My Home Town

When I get asked 'Where are you from?' I'm not sure what answer to give, or even what answer people expect to hear. At least I don't get the follow-on question 'Yes, but where are you really from?' That's because I'm a white person living in the UK, though I was born in West Africa, a fact that several of my past girlfriends have used to wind their parents up. ("Well don't think you'll be bringing him home!") 

The traditional answer to the "Where are you from?" question used to be the place someone was born and spent their formative years, where they have family roots. It was so much more clear cut in the old days when social mobility was the exception.

Right now (at least since 2013) my home town is Blackpool, jewel of the north, but  my only real tie to the place - though I love it and it feels like home - is to the football team. It's why I ever came here at all, because a young lad growing up in West Africa 3,000 miles from the nearest English football league club has no natural affiliation, except that Blackpool won their only FA Cup in the year I was born and that has been good enough for me.

As for my original home town, and the house in which I spent those formative years, that was in a place called Afon, in Nigeria. You've never heard of Afon. It wasn't very populous in the 1950s and was described in the somewhat tribal chronicles of the region as an ancient “walled” town which has never been conquered in history by any other town. Its residents were mostly farmers and their families, the farms being spread around outside the town walls. The nearest big town was Ilorin, about twelve miles away. You've probably never heard of that either. 

our house in Afon, Nigeria, 1950s

During the time I lived in Afon, neighbouring Ilorin was about the size of modern-day Blackpool, population approximately 130,000. It had a royal chief (or Emir) who lived in a palace and whom I had the privilege of meeting when I was about four years old. It was the administrative and commercial centre of the region, with a Moslem law court, several large markets, including a night market, shops, hospital, high school et cetera. It still has an Emir in fact. His Royal Highness, Alhaji (Dr.) Ibrahim Sulu-Gambari, is the 11th Emir of Ilorin. He ascended the throne in 1995. I may even have met him, for he would have been in his late teens when I was presented to his father. Afon and Ilorin are both in Kwara state, in southwestern Nigeria. (Google Maps if interested.)

Of course, Nigeria has changed almost beyond recognition since I was born and grew up there. Afon itself may still be relatively rural, a farming town of some 20,000 inhabitants, approximately the size of Penwortham or Buxton, but nearby Ilorin has ballooned from its 130,000 into a major city (Nigeria's 7th largest) with a population today of over 1 million. It boasts an international airport, contains Nigeria's largest university and now has a National League football club, ABS FC or Abubakar Bukola Saraki Football Club, named after the man who owns it. (Can you imagine Simon Sadler FC?)

Nigeria itself claims to be the wealthiest country in Africa. It certainly is the most populous, with some 230 million citizens (making it the 6th most populous in the world after India, China, USA, Indonesia and Pakistan). That wealth is largely built on its oil industry, followed by chemicals, machinery, food and drink, leather and textiles. Some assert it has become one of the most corrupt countries, with bribery rife. I don't know. I've not been back there since I was a boy, and have no desire to do so now,

Afon in the 2020s

As to why Nigeria was the land of my birth and Afon my home town, that was down to social mobility of a most specific kind. My father and mother were devout Christians who met shortly after World War II at an evangelical event in Huddersfield. He was training to be a minister of religion, she was a midwife. They fell in love and, fired by a belief that they had been "called by God", they decided to get married and offer themselves for missionary work in Africa. I suppose they were almost the last of a long line of well-intentioned Christians who had gone overseas since mid-Victorian times, to spread the word of Jesus and generally 'improve the lives' of the native peoples by building chapels, schools and medical facilities, all under the benevolent arch of colonialism. Nigeria was not yet an independent country when they embarked on their mission in 1951.

My father went trekking through the bush to all the villages and towns round about, converting people to Christianity. Many up to that point had been worshipping their ancestral tribal gods and getting their medical aid from witch doctors. Many others were Muslims whom he sought to persuade to change allegiances. He organised the building of chapels and schools for the new congregations of Nigerian converts. My mother ran the local medical centre and dispensary in Afon until my arrival, the first of their three children to be born there.

I suppose I had a happy enough though quite isolated childhood and all of my early years memories are of our big old thatched-roof bungalow (without electricity or running water), the expansive garden with its fruit trees, our pet peacock, ducks and rabbits, the constant warnings about snakes and scorpions, the occasional sightings of elephants and other wild life, and it always being warm, even in the rainy season. I just accepted everything, in the way children do. It never occurred to me to wonder why everyone was a different colour to me and my parents, or to question the fact that we had a gardener and a 'houseboy', the nearest I had to a friend. I learned to speak some Yoruba (the local language) though I've forgotten most of it. I was schooled at home, can still remember a time before I could read for myself and what a magical mystery books seemed until I mastered the skill. And I loved music, played on my parents' wind-up gramophone.  

