Sunday 15 February 2015

Strangers in a strange land


Sarah's latest post reminded me that when I was about 8 years old and halfway through a school term, a beautiful, brown-skinned and tall girl with a great mass of shaggy hair was stood up in front of the class to be introduced to us as a new (if late) comer.

Anyone else would have quietly slipped in at the back to avoid disruption, but this girl was such a rarity that she was displayed as if she were an exhibit at the Museum of Mankind.

"This is *****," the teacher shouted to the class, "She is from Australia, and she is an Aborigine. Aborigines are the original inhabitants of Australia."

Even at that age, I was acutely aware of just how exotic this girl was, especially set in the tight-arsed, straight-laced environs of post-war Surrey, and I immediately formed an excruciating infatuation for her.

Sadly, this infatuation was not reciprocated, and my initial approach toward her to strike up a friendship was met with, "You stink, Stephenson". I was gutted.

Far from playing the part of a shy outsider, she was extremely forward and rowdy, setting an example to all the other girls by soundly beating-up all the male bullies one by one until they had all submitted to her superior strength.

Her technique included an impressive finale which involved pinning the boy to the ground, crouching over him with her face inches away from his, then projecting a 5 inch string of saliva out of her mouth toward their face, only to pull it back in again - all repeated in quick succession like an insect-eating lizard. Not being a bully, I didn't get this treatment.

It was only in later years that I understood the extreme rarity of the elderly woman who got on my number 63 school bus every morning as well.

She was brown and wrinkled and every inch of her face was covered in lurid, swirling tattoos.

She was a Maori woman from New Zealand - almost as rare a sight in the stockbroker-belt as the huge, yellow-eyed wolf which our near neighbour used to walk on a lead down the leafy road which ran past our mock-tudor house.

19 comments:

  1. The above, of course, is a different, much later girl in the photo.

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    1. Aborigines are just so good-looking. Look at that girl in the photo. What a head-start in life that should be.

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  3. Interesting Tom. Up here in the Dales a black person is still quite a rarity and it took me some time after I came to be married to the farmer to persuade him that when we met a black person we referred to him/her as just that - no pussyfooting around and definitely no derogatory name. I came here from the Midlands and from a marvellous multi racial Comp, where black, brown or white faces - or anything in between were the norm. And nobody thought twice about it. Would that it was like that everywhere.

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    1. My home town in Surrey - Woking - had the first purpose-built Mosque in Britain, so we were used to Asians, but there were very few other brown skinned, Afros or Afro-Caribean people there in my childhood.

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  4. In my native Surrey village, even someone with a suntan was a rarity.

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    1. And I bet they were all from either skiing holidays in the Winter, or Tuscan holidays in the Summer?

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  5. I saw a black person in Ipswich once.

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    1. It was in 1966 and the first black person I had ever seen.

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    2. Really? I was walking through London when I was about 6 with my parents, and I saw an African man with skin so dark it looked almost blue - you know what I mean? I was astounded and stopped to look at him, but my mother shooed me along for fear of embarrassment.

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    3. Yes. It was a school outing to see A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Comedy Theatre in London and for some reason the coach driver took us via Ipswich. We all looked out of the coach and said "look, a black man". From then on we started a game of spotting them but as we entered the outskirts of London we gave up the game because black people became more prolific and the game lost its attraction. We had no black children in the school or the city itself. There are still very few here but my best friend in the office is Nigerian. She is the only black person on an open-plan floor of 70 people.

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    4. Blimey. So it's really true what they say about Norfolk then.

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  6. There was one black boy in my class in grade school. I made sure to always hold his hand when we played circle games, because no on held the other. He had such a shy smile. He did not finish school with us, but he is indelible. Harry Wheeler.

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    1. PS--I am going to re-up and see if I reappear.Between chickpea and ?.

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    2. There were no black people in my school at the time - not even Asian ones, so this girl was a genuine rarity.

      I was told about your recent post, so I don't know where your face gas gone.

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    3. THERE YOU ARE ON THE FRONT OF THE LIST!

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