‘You could tell them yourself, if you want,’ I said. I opened the door wide for him.

‘No, no, that won’t be necessary,’ he told me. ‘I’ll leave that to you. But I just thought it might help relations around here if all our coloured brethren understood how to behave.’

Ten

Hortense

At least the fool man, Gilbert, had had the decency to place himself on to the armchair to sleep for the night. In this rundown room there was no private corner for me to change into my nightclothes. ‘Use the bathroom,’ the man said. But I had no wish to climb that mountain of stairs in my stocking feet with only a nightdress to keep out the cold and eyes that might pry. ‘Tell you what, I will turn my back so you can undress,’ he said. ‘I will not peek.’ But twice I caught his greedy eye perusing me. This man could not be trusted and I told him so. ‘Cha,’ he said. He took up a scarf to place it over his eyes. And all the while he is sucking on his teeth so fierce I feared he might swallow them. ‘Happy now?’ he asked me.

My toe immediately fell into the hole in the sheet as I got into the bed. But it was not the fault of my foot that the sheet was so flimsy it ripped in two as easy as paper. ‘Cha, that is the only good sheet I have.’ I shielded my ears from the cussing that flew from the man’s mouth as he began to undress.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘but would you be so kind as to please turn off the light?’

‘Wait,’ he told me, ‘I just get undress.’

Any man of breeding would have realised that that was why a woman such as I might require the light to be off. I did not wish him to stand before me in his nakedness as puffed as a peacock, as he did that night in Jamaica. ‘That is why I should like the light extinguished,’ I had to inform the fool.

And he laughed. ‘So you can’t trust yourself to keep your eye away from me?’ But I paid him no mind. Even with no light in the room, the street-lamp glowed luminous through the window. Any poor Jamaican would have been proud to have so much electric light reach their night-time eyes. I could feel the man standing by the bed when he had finished changing. Jiggling up himself and skipping with the cold. I decided then that if one of his fingers so much as brushed the cover on the bed I would scream so loud that ears back home in HalfwayTree would hear me. It was hard to tell who groaned more – the silly man as he wrestled blankets around him or the tumbledown armchair as he restlessly fidgeted for comfort.

At first I thought the scratching was Gilbert – he was rough enough for such bad behaviour. But then I heard a pitter-patter running above my head across the ceiling. ‘You hear that?’ I asked him.

The wretched man was asleep. He wake up saying, ‘What, what?’

‘Can you hear that scratching?’

It was matter-of-factness that said, ‘It’s just the rats.’

‘Rats!’

‘Well, mice . . .’

‘You bring me to a house with rats?’

‘No, they are mice. And every house in London has mice. They bombed out too, you know.’

But this scratching was coming so loud. ‘You sure it is mice?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ the man told me, ‘you see mice in England like to wear boots.’

I could feel him smiling to himself at this silly joke. ‘You must get rid of them.’

‘Okay,’ he said.

‘Now, Gilbert.’

‘How you expect me get rid of rats now?’

‘You say it was mice.’

‘Mice, rats, it’s still the middle of the night. What you wan’ me do?’

‘You must tell the landlady.’

‘Cha, you wan’ me go wake her to tell her something she already know. Come, Hortense, please, go to sleep, it is only noise they are making.’

I tried to sleep but the mice had decided to push a piano across the floor of the room above. I could see them in my mind’s eye as clear as if I was watching their furry figures labouring in their boots.

‘Gilbert?’ I said quietly.

‘Oh, cha,’ he yelled. He took up his shoe and threw it at the ceiling. I heard the vermin scatter just before the shoe landed, ‘Ouch’, on top of Gilbert. Buffoon!

‘What goes up must come down,’ I told him.

‘Oh, in the name of God, please, go to sleep, Hortense,’ he begged. ‘I promise it will all be different in the morning.’

Before

Eleven

Gilbert

My mirror spoke to me. It said: ‘Man, women gonna fall at your feet.’ In my uniform of blue – from the left, from the right, from behind – I looked like a god. And this uniform did not even fit me so well. But what is a little bagging on the waist and tightness under the arm when you are a gallant member of the British Royal Air Force? Put several thousand Jamaican men in uniform, coop them up while, Grand Old Duke of York style, you march them up to the top of the hill and then back down again, and they will think of nothing but women. When they are up they will imagine them and when they are down they will dream of them. But not this group I travelled with to America. Not Hubert, not Fulton, not Lenval, not James, not even me. Because every last one of us was too preoccupied with food. The only flesh we conjured was the sort you chewed and swallowed.

This was war. There was hardship I was prepared for – bullet, bomb and casual death – but not for the torture of missing cow-foot stew, not for the persecution of living without curried shrimp or pepper-pot soup. I was not ready, I was not trained to eat food that was prepared in a pan of boiling water, the sole purpose of which was to rid it of taste and texture. How the English built empires when their armies marched on nothing but mush should be one of the wonders of the world. I thought it would be combat that would make me regret having volunteered, not boiled-up potatoes, boiled-up vegetables – grey and limp on the plate like they had been eaten once before. Why the English come to cook everything by this method? Lucky they kept that boiling business as their national secret and did not insist that the people of their colonies stop frying and spicing up their food.

I was brought up in a family with ten children. At that dining-table at home one lax moment and half my dinner could be gone to my neighbour. I learned to eat quickly while defending my plate with a protective arm. But with this English food I sat back, chewed slowly and willed my compatriots to thieve. I had not yet seen a war zone but if the enemy had been frying up some fish and dumpling, who knows which way I would point my gun?

Now, I am telling you this so you might better understand what a lustless and ravenous Jamaican experienced when he arrived, guest of the American government, at the military camp in Virginia. The silver tray had compartments so the food did not get messed up. Into each compartment was placed bacon, eggs (two proper eggs!), sausages, fried tomato, fried potatoes, toast, a banana and an orange. The cereal with milk was in a little bowl to itself. My arm was round that plate of food before I had even sat down. Only when I was assured that the rumour of second, third or fourth helpings was not the reverie of a deranged mind did I relax. I swear many tears were wept over that breakfast. Paradise, we all decided, America is Paradise. A bath with six inches of water that rivalled the Caribbean sea in my affection and more meals of equal, no, greater satisfaction than the first, had the word Paradise popping from our mouths like the cork from champagne.

‘Okay, boys, now listen up here,’ was how he began, this officer from the US military. Perched informal on the edge of a desk he was relaxed, the only white man in this room full of volunteer servicemen from the Caribbean.

‘Pay attention, you lot,’ our British NCO, Corporal Baxter, had warned us while we waited for this American officer. ‘He’s got something he has to say and you’re guests here, so you listen to him politely. All right.’

This American officer’s head was angular – a square jaw is not unusual especially on an officer, but a square skull! Lenval whispered, ‘Him mummy still cross eye from giving birth,’ and my smile made this officer pin two penetrating blue eyes on me and me alone.