Cromwell House was not as grand as it sounds. The municipal block teetered on the edge of the city bypass, which cut through the centre of Croydon. On the day we moved in, the lift to the odd numbered floors was broken, so we had to carry all our furniture down a floor. My dad resented the daily decision of whether to walk one floor up or one floor down, but I enjoyed the game of running up all three flights, arriving breathless, always first.
Square windows in uniform rows looked out onto the concrete walkway, a pattern repeated across the block. I’d imagined that the insides were the same: replicated flats of beige plastic tiles and white walls. It was a few weeks after moving in that I saw inside another one.
I’d already been invited to play down by the bin stores. The others didn’t notice that my elongated Humberside vowels marked me as a newcomer. Freed from parents who worked too hard, we would gather and run and laugh and roll down the small patch of grass. Once the call for dinner came, echoing out from balconies, we would run inside. Those left behind in the dimming light kicked stones until it got too dark. Only then would they slink back to their flats, which were filled with resentment at Thatcher, or foreigners, depending on their view.
‘Londoners are warm and friendly. We should say hello to our neighbours. You interpret for me,’ Dad told me over a bowl of Rice Krispies. Determined that we should start the introductions immediately, he strode out of the kitchen. Still in my nightie, I went with him onto the outside inside street in the sky.
He knocked too loudly on doors and introduced himself. People’s reactions to a tall deaf man and a small child speaking his words ranged from suspicion to terror. I stole glances past them into their homes. The old man, whose eyes remained fixed on me, had a thick carpeted hallway, embossed wallpaper and pictures in golden frames. The man with the dog-chewed lino nodded a hello at Dad, eventually. A grim-faced woman peered out from behind her door chain, wafts of talc and Imperial Leather soap. I wanted to go. She was not a friendly Londoner but Dad didn’t like being wrong.
It was different with the people next door. When dad banged on their door, he was greeted by a young man. I started to interpret dad’s signs, but the man smiled at me and said, ‘Don’t worry. I can try to understand him.’ Relieved, I ran off to find the others playing bin cricket.
Later, Dad told me that our neighbours were from Uganda and had been kicked out by someone called Idi who was mean.
‘Why?’
‘Because they’re Indian and Idi A Mean only wanted to keep black people in the country.’ He’d used the sign for ‘terrible’ with the lip pattern of ‘Idi Amin’. I assumed he was like Ivan the Terrible, and wondered how many other evil people had names beginning with I.
‘Why doesn’t Idi a Mean like Indian people?’
Dad turned away and changed the subject. It was rare that he didn’t know the answer to a question.
I took out my atlas. Uganda: capital – Kampala, population - 11 million. I traced the border with my finger, followed the contours of mountains and tracked rivers running into lakes, imagining huge green trees, and friendly lions, and talking parrots. Maybe they’d get to go home someday.
Dad had told me that when he had left Nigeria, he’d come back to Britain by boat. Uganda was landlocked, so how had the neighbours got here? I studied the map. Had they travelled by land through Sudan and Egypt? Had they seen the pyramids and battled with mummies? Had they found their way to the sea?
The neighbour and my dad would hang out by our kitchen window, smoking. Late into the night, under the lights of the walkway, they would sign and speak and communicate any way they could. Leaning on the railings and swapping stories of Africa, about the lands of their birth which no longer wanted them, whilst living in a country where they didn’t belong.
He was dad’s friend, but his parents were mine. It started after school one day, my head had been full of stories of legendary conkers that had withstood season after season. I rummaged around the kitchen cupboards wondering if vinegar would toughen conker skin - conker success might stop my classmates imitating my northern accent. My experimentation was interrupted by a tapping on the window. It was the old couple from next door, peering in through the window, smiling and gesturing for me to follow them.
I wondered if I should. They are strangers. We’d been warned about strangers in films at school but they tended to be white men in tan overcoats driving cars. These were the parents of Dad’s friend, the people who always smiled and waved hello, which was good enough for me. I stepped out onto the walkway.