But of course I and we never really belonged to Afon or the land of my birth. Roots, aunts, uncles and grandparents, were in faraway England. They used to send Christmas cards with snow on (how strange I used to find that) for our Christmas days were always hot and sunny. They would send books, football annuals and the like, and I was always conscious that we lived a somewhat exotic existence in our town of mud walls, thatched huts, red dirt roads, beds with mosquito nets on, and diet of yams, maize, groundnut stews, with  poultry, mangos, bananas and grapefruit from the garden..

picking grapefruit with my (pregnant) mum in our Afon garden

It was an unusual and in some ways quite privileged childhood. I never knew what cold was until we returned as a family to England, a much better option in retrospect than my parents sending us off to boarding school. But as I said earlier, I have never felt any desire to return to Nigeria. I follow the progress of their national football team with interest, and I enjoy the country's Highlife music (Fela Kuti, Prince Nico, Sunny Ade), but as for the rest, it has all changed so much. The best and worst parts live on in memory.

The very worst part of all was our house burning down and me having to watch it do so. That traumatic event has given rise to today's poem. Some burning grass from a nearby field had been carried about half a mile on the wind and landed on the tinder-dry thatched roof of our house, which went up in flames. 

I've titled the poem in reference to Morimi, the Yoruba goddess of fire. She got invoked when flames were used to prepare the earth for new planting. She was also known for deliberately setting the countryside on fire. So there's an irony somewhere in the fate of our Christian missionary house in Afon. We lost everything in that blaze. When nowadays I see footage of houses being consumed by wildfires as a result of global warming, I know just how those poor people feel.

Morimi Strikes Alight

A roar like motorbikes approaching

but the road is empty, no dust rising,

clear to the vanishing point. Yet still

they sound, nearer, louder. And then

smoke comes billowing down, spikes

of burning thatch, a rain of scorpions.

We leap up from the veranda, run out,

turn back to see the roof ablaze. I'm 4

and my house is on fire. We had just

started tea, my brother, mother and I.

Soon come shouts and men running,

our father, villagers, armed with cans

and buckets, anything to carry water

in a human chain from the water tank

to hurl it at the flames. Through door

and windows we see the thatch fall in

setting the whole insides alight. I fret

my parents might try to rescue things

but the fire is so intense, scorching us

as we stand and watch it, mesmerised,

horrified. If I have any concept of hell

it's just being realised before my eyes.

By evening, my home is a charred and

flickering shell. We all stink of smoke,

are smutted and thirsty, my teddy bear

burned, my books are ash, but we four 

are safe, if homeless. I don't know how 

we'll sleep tonight, or where we might.

our house in Afon after the fire, 1958

Ku ni ilera.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Adolescent Nell

I watched a programme about the history of Covent Garden and also listened to a BBC history podcast earlier this year about the life of Nell Gwyn, who lived there in the 17th century.  Most people know something of Nell's story, how she started off as an orange-seller in a London theatre, how she transitioned to the stage, as an actress achieved fame and caught the eye of noblemen and eventually King Charles II, became the king's mistress, bore him a child and soon thereafter 'retired'. 

What struck me most forcibly listening to the podcast was that she achieved all of this in her supposedly adolescent years! She was only just into her teens when she started as an orange-seller and she had only just turned twenty when she became a mother and gave up her acting career. That's extraordinary, isn't it, by today's standards? Not so unusual perhaps when one considers that in the previous century, both Catherine of Aragon and Catherine Howard were only sixteen when they made their Tudor marriages. 

Maybe  adolescence  (from the Latin adolescere , to mature) was much more aligned to physical rather than emotional maturity prior to the 20th century. It must be fairly obvious that nowadays, certainly in the more affluent and enlightened West (since the education and welfare reforms of the last hundred years) youngsters can enjoy the luxury of an extended childhood.

Anyway, historical comparisons aside, I decided to head off into the bountiful worldwide web to find out more concerning the  remarkable adolescent years of  mistress Nell Gwyn. 

Eleanor 'Nell' Gwyn, 1650-1687

Information about her early life is both somewhat patchy and conflicting. It's believed she was born in 1650, a year into the country's short flirtation with puritan Republicanism (1649-1660). Her birthplace may have been Hereford, or Oxford, or London (they all lay claim), though the latter has the strongest case, given that's where we know Nell (given name Eleanor) grew up, in Covent Garden. She was "low-born", a euphemistic description of her working-class origins, the younger daughter of a mostly absent and sometime convict father and a mother who was proprietor of a bawdy-house.

It's also almost certain that she was illiterate, for there was no schooling available to poor girls of her day. She would have grown up in her mother's brothel in Coal Yard Alley, just off Drury Lane, and along with her "notorious" sister Rose she would have served "strong waters" to the clientele. There is a suggestion she may have taken a lover of her own when she was twelve years old.

