Hateland (2 page)

    Tyndall, who'd already packed his lunchbox into his briefcase and was heading for the exit, stood about five yards from me. He ordered me to open the door. I told him to fuck off. He shouted, 'Open it.' Again, I told him to fuck off. He stormed towards me and tried to bustle past to open the door. I grabbed hold of him. He tried pushing me off, so I put him in a head-lock and stood there with his head under my arm. We had a little dance as he struggled to break free. I looked down at his bald patch. Our struggle was shaking the dandruff from his remaining hair. I had his neck in a very firm grasp. He gurgled something at me, and a bit of his spit dribbled onto my arm. He kept struggling, but the more he struggled, the more I squeezed. Adolf was laughing. He kept saying, 'Fucking let go of him, Bernie.' So I did.

    Tyndall regained his erect posture. His features flashed with outrage. Flushed and sweating, he turned towards his minder, presumably because a minder should normally be mindful of such assaults on the mindee's person and dignity. The minder looked as if he was going to do or say something, so I moved towards him as if about to bash him. The minder stepped back and cowered behind his friends.

    I began shouting at Tyndall, 'Some fucking nationalist you are. One paddy tells 30 of you to leave and you scuttle off.' Tyndall began addressing his followers as if I were invisible. I kept shouting, 'You fucking wanker.'

    Tyndall ignored me and, with the little of his dignity that remained, said they'd finish their meeting elsewhere. I let him unbolt the door. Everyone trooped out after him.

    I wanted to go home, but Adolf said, 'We might as well hear what he's got to say.'

    The group walked to a nearby park. There, in darkness, Tyndall stood on a low wall and addressed his disciples. I didn't stay to the end. I'd had enough of the bulldog spirit. I said to Adolf, 'Come on. Let's go.'

    On the way back to the tube, I began raging about Tyndall and the Nazis. Adolf wouldn't stop laughing. I said, 'You can fucking laugh, Adolf, but I'm not going to another one of their fucking meetings.'

    This made him laugh even more. He said, 'Do you really think they're going to invite you?' We both started laughing. We agreed that another invitation seemed unlikely.

    I suppose this meeting was a sort of turning point for me. It wasn't that I suddenly saw the British Nazis in a new light, scales falling from my eyes. It was more a confirmation of every negative thought I'd ever had about them. I'd been chewing their shit for several years, but thankfully I'd never got round to swallowing it. And now I knew I never would. There had always been something ridiculous about my involvement with the British Nazis. For one thing, my parents were Irish Catholics - a group that hasn't always contained the most loyal defenders of the English nation. Even Adolf's blood wasn't pure St George - his dad was Irish too. In fact, almost every one of the small group of south London 'Nazis' I hung around with had either Irish, or mixed, blood.

CHAPTER 2

RIVERS OF BLOOD

I'm standing in a field picking potatoes with my mother. I'm about eight years old. Around us are other pickers, all white and mostly women. On the other side of the field, a group of Asians are working. Occasionally, a white woman throws a potato in their direction. A few of her friends laugh. The Asians, mostly women and children, don't respond. They get on quietly with their work.

    We're on the outskirts of Wolverhampton at Bradshaw's, one of the largest fruit and vegetable farms in Europe. My father needs all his money for his beer, so to support me and my three brothers, my mother must work here at the weekends and in a factory during the week. Somehow, she manages to squeeze in a few cleaning jobs as well.

    The roar of motorbike engines makes me look up. A gang of Hell's Angels on perhaps 20 bikes has stopped on the A5 overlooking our field. I can see them looking down at us and the Asians. Then they rev up their engines and peel around, heading back down the A5 to the farm entrance. As soon as the first bike passes the gate, the Asians begin to run. In our white group, no one moves or seems to feel threatened.

    I realise the bikers want to get at the Asians. No real surprise registers in my childish mind, because everyone, apart from my mother, seems to dislike them. Every day, I hear the words, 'dirty Indians'. Perhaps their skin is brown because they're dirty, I think.

