Apparently our hosts had tried every solution to their nigger problem. ‘Only one that works in this country, and certainly in the military, is segregation.’ This was apparently how everyone liked it – black man as well as white. They had a name for it – no, not master-race theory: Jim Crow!

I soon realised we were lucky the American military authorities did not let us off the camp in Virginia. We West Indians, thinking ourselves as good as any man, would have wandered unaware, greeting white people who would have swung us from the nearest tree for merely passing the time of day with them. And my brother Lester? How would they know he was a British coloured man with no uniform to distinguish him? By a badge perhaps worn on his coat? But in what shape? The word Paradise had long since stopped popping from my lips. We might have been returning to that British boiling business but I was not the only boy who was pleased to be leaving America behind.

Frigates, corvettes, warships, troop carriers, destroyers marshalled all along the horizon in Newfoundland. How many ships? Forty, fifty maybe, stretching out for miles like an illusion from an admiral’s imagination. All assembled with one mission: to convoy across the ocean. What a sight! Hubert was struck dumb a full ten minutes. When finally he spoke, his voice quivering, he said, ‘So beautiful and so deadly.’ It was brief, considering the sheer majesty of the moment, but an intelligent comment none the less.

Once we were under sail, under orders and captive on this ship, Corporal Baxter began with his lectures. This man took satisfaction in telling us ‘colony troops’ everything his twenty-six years as a Londoner had taught him about England. Me, I found it interesting. Did you know that the smog in London can be so thick that it is not possible to recognise your own hand in front of your face? I did not know this. But many of the boys did and yawned wide as crocodiles so Corporal Baxter might realise.

‘Don’t expect your rice and peas or spicy things or grub like you had in America in England,’ he warned us. That I did know and was not pleased to be reminded. ‘You’re off to a war zone.’

I was yawning now.

‘Britain’s been at war for a long time, everyone’s tired out. There’s shortages. You’ll have to get used to ’em. You can kiss the idea of a banana goodbye,’ he informed us, with uncharacteristic mirth. Then suddenly, without warning, we West Indian RAF volunteers destined for England felt something like an explosion. I was not the only one on my feet ready to fight when I caught its blast. Not the only one with fists clenched willing to kill, when the renk and feisty fool-fool ras-clot Corporal Baxter, belittling us once more with his ‘colony troops’, told all us boys, ‘And don’t think you lot are going there to paint the town red. No white women there will consort with the likes of you.’

Twelve

Gilbert

‘Wakey, wakey, wakey – let go your cocks and grab your socks.’ The man who shouted those oh-so-funny words at six o’clock every morning to awaken we West Indian RAF volunteers was called Flight Sergeant Thwaites. The hair at the front of this sergeant’s head was receding. Under the frugal, carefully combed hair that remained, an angry red birthmark blazed on his scalp, which formed the unmistakable shape of a letter B. We all knew, we other ranks, that one day when this sergeant lost all his remaining hair to gravity and the wind, the word ‘bastard’ would be revealed written over the top of his bald head in that blushing stain. It was the devil who scorched that word on to his skull in case there was ever any doubt as to the character of this puff-up, dogheart man.

We were billeted four to a chalet at the training camp in Filey in the county of Yorkshire. Pure imagination was needed to see how in peacetime English families could actually enjoy a holiday at this woebegone place. Hubert, Fulton, James and I huddled round the hot pipes after every day of indispensable regimen – like running through freezing fields with nothing to keep out the biting sea wind but vest, pants and the order to ‘Keep moving, keep moving,’ searing from the mouth of Sergeant Bastard. We blocked up the door of this little holiday home with spare clothes, sealed up the gaps in the windows with old newspaper. Every evening we sat close as nesting birds drinking in the heat that wafted from the pipes. Once James took off his scarf but he was the only one. Could this misery be a portrait of an English holiday? One night that bastard sergeant flew open our door and yelled, ‘Blimey, it’s like the tropics in here. Get those windows open.’

There was no protest we coloured troops could make that would appear to this man as reason. From the first time Oscar Tulloch from Antigua met the sergeant’s order to move at the double with an inane gape – provoking the sergeant to moan, ‘What the bloody ’ell have they sent me?’ – every action we took confirmed to this man that all West Indian RAF volunteers were thoroughly stupid. Eating, sleeping, breathing in and out! Cor blimey, all the daft things we darkies did. We did not know that answering the question ‘What is it, Airman, kill or be killed?’ with the answer, ‘I would prefer to kill you, Flight Sergeant,’ would see you up to your neck in bother. And that insolent, annoying Jamaican habit of sucking teeth – so frequent did the custom ring in his ears that Sergeant Bastard ordered that particular noise to be seen as an act of insubordination and treated accordingly. Now ask an Englishman not to suck his teeth and see him shrug. Tell a Jamaican and see his face contort with the agony of denied self-expression. Oh, we were all, every one of us, by virtue of being born in the sun, founder members of this man’s ‘awkward squad’.

‘Warm air ain’t good for you,’ he shouted. ‘It makes you soft. Cold air keeps you alert.’ Once all the windows were opened and we were again a group of cold and pitiable black men, he eyed us with scorn before leaving the chalet saying, ‘I bet you lot regret volunteering now.’ With a good long suck of teeth no longer available to us, we four saluted his back with the silent two-fingered symbol favoured by Churchill but, let me assure you, with its more vulgar meaning.

Now tell me, have you ever seen a dog with a gecko? We had a dog at home – Blackie – my boyhood friend. Wrestling Blackie from the smothering arms of my sisters, removing the baby’s hat from his head, the mittens from his back paws and returning to him his scruffy canine dignity, I would find one of those little lizards to deliberately place in Blackie’s path. A gecko sensing a dog remains as still as death. Blackie seeing a gecko is suddenly caught by passionate curiosity. Up with his ears, his eyes popping wide. Fearing the unexpected he moves stealthily round the creature, never – even for a second – taking his gaze from it. Carefully, closer, pat the air above it with a paw and jump back. Circling round. Sniff the air. Closer, closer. Skip forward, leap back, wait. That gecko could not even move one of its prehistoric eyes without that dog’s awareness. This could go on nearly all day until eventually Blackie would pluck up the courage to slowly crouch down low, wiggle his back end, and pounce at the gecko. Sometimes he almost caught it but usually the gecko ran away, being skilful and faster than my silly dog.

You might want to know why I am telling you this. But patience. Now see this, a fine day: a weak, heatless sun resting in a blue sky. We are out of the camp for the first time, six maybe seven of the boys and me. Walking in our RAF blue through the English village of Hunmanby. No order to follow, no command to hear, just us boys. We are remarking on the pretty neatness of the gardens – a flower still in bloom, which someone, I forget who, insists they know the name of. Shutting his eye and biting his lip he tries to recall it. ‘A rose,’ he says.