In To Sir, With Love the teacher Ricky Braithwaite sees that he has to change the children’s attitude to him as a black man before he can interact with them positively, before anything good can take place. Fear, submission and hate make only chaos. It’s significant that Ricky Braithwaite, despite Greenslade being a progressive school, doesn’t introduce more freedom into the situation in which he finds himself. He wants more rules, insisting on politeness and respect, knowing that we are profoundly dependent on the way others speak to us. He asks the children to read, explaining that they are made and constrained by language. This is why jokes and insults matter; no abuse is a trivial ‘one-off’. The insult is violent, political and authoritarian, part of a collective view which can be resisted. Poetry, for him, provides better words for things.
To Sir, With Love is partly a record of where we were in Britain at the beginning of the 60s. From this powerful testimony we can see what has changed and how we’ve remained the same. The language used about strangers and immigrants in the novel is used by fascists and fundamentalists today. Unsurprisingly, we are still people who love to hate, and are much bothered by what we imagine to be others’ pleasure. Their happiness is always more than ours; however much joy we might have, we have been cheated, deprived and exploited. We are missing out on something which the other, however poor they are, clearly enjoys. And what could be more intolerable than other people’s ecstasy?
The insult, which exposes this envy, excludes exchange. The woman on the bus and many other characters in the novel fear equality. What might happen if people encountered one another directly, without a barrier of subjection or oppression? But it is precisely because equality is unpredictable that it is also difficult and more dangerous than the dreary repetition of degradation. We will never not be ambivalent about others. We do know that worthwhile relationships can happen, and that equality makes difference possible.
Ricky Braithwaite knows he didn’t make the difficult world in which he has arrived, but he never gives up resisting its deadness in his own way. He knows he can bring it to life through language. Appearance isn’t destiny if we change the way we speak. And we can find ourselves in books, as I did with this one.
We Are the Wide-Eyed Piccaninnies
I was fourteen in 1968 and one of the horrors of my teenage years was Enoch Powell. For a mixed-race kid, this stiff ex-colonial zealot with his obscene, Grand Guignol talk of whips, blood, excreta, urination and wide-eyed piccaninnies was a monstrous, scary bogeyman. I remember his name being whispered by my uncles for fear I would overhear.
I grew up near Biggin Hill airfield in Kent, in the shadow of the Second World War. We walked past bomb sites every day; my grandmother had been a ‘fire watcher’ and talked about the terror of the nightly Luftwaffe raids. With his stern prophet’s nostalgia, bulging eyes and military moustache, Powell reminded us of Hitler, and the pathology of his increasing number of followers soon became as disquieting as his pronouncements. At school, Powell’s name soon become one terrifying word — Enoch. As well as being an insult, it began to be used with elation. ‘Enoch will deal with you lot,’ and, ‘Enoch will soon be knocking on your door, pal.’ ‘Knock, knock, it’s Enoch,’ people would say as they passed. Neighbours in the London suburbs began to state with some defiance, ‘Our family is with Enoch.’ More skinheads appeared.
It was said, after Powell mooted the idea of a Ministry of Repatriation, that we ‘offspring’, as he called the children of immigrants, would be sent away. ‘A policy of assisting repatriation by payment of fares and grants is part of the official policy of the Conservative Party,’ he stated in 1968. Sometimes, idly, I wondered how I might like it in India or Pakistan, where I’d never been, and whether I’d be welcomed. But others said that if we were born here, as I was, it would be only our parents who would be sent back. We would, then, have to fend for ourselves, and I imagined a parentless pack of us unwanted mongrels, hunting for food in the nearby woods.
Repatriation, Powell said, ‘would help to achieve with minimum friction what must surely be the object of everyone — to prevent, so far as that is still possible, a major racial problem in the Britain of ad 2000’. It was clear: if Britain had lost an empire and not yet recovered from the war, our added presence would only cause more strife — homelessness, joblessness, prostitution and drug addiction. Soon the indigenous whites would be a ‘persecuted minority’ or ‘strangers’ in their own country. It would be our turn, presumably, to do the persecuting.
Powell, this ghost of the empire, was not just a run-of-the-mill racist. His influence was not negligible; he moved British politics to the right and set the agenda we address today. Politicians attack minorities when they want to impress the public with their toughness as ‘truth-tellers’. And Powell’s influence extended far. In 1976 — the year of the Clash’s ‘White Riot’ — and eight years after Powell’s major speeches, one of my heroes, the great Eric Clapton, ordered an audience to vote for Powell to prevent Britain becoming a ‘black colony’. Clapton said that ‘Britain should get the wogs out, get the coons out,’ before repeatedly shouting the National Front slogan ‘Keep Britain White’.
A middle-class, only child from Birmingham, socially inept and repressed, Powell had taken refuge in books and ‘scholarship’ for most of his life. He was happiest during the war, where he spent three years in military intelligence in India. It was ‘intoxicating’. Like a lot of Brits, he loved the empire and colonial India, where he could escape his parents and the constraints of Britain, and spend time with other men. Many Indians were intimidated by and subservient to British soldiers, as my family attested. Like most colonialists, Powell was a bigger, more powerful man in India than he’d have been in England. No wonder he was patriotic and believed that giving up the empire would be a disaster. ‘I had always been an imperialist and a Tory,’ he said.
On his return in 1945, Powell went into politics. Like the grandees he aspired to be, he took up church-going and fox-hunting. Before his speeches on race, he was an obedient servant of the state, uninteresting, undistinguished and barely known as a politician. But early on, during the post-war consensus, he was, in fact, a proto-Thatcherite: an individualist and anti-union supporter of the free market and lower taxes with a utopian vision of unregulated capitalism in which, miraculously, everything people required would be provided by the simple need for profit. Soon, as Thatcher said, there would be no alternative.
But, in 1968, that great year of newness, experimentation and hope, when people were thinking in new ways about oppression, relationships and equality, there was a terrible return. This odd Edwardian figure popped up into public life, and decided to become a demagogue. Richard Crossman, in his diary of 1968, wrote worriedly of Powell’s celebrity appeal to ‘mass opinion, right over our parliament and his party leadership’.