There were moments of happiness, slim vignettes of what childhood could be. These moments would be violently punctured by chaos and upheaval. I began to feel the most relaxed within struggle and pain, happiness made me uneasy, gentle people made me suspicious and affection made me itch. When my father did turn up, the arguing would progressively worsen between my parents, from shouting to breaking plates to physical violence. My mother was a strong woman, still the strongest person I know. She knew nothing of comfort, she just worked for years. She often had two, sometimes three jobs, which meant very little time for anything else or herself. My father had little formal education. He had always been someone who survived off charm and a ready smile. He could take a fifteen-minute walk and make three new best friends. He was handsome, quick tempered, with a typical paunch of a man who enjoyed Olympic sized portions of fufu peanut butter stew with meat tucked underneath, a prize to be found by the greedy consumer. He would fish his large fingers through the thick rich stew for treasures of succulent cuts of lamb that were eaten till you could suck and chew down on the bone with a crunch as it snapped apart. A trick he swore made your teeth stronger. His paunch was always stylishly covered in one of his flamboyant shirts which gave him the look of permanent pregnancy. He was a man of intense contradictions: a ladies' man who would have one real love for the rest of his life, a family man who never quite knew how to keep his own together, an electric anger which like lightning would strike white hot yet dissipated just as quickly. He had a smile which took up most of his face and a front gold tooth that glistened. I had wanted to be just like him, even down to his stammer which made calling my name sound like an engine struggling to turn over ‘Je..Je.Je..Jeffrey’.  

I liked my father, but I couldn't say I loved him. Yet I had a love for my mother, however at times I didn’t like her.

My mother conflated anything she saw as flashy or attention grabbing with negativity. There is a common misconception that the racism and prejudice experienced by migrants in the early 80's could be isolated between white British and black migrants. What is often left unsaid is the internal fears and catastrophic stereotypes internalized then spewed amongst the black diaspora. Some of the early Caribbean and later African migrants were fed false and damaging narratives, such as the lazy, weed smoking Jamaican or the starving, uneducated and uncivilized African. Things I inherently knew to be stupid on both sides. Something as simple as having a gold front tooth was seen by my mother and others in our small Ghanaian community as a brash sign of bad intent reserved for the Jamaican rude boy. Often I was not only fighting racism from whites, I would be fighting prejudicial views based on ignorance held by fellow blacks, often through their lack of interaction and understanding. I was always proud to be African, yet many were not, and they would lie about where they were from to avert any bullying or inadequate feelings. Girls would openly say they wouldn't date an African bubu, with such vitriol it pierced your chest. I was fortunate enough to grow up amongst a mixed estate, so after a while we began to slowly see past the nonsense and the lies we had been fed about one another.

I know very little of how my mother and father met. It felt alien to me that at one point these two individuals even loved or cared for each other enough to have children. Many nights I would sit at the top of the stairs with ring-side seats to this circus of destruction, looking on as my father slapped my mother over and over. I sat holding my breath in fear of being heard or seen, with each slap her body would begin to crumple, she would fall as if in slow motion to her knees crying, begging him to stop and I would feel charges of anger surging through my body. I wanted to yell 'STOP!', yet I sat silently and watched as tears of rage and helplessness filled my eyes. I feel ashamed to admit it, but part of me wanted her to be as helpless as I was when she beat and slapped me. In my mind this was some sort of payback, so like a coward I did nothing. As time went on, I became proficient at holding in secrets, my only release was school; it was the only place that offered me consistency. I hated inset days, bank holidays and dreaded the six-week summer break. I didn’t want to be home.

The day my father left for good I had been suspended from school this had become a somewhat familiar occurrence especially when you have a temper. Unsure how I would break the news to my mother I began the long walk home, it was as if a condemned man been sent to the gallows. With each step my legs began to feel heavier and heavier. I wiped the building sweat off my forehead as my throat began drying up, I began to rehearse over and over how to begin the conversation. By the time I had almost reached home I was convinced I was Horace Rumpole. I would fight to keep my client from their pending death sentence. I decided I would tell her the truth, well just enough of the truth to buy me some sympathy. I would tell her I was minding my business (which essentially is kind of true), I would tell her I was defending her honour. I would have to add, I was doing my work, of course. I would leave out the fact I was teasing Ernest at the time, but that’s a small detail, she wouldn't have to know. I had asked him for two pound for the tuck shop and not only had he said 'No!' he had added the two words that would automatically guarantee a fight ‘Your mum!’. We knew if a sentence began with ‘Your mum’ it would end in a slur. That was it! What could I do? The gauntlet had been thrown, that was a declaration of war amongst all young boys. I grabbed him by his tie, pulling him close enough for me to rain down as many punches as I could, his nose exploding on my fist, blood running through my fingers with each punch. The deputy head was called and I was dragged to the headmasters office. 

The journey home had been a blur, my body already flinching as I nervously started to put the keys into the door, but it was already open. I panicked, had I forgotten to lock the door? Or, even worse, had someone broken in? I tentatively pushed the door open, fully stepping inside and scanning the place for signs of an intruder my eyes only saw her, knees tucked to her chin, her arms wrapped around herself, rocking in an empty living room. The tv gone, settee gone, tables, chairs and pictures all gone. The house was bare, I called out to her 'Mum, what's happened, have we been robbed?' She just rocked unresponsively, momentary silences punctuated by sniffling and whispers of 'He's gone, he's gone and taken everything!' I ran into the kitchen and that too was bare, he had even taken the bulbs. I'm sure if he had time, he would have taken the doors off the hinges. My head was spinning, I steadied myself walking back slowly into the front room. I sat with my mother and that was the first time she had really hugged me. I cried not over him leaving, but because it hurt to see my mother like this.

From then on, true happiness frightened me, it never arrived alone. I grew to distrust myself for smiling too long, laughing too hard, I knew I’d have a debt outstanding. I learnt to pay my balance early, hiding my smile, pushing my happiness down where it wouldn’t be discovered and stolen from me. Soon I worked out that if I stayed in the dark it could never surprise me, I was not going to be Sisyphus, rolling my emotions like a boulder up and down this hill.

My brother Simon and I were nothing alike. As a child I looked up to him, he was the person I hoped would offer me some protection, yet I never considered how he must've been feeling trying to make sense of the madness around us. The time we had spent apart as children had affected the bond that we should have shared. We were three years apart, yet it may as well have been a lifetime. He was an altar boy, captain of the school football team, well-liked by the teachers and fastidious with his appearance. I would have stolen the church offering given the chance, had no interest in sports, was tolerated by most of the teachers and I didn't care how I looked. Some days I would be sent to school in my brother's hand me downs, even having to wear his old school shoes stuffed with socks as his feet were much longer than mine. I sensed a feeling of embarrassment from him about living where we did. Being children who had to use dinner tickets in school to receive our free meals. I began to slowly identify everything he was and wanted to be the opposite. My brother would spend as much time as he could out of the house and out of the area. Our relationship would slowly deteriorate, we had nothing in common and I preferred it that way. I was not embarrassed about coming from a council estate, in fact it was something I became proud of. For me there was nothing better than being from South London.