At first, I wasn’t sure what they wanted. She pointed at me, then at the window, which was slightly ajar, then at the door, and made praying signs with her hands. He smiled and copied the gestures talking to me in a language I didn’t understand.
‘You want me to crawl through the window and open the door?’ I said slowly, gesturing, nodding, and matching their smiles.
I felt like an explorer of new lands as I squeezed through the window, straddled the sink and jumped down in the middle of their kitchen. The layout of the flat was exactly like ours, but everything else was different. They had a tapestry of rugs across the floor, and it smelled of spices and warmth.
I undid the latch to let them in. They smiled, she hugged me, and ushered me back through to the kitchen, and sat me down on a wooden chair. After filling the small table with hot drinks and treats, she sat with her arms cuddled across her chest, her short legs dangling, encouraging me to eat. Her sari was beautiful and edged with gold. I wanted to touch it but didn’t know how to ask, so I chewed on a sweet biscuit instead.
I’d look forward to the knock, and the ritual of climbing through the kitchen window. The hot sweet drinks, and platter of treats and the rhythm of stories. I taught them signs and tried to learn words from their language.
He was a storyteller. Rolling his r’s, starting slow and low, the speed gradually increasing, his face becoming more animated, the gestures becoming wider. The story would be punctuated by chuckles, and great guffaws. His eyes twinkled. His wife murmured and giggled and laughed with him. I imagined they were stories of friendly lions or their perilous escape from Uganda. I imagined them running through the trees and on boats crossing treacherous seas, getting away from Idi a Mean.
Kicking up fallen leaves gave way to sliding down the snow-covered slope in binbags. Once the snow melted, we made daisy chains and played cricket. My vowels became more melodic South London, and just like the others, I dropped my h’s and my t’s.
I no longer crawled through the kitchen window. I would be greeted by the crinkly smile of the storyteller as I returned home from school, and their door would be opened for me. One day, I helped to make dinner, his wife showing me how to fry off spices and sweat onions. I took some home for Dad and me. We sat at the kitchen table, our mouths exploding. Our pale English palates were not used to the spices and flavours. Drinking milk and sweating and laughing, we licked our plates clean. We would try to recreate the recipe in the years to come.
The start of the summer break brought days of heat broken by stretches of rain. As lightning ran down the copper conductor, I was in the neighbours’ kitchen enjoying hot sweet milk, listening to stories. My dad’s friend poked his head round the door.
‘Ah. There you are. Your dad says you need to go home now and get ready.’
He turned to his mum and said something in their language, which made his parents glance out of the window and laugh. His mum jumped down from her chair and shuffled across the kitchen. Returning a few moments later, she pressed clingfilmed parcels of sweets into my hands. I said thank you in their language. She laughed and rubbed my cheeks.
‘She says they are for your journey,’ my dad’s friend said.
‘I think I understood,’ I said, smiling.
I was away when it happened. I arrived home muddy and tired from a fortnight camping in the English summer rain with my cousins. After a scrub in the bath, and settled in clean pyjamas, Dad sat me down in the living room. That’s when he told me.
It was the shoes. One morning he’d found rows and rows of shoes, all neatly placed outside the flat next door. Different colours, different sizes, all placed neatly in pairs. My dad waited for his friend on the walkway to find out what was going on. He knocked on the door of their talc-smelling neighbour who shook her head, muttered something and closed the door.
He’d read it in the evening paper. His friend had been found dead at the bottom of the stairs in the multi-storey car park with his head bashed in.
We never spoke about it again. A few weeks later, the removal van came to take us away, to Scotland this time.
I had waited for a knock on the window, I had peered into their lifeless kitchen, but I only saw the storyteller and his wife once more. They were walking away from the flat. He was carrying a suitcase. She had her hand on his back. They walked slowly. His shoulders were stooped and his head hung low. Part of me wanted to run up to them, to see his face, see the lines around his cheeks and those twinkly eyes, but I just stood there. I waved. A futile gesture which they would never see.