‘It would be nice to have company. But I think I might get a cat.’ She sighed and said, ‘Don’t worry, Luca, there will be other paradises.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, why would there be?’
She stood up and opened the curtains. The light was coming up. He got up and stood beside her. Together they looked into the park opposite.
‘They’ll be opening the park soon,’ she said. ‘Will you walk across it? I’ll wave to you.’
‘Okay,’ he said, putting on his hat and coat. ‘I’ll do that. Goodbye.’
As he walked across the park, he was determined not to turn and look back because she wouldn’t be there to wave. No one was sincere; and, anyway, he couldn’t possibly have anything she wanted. But, at the exit, he did stop and turn. He thought he should; it would soon be time to face important things. And she was there because she knew he would turn. She was standing, doing her breathing exercises, he guessed. And before he went away, he waved back.
The Heart of Whiteness
E. R. Braithwaite’s To Sir, With Love
I didn’t know I was coloured until I went to school. It wasn’t until much later that I knew what it meant. Books helped me: in Bromley Library in 1970, aged sixteen — around the time I was reading Ian Fleming, the Saint, P. G. Wodehouse, James Baldwin and Mickey Spillane — I found To Sir, With Love. As a half-Indian, half-English schoolboy living in the suburbs with no vocabulary for describing his experience, this 1959 novel about a black teacher in Cable Street in London’s East End was a revelation. At last there was a way to talk about race and what racism might do to someone. This had barely begun as a public discussion in Britain, except in the negative by people like Enoch Powell, who, in the midst of Britain’s imperial decay and decline, were attempting a resurgence of supremacy.
This straightforward and moving story of an educated Guyanese in a new-style ‘free’ school — a man journeying into whiteness, class, miscegenation and teenage sexuality — helped me see what might be possible for a tyro writer tackling a subject that had hardly been broached by British artists. Growing up in an atmosphere of casual and deliberate racism, forbidden from visiting various houses, and with fascist groups like the British National Party around us in South London, I was beginning to think of how I might approach this material in fiction and begin to write myself out of the corner I was in.
With its reference to Rosa Parks and the early civil rights protests in the US, the novel begins with an insult on a London bus. A woman refuses to sit next to a black man because of his colour. It is a very clear beginning to the story. The woman wants this man to know something. It is not that he is merely dehumanised for her: she could, after all, merely ignore him or, in fact, not see him at all. But she doesn’t. He is not ‘invisible’ as he might once have been. In his essay ‘Marrakech’ (1939), George Orwell comments, ‘[I]t is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces — besides, there are so many of them! […] Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff …?’
But now, after the empire, and as London begins to change, the black man is too present, and so the woman becomes coercive. She insists, with her refusal to share a seat with him, that he see himself through her eyes and know his place. The insult not only creates a necessary distance between them — making it clear that he is abhorrent to her — but tells us that she is superior to him and that this gives her the power to hurt. She could traumatise him repeatedly if she wished. At the moment of the insult he no longer has an identity of his own; he exists only as she sees him. She counts for more than he does and, because he is inferior, she can enjoy humiliating him. And we know, as she petrifies him, that she takes pleasure in it.
To Sir, With Love bristles with such humiliations and the attempts of the new teacher, Ricky Braithwaite, to live with them. He has to. He loves the idea of Britain, though Britain doesn’t love him as much as he thought it might. Braithwaite has served in the RAF and now, after the war, is desperate for a job. He is a qualified electrical engineer, but because of his colour has been unable to find a position. He has been rejected repeatedly and told that whites will not accept a black man in authority over them.
To Sir, With Love is a shocking novel because the desire to degrade and humiliate is so strong in the whites. Braithwaite has to deal with this constantly. As the only major black character in the book, this is the story of a man trying not to lose his mind while keeping his temper — a daily struggle involving him in such an awful, limiting self-restraint that it is difficult to know whether he is a saint or masochist. He has, unfortunately, to be good all the time for fear of descending into the clichés with which the whites surround him.
The desire to degrade and humiliate is not simply an addictive sadistic amusement, although there is a great deal of that in this book. It is also the desire to sustain power: the power of whiteness, of whiteness as the norm, the core, the invisible standard of what a person should be in order to become entirely acceptable. This notion of whiteness begins to decline in the early post-war period, as the world starts to come to Britain, altering it forever. But in London, a city devastated by war, the pleasures of privilege and empire were never going to be easy to give up. Hence the desire to defend an already dead idea. The insult, therefore, is unambiguously and structurally supremacist. Blacks, Asians and others will always be secondary in derivation, with no identity of their own. They are like us, but never enough like us. They are separate; they are not authentic, but failures or ‘mimic men’, bad copies of the original. Their position is always impossible, which is how the whites like it.
Of course, as Ricky Braithwaite points out when teased and goaded to exasperation, there is nothing natural about this notion of whiteness as the supreme standard. It is as arbitrary and socially conditioned as every other moral ideal. The children begin to understand this because to a certain extent Braithwaite — under the descriptions of others — resembles the pupils he is trying to instruct. The immigrant, like the teenager, is gradually losing his home, his past, his safety and stability. Like them, he has been placed outside. He wants to be assimilated, to find a position where he can live a fruitful life, but the whites will not have it, preferring the fantasy of the black or alien intruder. What sustains racial insults might be the wish for unstained whiteness, for purity and a healthy world in which the intrusions of others’ gratification don’t exist. But there is another sense in which the racist never wants the pleasures of persecution to end.
If blacks are considered, in this branding, to be savages — uncontrolled, greedy, noisy, over-sexualised, dependent and so on — there is a similarity here with the children Braithwaite is teaching. One of Braithwaite’s colleagues, Weston, considers his job as ‘survival’ and the children as barely human. But if a place has been assigned to them, there is always the danger they will escape their fate. Someone, somewhere — women, children, deviants, blacks, colonial subjects — could be getting too excited and will have to be suppressed. As Orwell recognised, as a colonial administrator in Burma, for the ruler the key thing is the maintenance of order and ‘the long struggle not to be laughed at’.
However, Alex Florian, the novel’s headmaster, likes children and thinks of them as individuals rather than as a mob or horde. He knows how they and their parents suffered in the war and the deprivation they are currently living with. Braithwaite based Florian on Alex Bloom, the headmaster who ran the St George-in-the-East secondary modern school on Cable Street where E. R. Braithwaite himself taught. Bloom wanted to attempt a different way of interacting with children. Influenced by the work of Freud and his followers such as Melanie Klein and the psychoanalyst of children D. W. Winnicott, Bloom wanted to escape the Dickensian model of discipline, obedience and punishment to which English working-class children had long been subjected. Children were humiliated for their own good; nothing was feared more than the collapse of authority, which had to be sustained at all costs. But in the new thinking, new questions arose: what would happen if children didn’t represent the uncertainties of the adults? If they were not seen as having monstrous and uncontrollable appetites which had to be subjugated?