    Because of the furrows, the bikers can't drive over the field to reach the Asians. Instead, they roar up and down the two dirt tracks on either side. The Asians run from one corner to another, pursued by jeering Angels. The white pickers have stopped work to watch. Some are laughing. After five minutes or so, the Angels tire of their game and roar off. For a few minutes, the terrified Asians stay huddled together in the middle of the field. Some of the women are shaking. Others are crying. After a short while, everyone, white and Asian, goes back to picking potatoes, as if nothing's happened.

    I'm pretty sure this incident took place in 1968, but maybe it was six months earlier or later. It was certainly around the time of local MP Enoch Powell's infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech.

    In April 1968 - one month after my eighth birthday - Powell (then Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South-West and a member of the Shadow Cabinet) said Britain had to act to halt immigration (especially black and Asian immigration from Commonwealth countries). He feared that, unless the government took urgent counter-measures, by the year 2000, 'whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by different sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population'. He said this was 'like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre'. He proposed that the next Conservative government should refuse to let in more immigrants - and send back as many as possible of those already here. The absence of such measures could provoke serious civil strife. He said, 'As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood".'

    The speech went down well at my Wolverhampton primary school, which didn't contain many 'Commonwealth' pupils. I remember the older children chanting in the playground, 'Enoch, Enoch, Enoch Powell, Enoch Powell, Enoch Powell.' I doubt whether the chanters could have explained much about the speech's content, but they'd certainly picked up something from their parents.

    Four national opinion polls recorded an average of 75 per cent support for Powell's views. If the parents outside my school's gates were anything to judge by, I suspect support for him may have been even higher among the whites of Wolverhampton, many of whom embraced the MP as a folk hero.

    I'd often hear parents talking about 'jungle bunnies', 'dirty Indians', 'nigger bus drivers' and 'the fucking Irish'. The older children at my school started calling everyone who displeased them 'Paki', 'wog' or 'coon', regardless of their colour. These were the 'in' insults. I don't really know what I made of it all. I was myself the son of Irish immigrants, and I had a vague sense of not being English, but I absorbed a lot of the anti-black prejudice of my peers. Perhaps I hoped that, if I joined them in hating blacks, they'd overlook my 'fucking Irish' background. I don't know. I only know that this prejudice couldn't have come from anywhere else, because my parents never said a word against black people. When my mother and father first came to England in the '50s, I think they encountered similar hostility ('dirty Irish' and the like).

    To be honest, the questions of immigration and national identity weren't uppermost in my mind at that age. I was more preoccupied with the hostile environment in my own home. My mother came from Sligo in the Irish Republic, one of thirteen children raised in a four-bedroom council house. I was her third child. There were two boys before me, Jerry and Paul. A fourth, Michael, came later. I was christened Patrick Bernard, taking the first name from my father and the second from a favourite uncle. As soon as I could exercise any choice in the matter, I stopped using my father's name.

    My father came from County Waterford in the Irish Republic, but never told me anything about his background. In fact, he never told me anything about anything. Normal conversation didn't take place in our home. Over the years, I've pieced together fragments of his story. They've helped me understand better why he became such a vicious bastard. Born illegitimate in the 'county home' (otherwise known as 'the workhouse') and abandoned by his young mother, the experiences of his childhood must have killed any decency within him. They certainly convinced him he could survive only by suppressing his softer emotions. That was what life had taught him and it was the only lesson he wanted to pass on to his children. He hated to see us crying or showing 'weakness'. Even as infants, he expected us to behave like grown men, or, rather, like the man he'd grown into - cold, hard and ruthless.

    I'd been born in Dunstable, but when I was four my father, who worked at the Vauxhall car plant, decided we should move to Wolverhampton. He began to drink a lot and also became extremely violent towards all of us, my mother especially. He'd come home barely able to stand, spitting obscenities at my mother before beating her and slouching off to bed. Memories of my mother screaming as she was beaten still haunt me. She'd be screaming for him to stop and we the children would be screaming with fear. Other nights, even without much drink taken, he'd just turn off the television and sit there slandering her family, humiliating her, degrading her, even questioning the point of her existence. His most decent act would be to send us to bed. Then I'd lie awake in the darkness listening to her sobbing downstairs, pleading with him in my head to stop. As I got older, I'd sometimes overcome my fear and shout out, 'Leave her alone, you bastard.' And he'd come running up the stairs to beat me.

