I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey by Stephen K Amos

and stopped outside a school. As Dad ushered the three of us out of the van and into the school reception, a crowd of uniformed school kids appeared and curiously stared at us. Stella was the first to figure out what was going on and burst into tears. Dad started to sign a lot of papers and we realized that we were not going to be heading back to England any time soon. All the hard work that she’d put into getting good grades in her 11-plus, and even in getting me to pass the exam, seemed to have been totally in vain. Even the secondary comprehensive was preferable to this. However, it looked like she would at least get her wish of having us go to the same school when term started.

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    M ANY THOUGHTS WERE GOING around inside my head. Nigeria. Naija. Niajaland. Yoruba. Hausa. Igbo. Jai! Shut up you dirty stinking mout’ that you’ve never washed since the day you were born in the gutter! Don’t tell me that I have to live here!
    Stella, Albert and I sat together that night and we couldn’t believe that Mum and Dad had taken us to live here without even telling us. Why did we get no warning? If I had known I may have tried to run away again. I had already tried it once in London. Well, I walked. The phrase ‘run away’ implies that there was someone running behind me shouting, ‘Come back, come back! I love you!’ which there wasn’t. I went back home after it got dark and nobody had even noticed that I had left. You don’t know what its like growing up with seven people sitting around the dinner table and your mum asks your brother while pointing to you, ‘Hey, who’s your friend?’ In a big family your parents can neglect you all and call it economy of scale.
    So we’d gone from Londoners to Lagosians overnight. We didn’t have any time to get adjusted to anything because a week after Dad enrolled us in school we had to start. The Nigerian school year runs from January to December, so we were going straight into the second term. Stella and I would be in the same secondary entry-level class and Albert was going into the more senior class three years ahead of us. So to add insult to injury, we were going to miss out on our summer holidays altogether. We were given bolts of cloth in the school colours and we had to pay someone to make our uniforms. It was like a condemned man being made to pay for his own bullet. That first day was a horrible experience, and the heat on the mile-long walk to school produced more sweat than I’d ever known.
    A kid going into the school class halfway through the year is already social suicide. But we weren’t just new; we were foreign to the other kids and to the teachers too. My Nigerian roots are important to me, but simply having black skin does not qualify you for fitting perfectly in to a foreign culture with its fair share of bullies. They taught in English but they mainly spoke Pidgin English and Yoruba in break and at lunch and we could barely understand them. With our English accents we did not fit in any better here than we had back home in South London.
    By the time we had been in Orile Iganmu for a month our home was quite comfortable. We had electricity when NEPA hadn’t taken the light, and we had clean water from the well, a TV and radio, a cooker and beds. But the school was a complete eye-opener, with no windows and just a door-sized hole where a door should have been as an entrance. There was no power and so no air conditioning or fans and because the tropical heat of the day ran from six thirty in the morning until two in the afternoon. We had to leave every day at first light, which is the only option as there is barely any street lighting in Lagos but there are a lot of very deep potholes. And the food from the school kitchen was so bad that we had to go out and buy suya from the local suya spot for lunch every day.
    We thought that with our English education we would at least be at the top of the