century of their lives, the only black man they had ever set eyes on was The Banana King who, I gather, marketed bananas that had crossed some ocean to the west or south, somewhere in Burnley. They don't grow bananas in Lancashire, not even under glass. Not then, not now.

My grandparents had followed my grandmother's cousin towards the Americas, but must have got side-tracked. The cousin had gone to Canada with her husband, and then crossed into the USA, illegally, in upper New York State. They ended up on Staten Island, where their descendants still live, so far as I know.

Life in the failing cotton mills in Lancashire must have been quite grim in the early 1920s; I've read a few books on the subject, and heard the tales first hand, of course, from my grandparents and back in Harle Syke when visiting family there who'd not moved away. However, bearing in mind that my grandparents didn't go to The Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave in search of a better life, but to a backwater island some 600 miles from anywhere that grew Easter lilies and Bermuda onions, I think it was more a case of getting away than of going somewhere. My grandfather had hoped that his Uncle Mick, who had no sons, would leave him the farm that Mick owned. When Mick said no to that, my grandfather was mightily miffed, he had a temper, and was probably embarrassed at having asked, so they went and booked a passage on a boat to Halifax, and then another down to Bermuda, wherever it might be.

My grandmother was expecting their first child, they were newlyweds, when they left England, but they didn't tell anyone as they knew the family would not be happy to see them go in that delicate condition. My mother was born, in Bermuda, six months after they arrived.

On 3 August, 1925, coming down the gangplank onto Front Street in the City of Hamilton in Bermuda, the first thing William and Elsie noticed was that the Banana King was not unique in his blackness. In Burnley, the Banana King had been a curiosity, he had a certain charm, and he was wonderfully rare. In Bermuda, upwards of 80% of the people were Negroes. Racial segregation was the law. My grandparents never quite warmed to the population mix, they never liked the coloured folks. My grandmother died, in Bermuda, aged 104, in her right (if prejudiced) mind, and complained as long as she was able about the lazy, shiftless coloured girls who cared for her in the home she'd gone to live in when she was 98. She sometimes complained to their faces in her thick Lancashire accent. My grandfather had died some 25 years earlier, and he'd actively disliked the locals till his time ran out.

I never, ever, heard my mother say something disparaging about any person of colour. She had many black and Asian friends, and not just in name or as a convenience. My mother did things with all her friends, went out with them, visited, telephoned and waved to them. My mother was mentally ill most of her life, and one might ask if that is to blame for her simple acceptance of people as people, not considering racial types, or religion either.

I've often wondered if my mother ever clashed with her parents over her unwillingness or inability to see non-whites as different, hostile, fearsome, untouchable or unattractive beings. I certainly had some rip-roaring arguments with my grandparents, for the most part about racial prejudice, segregation, and disharmony in Bermuda. I didn't know a whole lot about the world as a boy. I don't know all that much now, but I recognise illogical hate. It's easy, all hate is illogical!

As a member of a minority group myself, I have to deal with people who have a problem with it. You see, I am a fan of Joni Mitchell, have been for over forty years. For the majority of people, perhaps as much as 90%, I'm a freak. You thought I was going to out myself as a Mormon?

My grandmother operated a little shop in the hospital in Bermuda, the profits went to charity. She sold sweets, ice-cream, soft drinks, potato chips, air-mail writing pads and envelopes, postage stamps and tampons. I'd usually get her to buy me a Nu-Grape drink, sometimes an orange sherbet in a paper tub with a wooden spoon. Through the window, or hatch, at the shop, you could not really see a great deal, you had to know what you wanted, and people did. No point in asking for a sandwich or an apple, everything was pre-packaged.

When someone offered the money, usually coins as I recall, to pay for their crisps or Tampax, or was accepting change, something happened that I always noticed, and that bugged the hell out of me. If you were white, your cash was taken by my grandmother in her hand, and she would place any change into your palm. But, if you happened to be other than white, she would point at a rubber mat on the counter, and you must put your money down on it. Change was placed on the mat for you to pick up. My grandmother could not bear to physically touch a black person. She didn't like cats either, but that's not important in this story.

