The Son of a difficult father: Colin Grant at TEDxBrighton

Colin Grant is an author, historian and BBC radio producer; he has also worked as a script editor and produced several radio drama-documentaries. His talk discusses how he attempted to bridge the void between him and his father, through writing a memoir, failed; but taught him more about the vast experiential and cultural gaps between immigrants and their native children.

This is a photograph

of a man whom for many years

I plotted to kill.

This is my father,

Clinton George "Bageye" Grant.

He's called Bageye because he has

permanent bags under his eyes.

As a 10-year-old, along with my siblings,

I dreamt of scraping off the poison

from fly-killer paper into his coffee,

grounded down glass and sprinkling it

over his breakfast,

loosening the carpet on the stairs

so he would trip and break his neck.

But come the day, he would always

skip that loose step,

he would always bow out of the house

without so much as a swig of coffee

or a bite to eat.

And so for many years,

I feared that my father would die

before I had a chance to kill him.

(Laughter)

Up until our mother asked him to leave

and not come back,

Bageye had been a terrifying ogre.

He teetered permanently
on the verge of rage,

rather like me, as you see.

He worked nights
at Vauxhall Motors in Luton

and demanded total silence
throughout the house,

so that when we came home from school

at 3:30 in the afternoon, we would huddle

beside the TV,
and rather like safe-crackers,

we would twiddle
with the volume control knob

on the TV so it was almost inaudible.

And at times, when we were like this,

so much "Shhh," so much "Shhh"

going on in the house

that I imagined us to be like

the German crew of a U-boat

creeping along the edge of the ocean

whilst up above, on the surface,

HMS Bageye patrolled

ready to drop death charges

at the first sound of any disturbance.

So that lesson was the lesson that

"Do not draw attention to yourself

either in the home
or outside of the home."

Maybe it's a migrant lesson.

We were to be below the radar,

so there was no communication, really,

between Bageye and us and us and Bageye,

and the sound
that we most looked forward to,

you know when you're a child and you want

your father to come home
and it's all going to be happy

and you're waiting for that sound
of the door opening.

Well the sound that we looked forward to

was the click of the door closing,

which meant he'd gone
and would not come back.

So for three decades,

I never laid eyes on my father,
nor he on me.

We never spoke to each other
for three decades,

and then a couple of years ago, I decided

to turn the spotlight on him.

"You are being watched.

Actually, you are.

You are being watched."

That was his mantra to us, his children.

Time and time again
he would say this to us.

And this was the 1970s, it was Luton,

where he worked at Vauxhall Motors,

and he was a Jamaican.

And what he meant was,

you as a child of a Jamaican immigrant

are being watched

to see which way you turn, to see whether

you conform to the host nation's
stereotype of you,

of being feckless, work-shy,

destined for a life of crime.

You are being watched,

so confound their expectations of you.

To that end, Bageye and his friends,

mostly Jamaican,

exhibited a kind of Jamaican bella figura:

Turn your best side to the world,

show your best face to the world.

If you have seen some of the images

of the Caribbean people arriving

in the '40s and '50s,

you might have noticed
that a lot of the men

wear trilbies.

Now, there was no tradition
of wearing trilbies in Jamaica.

They invented that tradition
for their arrival here.

They wanted to project themselves in a way

that they wanted to be perceived,

so that the way they looked

and the names that they gave themselves

defined them.

So Bageye is bald and has baggy eyes.

Tidy Boots is very fussy
about his footwear.

Anxious is always anxious.

Clock has one arm longer than the other.

(Laughter)

And my all-time favorite was
the guy they called Summerwear.

When Summerwear came to this country

from Jamaica
in the early '60s, he insisted

on wearing light summer suits,

no matter the weather,

and in the course
of researching their lives,

I asked my mom,
"Whatever became of Summerwear?"

And she said, "He caught a cold and died."
(Laughter)

But men like Summerwear

taught us the importance of style.

Maybe they exaggerated their style

because they thought
that they were not considered

to be quite civilized,

and they transferred
that generational attitude

or anxiety onto us, the next generation,

so much so that when I was growing up,

if ever on the television news or radio

a report came up about a black person

committing some crime —

a mugging, a murder, a burglary —

we winced along with our parents,

because they were letting the side down.

