City of Spades

4

Back home aboard the Lugard


It was when Laddy Boy returned from sea that he tell me of this tugboat, called the Lugard, to be sailed empty from London Docks to Lagos, and that a deck-hand crew of five was needed to take her there. And when Laddy Boy did me the great favour to give me a forged seaman’s book he buy, and tell me answers I must give to any questions, I made such a good impression on the captain by my strength and willingness (he was high, anyway – an Irishman) that he sign me on, and even though I cannot yet believe it, I am to go back home from England.

So on our sailing day, I met with my English friend Montgomery and my sister Peach at a dockside Chinese restaurant where they come to say goodbye to me. ‘That is like the life,’ I said to Montgomery. ‘My sister Peach, who never wishes to leave Africa, is now in London till she becomes a nurse, and I who wished to live in this big city, go back home to all my family to take her place.’

‘Soon I come home also,’ said my sister, ‘with my nurse’s belt and badges. I shall not waste my time with foolishness like my brother.’

A sister’s remark! ‘Through Peach you will have news of me, Montgomery,’ I said, ‘and of all my activities at home.’

‘Won’t you be writing to me?’ asked my English friend.

‘Of course, of course – and soon you will come to Africa as well and visit Mum and Dad and Christmas and our family, and live with us in our home like I do when here with you.’

‘Perhaps I’ll go there when Peach has qualified,’ said Montgomery. ‘Perhaps we’ll go out together.’

‘Oh yes, oh yes,’ I said (but Peach has her close instructions, and this also is her wish, that she shall not see Montgomery so often, and always, if so, in the company of the nurses’ hostel).

I looked at my watch – a parting friendship present from Montgomery – and said that my time had come to go. We went in the streets, in sunshine, and I spoke first to my sister in our language, and then to Montgomery, my Jumble friend.

‘Goodbye, Johnny,’ he said. ‘I can’t think what to say, and how to thank you …’

‘Thank me? Man, it is you who gave me so many good things that I needed.’

‘Nothing it wasn’t a joy to … Shall we see you down to the dock gates?’

‘No, no, please. We find a taxi for you take my sister back to hospital, and then I go on alone.’

I opened the taxi door, and gave my surprise gift to Montgomery: it is the mission school medal I wear on my neck on its chain since boyhood. ‘For you,’ I tell him. ‘You keep it with you, please.’ Then I tell the driver where he should go, and I waved to them as the taxi carried this two away.

I walked on quickly to the dock gates, to get a best bed on my ship before the other seamen come there. But by the river side, where our strong, dirty, little boat is by its mooring, I find that Laddy Boy is waiting for me.

He took my arm, and pulled me behind the shed. ‘Listen, man,’ he said. ‘They sign on Whispers.’

‘Sign Billy on?’

‘Yes. As one of the five crew. I did not know. Shall I go see the captain and try to stop this?’

‘Why, man? Why you do that?’

‘Why? You know why.’

‘Let him come travel home with me if he wants to. Why should I stop him go?’

‘Johnny, is he stop you. This man will kill you on this voyage.’

I laughed now out loud at Laddy Boy. ‘No one will kill me, countryman!’ I cried. ‘This is my city, look at it now! Look at it there – it has not killed me! There is my ship that takes me home to Africa: it will not kill me either! No! Nobody in the world will kill me ever until I die!’





About the Author


COLIN MACINNES (1914–76), son of novelist Angela Thirkell, cousin of Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling, grandson of Burne-Jones, was brought up in Australia but lived most of his life in London, about which he wrote with a warts-and-all relish that earned him a reputation as the literary Hogarth of his day.

Bisexual, outsider, champion of youth, ‘pale-pink’ friend of Black Londoners and chronicler of English life, MacInnes described himself as ‘a very nosy person’ who ‘found adultery in Hampstead indescribably dull’ and was much more at home in the coffee bars and jazz clubs of Soho and Notting Hill.

A talented off-beat journalist and social observer, he is best known for his three London novels, City of Spades, Absolute Beginners and Mr Love and Justice. His other books include To the Victor the Spoils, a disenchanted view of the Allied occupation of Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War, June in Her Spring and England, Half English. Colin MacInnes’s essays were published in Out of the Way in 1980 and a selection of the best of his fiction and journalism is available in Absolute MacInnes, edited by Tony Gould. MacInnes died of cancer in 1976.