In the last months of her life, incontinent and crippled, unable to move about, but still thinking clearly, my grandmother had to be handled in every way, touched in every place, by others, usually black nurses and nurses' aides. And she'd yell at them! They could wipe her arse, but they didn't do it right. What a hell it must have been, and it seems, to me, a divine sort of punishment!

My father disliked blacks too. He once had a black man turn up to be interviewed for a position at the bank where my father worked, and the black man pointed out that his middle name was Eldridge, like my father's surname. And then cheerfully offered: "I think we must be related." It took my father weeks to calm down from that affront to his good name.

On one occasion, my father happened to board an aeroplane for London that I was travelling on. We bumped into each other in the Departure Hall in Bermuda. When we arrived at Heathrow Airport, my father asked me how I was getting into the City. I told him a friend was meeting me, and said that if there was room in his car and time, perhaps he'd take my father to his hotel. And my friend, who is dark-skinned, was waiting at the exit. I made the most simple of introductions, no explanations, the ride was agreed, and we headed for my friend's car, which happened to be an enormous Bentley, black, gleaming, spotless, leather interior, buttons to push. I sat in front with my friend, my father reclined in the back. He thought my friend was a chauffeur, as you've guessed. We off-loaded my father and then headed to the apartment I'd rented for a month. My friend was the son of the Ambassador to the Court of St James (the UK) of an African country, and he'd borrowed an Embassy car to come out to meet me at Heathrow. I told my father a few days later, and invited him to join us for lunch, but he declined. A drink then? No, thanks. It was never discussed again.

A few weeks ago I upbraided a sister of mine for complaining about her "Paki doctor" to his superior, pointing out that she was fortunate someone from Pakistan was here in England to tend to her neuroses, and that "Paki" was not an appropriate word to use. My sister snarled: "What's wrong with 'Paki'? And I call the Irish 'pikeys'!" She's like that. She doesn't like coloured people, as she calls them, even though her husband is a person of colour, and their son is mixed-race. Go figure! Finally, she said the most damning thing she could think about me: "You never did care what colour people are …"

The Americans are a fair people; they
never speak well of one another.
With apologies to Samuel Johnson

My grandparents, and my parents, have all passed away now. My grandparents and my father (who detested each other, my parents' marriage was short and unhappy) would be truly horrified to have lived to see a person of colour in the 2008 US Presidential Election. My sister, who is alive, is not happy with it, and says so. I feel sure she knows nothing of American politics, except a few names, and those confused. Republicans? Democrats? Huh? But Barack Obama must not win. She will not know that Senator Obama is accused of being a Muslim, or that it should not matter even if he was. She doesn't know his politics. She only knows he's not quite white for the job.

A reporter from the BBC was in the USA recently, interviewing prospective voters, mainly in Eastern Seaboard states. The blacks, male and female, tended to support Barack Obama. A few whites did as well, but over and over again, concerned white voters said there were problems with both candidates. What might they be?

"Senator McCain, there's the age factor. That is a problem."
"And Senator Obama?"
"Well, the race thing. That could be a problem."

The race thing. Could be a problem, and indeed it is. As one comedian here said: "There are many Americans who won't put a cross by a black candidate. Unless it's on fire."

The Americans pride themselves on the belief that the Puritans, back in the early 1600's, left Europe in search of freedom from the cruel laws that they felt persecuted under. Of course, they took their own brand of those laws with them; they were very nearly Christian Taliban. One's own freedom can only be achieved through the servitude of others. Later immigrants to America, likewise, sought a better life. Many got it by riding roughshod over the rights of others. Ask the original inhabitants of America! Ask the Jews! Ask the Catholics! Ask the Mormons! Ask the Latinos! Ask the Chinese! The Hawaiians! Oh, and ask the women! The blacks didn't immigrate to the Americas in search of a better life, which is just as well, because they certainly didn't find it waiting for them. They haven't ridden roughshod over much of anything, only moving to the front of the bus in 1955!

In 2008, I believe the Americans should think hard and ask themselves if they are The Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave. Then demonstrate it to the world. Elect the Irishman! O'Bama for President!