You did not just represent yourself.

You represented the group,

and it was a terrifying thing
to come to terms with,

in a way, that maybe you were going

to be perceived in the same light.

So that was what needed to be challenged.

Our father and many of his colleagues

exhibited a kind of transmission
but not receiving.

They were built to transmit
but not receive.

We were to keep quiet.

When our father did speak to us,

it was from the pulpit of his mind.

They clung to certainty in the belief

that doubt would undermine them.

But when I am working in my house

and writing, after a day's writing,
I rush downstairs

and I'm very excited to talk
about Marcus Garvey or Bob Marley

and words are tripping out
of my mouth like butterflies

and I'm so excited
that my children stop me,

and they say, "Dad, nobody cares."

(Laughter)

But they do care, actually.

They cross over.

Somehow they find their way to you.

They shape their lives
according to the narrative of your life,

as I did with my father
and my mother, perhaps,

and maybe Bageye did with his father.

And that was clearer to me

in the course of looking at his life

and understanding, as they say,

the Native Americans say,

"Do not criticize the man
until you can walk

in his moccasins."

But in conjuring his life, it was okay

and very straightforward to portray

a Caribbean life in England in the 1970s

with bowls of plastic fruit,

polystyrene ceiling tiles,

settees permanently sheathed

in their transparent covers
that they were delivered in.

But what's more difficult to navigate

is the emotional landscape

between the generations,

and the old adage
that with age comes wisdom

is not true.

With age comes
the veneer of respectability

and a veneer of uncomfortable truths.

But what was true was that my parents,

my mother, and my father
went along with it,

did not trust the state to educate me.

So listen to how I sound.

They determined that they would
send me to a private school,

but my father worked at Vauxhall Motors.

It's quite difficult to fund
a private school education

and feed his army of children.

I remember going on to the school

for the entrance exam, and my father said

to the priest — it was a Catholic school —

he wanted a better
"heducation" for the boy,

but also, he, my father,

never even managed to pass worms,

never mind entrance exams.

But in order to fund my education,

he was going to have to do
some dodgy stuff,

so my father would fund my education

by trading in illicit goods
from the back of his car,

and that was made even more tricky because

my father, that's not his car by the way.

My father aspired to have a car like that,

but my father had a beaten-up Mini,

and he never, being a Jamaican
coming to this country,

he never had a driving license,

he never had any insurance
or road tax or MOT.

He thought, "I know how to drive;

why do I need the state's validation?"

But it became a little tricky
when we were stopped by the police,

and we were stopped a lot by the police,

and I was impressed by the way

that my father dealt with the police.

He would promote
the policeman immediately,

so that P.C. Bloggs became
Detective Inspector Bloggs

in the course of the conversation

and wave us on merrily.

So my father was exhibiting
what we in Jamaica

called "playing fool to catch wise."

But it lent also an idea

that actually he was being diminished

or belittled by the policeman —

as a 10-year-old boy, I saw that —

but also there was an ambivalence
towards authority.

So on the one hand, there was

a mocking of authority,

but on the other hand,
there was a deference

towards authority,

and these Caribbean people

had an overbearing obedience
towards authority,

which is very striking,
very strange in a way,

because migrants
are very courageous people.

They leave their homes.
My father and my mother

left Jamaica and they traveled
4,000 miles,

and yet they were infantilized by travel.

They were timid,

and somewhere along the line,

the natural order was reversed.

The children became
the parents to the parent.

The Caribbean people came
to this country with a five-year plan:

they would work, some money,
and then go back,

but the five years became 10,
the 10 became 15,

and before you know it,
you're changing the wallpaper,

and at that point,
you know you're here to stay.

Although there's still
the kind of temporariness

that our parents felt about being here,

but we children knew that the game was up.

I think there was a feeling that

they would not be able
to continue with the ideals

of the life that they expected.

The reality was very much different.

And also, that was true of the reality

of trying to educate me.

Having started the process,
my father did not continue.

It was left to my mother to educate me,

and as George Lamming would say,

it was my mother who fathered me.