    My father had another notion to move, this time to Codsall, a village close to Wolverhampton. He'd found us a three-bedroom terraced house which backed on to the main railway line. At night, I felt the house was going to fall in on us as coal trains thundered past at the end of the garden.

    As I grew older, I didn't try to hide my hatred for my father. I forced myself to endure his violence stoically. I didn't want him to know he was hurting me. His dislike for me seemed to grow in response to my defiance. His physical violence only ended up hardening me, but his verbal violence had a more disturbing effect. He'd grip me by the throat or hair, shouting obscenities in my face while prodding or punching me in the head or body. His favourite insult was a reference to the circumstances of my birth (when my mother had almost delivered me in the street). 'You were born in the gutter,' he'd say, 'and you'll die in the gutter.' He'd tell my brother Paul that our mother had tried to kill him by pushing him in front of a bus when he was in his pushchair. He'd scream, 'She didn't want you, son. She didn't fucking want you.'

    But this was nothing compared to what he saved for our mother. He treated her like a dog. In fact, if she'd been a dog, he'd probably have been arrested for cruelty, but because she was his wife the police and others felt they could do nothing. It was, they said, a domestic.

    One Mother's Day, I brought her home a card I'd made at school. She put it on the sill above the kitchen sink. I was still sitting at the table eating my dinner when my father came home smelling of drink. He saw the card and picked it up. 'Is this what your little pet got you, is it? Mother's little fucking pet.' My mother asked him to stop, but that only made him worse. He turned to her and said, 'Shall I give you something for Mother's Day, shall I?' He picked up a plate off the draining board and went to smash it over her head. She raised her arm to protect herself and the plate broke across it, cutting it wide open. She spent the rest of the day in casualty getting it stitched.

    Another evening, he came home and complained his dinner wasn't freshly cooked, just heated up. Presumably, he expected my mother to guess what time he'd stagger back from the pub. He threw the dinner and the plate against the wall, grabbed my mother by the hair and started punching her. She was bleeding from the nose and mouth, but he kept punching her until she collapsed on the floor. He stood over her as she lay there, his hands and shirt smeared with her blood. My mother raised her head slightly, coughed up some blood and asked me to get her some water. My father said he'd get it. He walked out of the room and I helped my mother sit up. He came back holding a mug of water, 'Here, Anna. You wanted fucking water - take it.' And with that he dashed the mug into her face.

    I used to go to school in the mornings like a bomb waiting to explode. I loathed the other children's happiness: Daddy did this for me, Daddy did that for me. I needed to shut them up. I used to fight them with a ferocity fuelled by a hatred of their normality and happiness. Even at that young age, I was developing a fearsome reputation for violence. I must have spent more time in front of the headmaster than in lessons. I wasn't invited to another child's house until I was ten, when I went to the birthday party of my next-door neighbour, Nicky. There were about 12 children there, as well as adults, and everyone was laughing and joking. Their joy made me feel angry and down.

    One of Nicky's presents was a model of an American Flying

    Fortress bomber. When all the other children went out to play football, I stayed behind and smashed the plane to pieces, dropping the remains behind the television. I wasn't invited back.

    In 1971, just before I went to secondary school, my father decided to show me how to do up a tie. He made me stand still with my hands by my side. This meant I could only see his hands and not what he was doing with the tie. Then he undid the tie and told me to do it. I got it wrong. He grabbed the tie, which was round my neck, and began pulling me about with it, slapping me round the head and saying I was fucking stupid. Finally, I could take no more. I shouted at him, 'I wish you were fucking dead,' then I punched him on the side of the head before running out of the room and up the stairs.