Her first break (if you can call it that) was to be recruited by one Mary Meggs (aka Orange Moll) who had a licence to "vend oranges, lemons, sweetmeats" within the King's Theatre off Drury Lane - for by 1663 the dour days of the Republic were gone, the monarchy had been restored with fun-loving King Charles II on the throne and the theatres had re-opened. Mary Meggs' scantily-clad "orange girls" sold fruit to the patrons of the shows and were often tipped to take messages from high-society men in the audience to the actresses backstage. 

Nell soaked it all up, the atmosphere, how the theatre worked, and being both pretty, precocious and with a comic talent had soon managed to persuade the management to enrol her in the theatre's acting school in 1664, aged fourteen, where she was given small parts to begin with in plays and revues. Note that she was among the first wave of female actors, for prior to the Restoration of 1660 women's parts had always been played by boys and men. Not that Nell herself was averse to cross-dressing either. From time to time she dressed as a man with a false beard and called herself William Nell. Because she couldn't read, she learned her lines by rote from listening to others reading them and on top of that she improvised. She was a natural performer and by her mid-teens had become something of a sensation for playing in John Dryden's heroic drama 'The Indian Emperor ' as the love interest of the main actor Charles Hart, who was at the same time her real-life lover. 

By 1667 she had secured her acting reputation and offstage she numbered actors and earls among her paramours. In fact during that year the Duke of Buckingham took on the role of unofficial manager of Nell's love affairs and through that connection she came to the notice and soon to the bed of the King of England. Charles II made no secret of his mistresses. His Queen, Catherine of Braganza, could not bear him any children but he already had six from four separate mistresses by the time he took up with Nell. She rather archly called him Charles the Third because she'd already had two previous lovers with that name. He is said to have adored her for her quick wit and forthrightness as well as for her other charms.

Nell portrayed as Venus with her son as Cupid

Nell continued to appear regularly on the stage in tandem with being the King's favourite mistress through to the end of the decade when she fell pregnant with his son. Baby Charles was born early in 1670 and soon afterwards Nell made a triumphant return to acting and was the talk of the town again. However, she chose to retire aged just twenty when she became pregnant with a second royal bastard, after which the King installed her in a town house on Pall Mall within sight of the royal palace. He also gave her Burford House on the edge of his Windsor estate and for the next fifteen years Nell would be a sometime companion to the King, dividing her time between London and Windsor according to the King's movements. Not bad going for the illiterate little orange-seller who'd grown up in a brothel. She was apparently very tolerant, if sometimes scornful, of his other mistresses.

She'd never expected that her royal affair would last, but she made it work for her and she was always in the King's affections. Charles II kept that portrait of Nell as Venus hidden behind a landscape painting, but he would reveal it occasionally to guests who he though might find it of interest. And when he died in 1685, he left instructions for his brother (James II) that Nell Gwyn was to be well cared for, and so she was, living on in the Pall Mall house until her own death (from a stroke) two years later, aged just thirty-seven. She lives on in social and theatrical folklore, and various streets and buildings named in her memory.

I've been sorting through some old photographs recently and was struck by a similarity between the paintings of Nell Gwyn above (both painted by Sir Peter Lely when she was twenty) and that of a girl I knew fleetingly back in my own adolescence in Cambridge. I think it's the bosoms! Linda was the sister of a schoolfriend of mine, she was a student and part-time photographer's model, lived life to the full and barely made it into her twenties. I kept her picture (admittedly rather creased by the years) for sentimental reasons that you may care to guess at.

Linda Martin, 1952-1972 

As for my own adolescent years, I suspect they were fairly typical for a middle-class boy in the 1960s into early 1970s. There was embarrassment about one's conservative (i.e. 'square') parents, concern that the world might go up in an atomic fireball, worry about passing exams, about acne, the size of one's cock, making out with girls, being caught masturbating or using drugs, finding part-time jobs to fund buying clothes/records/books/beer, taking girls out (it was expected the boy would pay) and going to the football (those last two being mutually exclusive back then). It was a struggle but it was fun, And I left home as soon as I could.

I also wrote poetry, mostly for its own sake, sometimes for the school magazine, occasionally for girlfriends. I didn't keep much of it, as I didn't think it would stand the test of time, but I do have a couple of poems dating from those teenage years. I've shared this one before in an early Dead Good Blog back in 2014, but I'll reproduce it here in lieu of anything new this week:

Saturday

I open the window

into a cold and rainy morning.

The grey streets

are full of grey people

with frowns on their faces

and water in their shoes

cursing the day they were born.

So I turn back to Friday night

for you are smiling and warm.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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