Even in his absence,
that old mantra remained:

You are being watched.

But such ardent watchfulness
can lead to anxiety,

so much so that years later,
when I was investigating

why so many young black men

were diagnosed with schizophrenia,

six times more than they ought to be,

I was not surprised
to hear the psychiatrist say,

"Black people are schooled in paranoia."

And I wonder
what Bageye would make of that.

Now I also had a 10-year-old son,

and turned my attention to Bageye

and I went in search of him.

He was back in Luton, he was now 82,

and I hadn't seen him for 30-odd years,

and when he opened the door,

I saw this tiny little man with lambent,
smiling eyes,

and he was smiling,
and I'd never seen him smile.

I was very disconcerted by that.

But we sat down,
and he had a Caribbean friend with him,

talking some old time talk,

and my father would look at me,

and he looked at me as if I would

miraculously disappear as I had arisen.

And he turned to his friend, and he said,

"This boy and me have a deep,
deep connection,

deep, deep connection."

But I never felt that connection.

If there was a pulse, it was very weak

or hardly at all.

And I almost felt
in the course of that reunion

that I was auditioning
to be my father's son.

When the book came out,

it had fair reviews
in the national papers,

but the paper of choice
in Luton is not The Guardian,

it's the Luton News,

and the Luton News
ran the headline about the book,

"The Book That May Heal
a 32-Year-Old Rift."

And I understood that could also represent

the rift between
one generation and the next,

between people like me
and my father's generation,

but there's no tradition in Caribbean life

of memoirs or biographies.

It was a tradition that you didn't chat
about your business in public.

But I welcomed that title,
and I thought actually, yes,

there is a possibility that this

will open up conversations
that we'd never had before.

This will close the generation gap,
perhaps.

This could be an instrument of repair.

And I even began to feel that this book

may be perceived by my father

as an act of filial devotion.

Poor, deluded fool.

Bageye was stung
by what he perceived to be

the public airing of his shortcomings.

He was stung by my betrayal,

and he went to the newspapers the next day

and demanded a right of reply,

and he got it with the headline

"Bageye Bites Back."

And it was a coruscating account
of my betrayal.

I was no son of his.

He recognized in his mind that his colors

had been dragged through the mud,
and he couldn't allow that.

He had to restore his dignity,
and he did so,

and initially,
although I was disappointed,

I grew to admire that stance.

There was still fire
bubbling through his veins,

even though he was 82 years old.

And if it meant that we would now return

to 30 years of silence,

my father would say,
"If it's so, then it's so."

Jamaicans will tell you
that there's no such thing as facts,

there are only versions.

We all tell ourselves
the versions of the story

that we can best live with.

Each generation builds up an edifice

which they are reluctant
or sometimes unable

to disassemble,

but in the writing,
my version of the story

began to change,

and it was detached from me.

I lost my hatred of my father.

I did no longer want him to die
or to murder him,

and I felt free,

much freer than I'd ever felt before.

And I wonder whether that freedness

could be transferred to him.

In that initial reunion,

I was struck by an idea that I had

very few photographs of myself

as a young child.

This is a photograph of me,

nine months old.

In the original photograph,

I'm being held up by my father, Bageye,

but when my parents separated, my mother

excised him from all aspects of our lives.

She took a pair of scissors
and cut him out of every photograph,

and for years, I told myself
the truth of this photograph

was that you are alone,

you are unsupported.

But there's another way
of looking at this photograph.

This is a photograph
that has the potential

for a reunion,

a potential to be reunited with my father,

and in my yearning
to be held up by my father,

I held him up to the light.

In that first reunion,

it was very awkward and tense moments,

and to lessen the tension,

we decided to go for a walk.

And as we walked, I was struck

that I had reverted to being the child

even though I was now
towering above my father.

I was almost a foot taller than my father.

He was still the big man,

and I tried to match his step.

And I realized that he was walking

as if he was still under observation,

but I admired his walk.

He walked like a man

on the losing side of the F.A. Cup Final

mounting the steps
to collect his condolence medal.

There was dignity in defeat.

Thank you.

(Applause)