My intentions in writing this book were not particularly complicated. My father had not long since died, the funeral was over, the eulogy read, all that was left was to sort through his things, with my mother's help. Anyone who has had to do this knows how difficult and painful it can be. The way I decided to approach it was to try and mentally prepare myself beforehand, take a deep breath, then work through his dozens of jackets, his hundreds of shirts, shoes and ties. I seem to recall that it was sometime around then, in going through his personal effects, organising many of them into a filing cabinet, that a conversation with my mother arose about Dad's migrating to England from Dominica in 1956.
'Did I not realise', she asked, 'that he had never intended to stay in England?'
'No.'
'Yes, he was supposed to go back and marry a schoolteacher, once he had earned enough money in England. His intention was to buy a truck to carry bananas to port. Perhaps it was better that he didn't, he was never particilarly mechanically minded. It took him quite some time to learn how to drive a car, let alone a truck.'
Needless to say, it's slightly bizarre to have a conversation in which you realise that had things turned out slightly differently, you wouldn't exist at all, but I suppose anyone, given enough information about their parents, could easily say the same thing. Even so, if Dad had mentioned any of this previously, I'm not sure he ever spelt it out as such. The conversation made me realise how little I knew of some parts of his life and made me want to know more.
So, getting back to why I wrote the book, my intentions were simply this: I wanted to honour my father, to tell of the courage, character and decency of the man I called Dad. It wouldn't need to be (and isn't) a rose-tinted retrospective. It is not ancestor worship. It didn't need to be any of those things. I just needed to play the events back and let them tell their own story.
I've often thought about how he'd have reacted had he read the book. Firstly, he'd have been totally bemused at being the focus of any attention; he wasn't used to that at all. Once, when asked by my cousin Algie to describe my father, I thought for a second or two and replied: 'a man who would do the right thing when no-one was looking'. It was an off-the-cuff instinctive reply, but I'd struggle to come up with a better one given more time.
Secondly, Dad would no doubt have skewered me on matters of detail, as he was prone. Regarding that charge he would, of course, have been correct. I cannot possibly know the nature of his private conversations with a schoolteacher named Clara back in Dominica, nor if she ever read poetry to him.
What I can say for certain is that children in the Vielle Case Goverrnment School were taught classic English literature, that a schoolteacher such as Clara would have been well versed in it and that if she had read poetry to him, he'd have shrugged his shoulders when asked if he liked it and responded:
'It's alright'.
Readers from the UK of a certain age will probably be familiar with an old Morecambe and Wise sketch in which Morecombe is supposed to play a Grieg Piano Concerto.
'You're playing all the wrong notes!" says Andre Previn, the conductor. Eric Morecombe grabs him by the collar and responds.
'I'm playing the right notes. Just not necessarily in the right order.'
All of the events in the book happened, but not necessarily in the order in which they are written. Some characters are archetypes, some are real and their real names used.
The research process was, by and large, a joy, particularly in the Caribbean. Having aunts, uncles, cousins, many of whom are over ninety and still very sharp can be a revelation in itself, just letting them talk about events in the 1950s as if it was yesterday. It's also a little humbling. You sometimes start a conversation with an unconscious conceit that living in the modern age and in a more industrialised part of the world that you know more about some things than those who have gone before, only to realise after a while that it's quite the opposite, that you'd do well to live up to them, to achieve what they achieved.
Researching the Scunthorpe steelworks in its heyday was, for me, extremely interesting. Having started my career on the steelworks in the late seventies, (after having blown my educational opportunities, but that's a whole other story), I could draw on some of my own experience, at least in part. I also remember, very poignantly, the moment I sat on a bus in a bus park in Appleby Frodingham, watching some of the steelworkers who at that time would have been younger than I am now, seeing how their bodies seemed wrecked by their environment, thinking to myself 'I've got to get out of here, this place will kill me'.
So I did.
Fatailities were by no means infrequent when I worked at British Steel. Mercifully, they're far less frequent now. I did consider including the blast furnaces torpedo explosion of 1975, which, had my father been at work one shift earlier, he may well have been caught up in, but it didn't seem appropriate and may be too raw in people's memories, particularly the victims' families.
Having lived away from the town for some time, only visiting to see my parents and, in later years, my mother, the thing that strikes me most when I return is the loss of self-confidence in the town. People used to be really proud to come from Scunthorpe. Some still are, including myself. The town had a real sense of where it belonged in the world. We used to boast about how Tony Jacklin came from the town, how football players like Kevin Keegan and Ray Clemence started their careers at Scunthorpe United, and so on. You don't get that so much now.
On hearing that I was going to write this book, reaction in the Caribbean, those with whom I've discussed the project have embraced the idea wholeheartedly. There is a growing impetus for a strengthening of the bonds between Caribbean islands and their diaspora, just as there is one from those of my generation downwards to reconnect with their roots. Therefore, the idea of the story of one of Dominica's sons being told, of shedding light on what life was like once he had crossed the ocean, has been well received.
I expected a more muted reaction from those with whom I've discussed the project in the UK, but have been pleased, so far, to see that hasn't materialised to any great extent. On the contrary, being as there's a complete dearth of literature, not only about Scunthorpe, but of the UK steel industry in general, they were glad to see the town represented in print. On more than one occasion when scouring through book shops in the Scunthorpe area, in both the fiction and non-fiction sections, there hasn't been a single book about Scunthorpe or the steel industry. I find that strange, given that the steel industry has played such an important role in the country and that Scunthorpe has played such a vital role in the steel industry. D. H. Lawrence wrote about the coalmining industry, Catherine Cookson about shipbuilding in the north-east, Thomas Hardy about the agricultural industry in Wessex. Who has written about steel?
I recently read a blog article where a campaigner for medical recognition of M.E. wouldn't allow anyone else tell her story. From the beginning, I have held a singular determnation that I should tell ours. It is by no means an accident that many of the books you've read or films you've watched regarding people of African heritage are told from someone else's perspective - case in point, To Kill a Mockingbird, Mississippi Burning, Cry Freedom, Goodbye Bofana, The Help, and on the list goes. That is not in any way to decry those works or productions. In the book, you will see that a question is asked several times - why don't we tell our own story? The story I've told is my father's and, by inference, to a lesser degree, my own.
L. P. Hartley, author of The Go-Between, wrote 'the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there'. He was no doubt alluding to how sometimes people want to distance themselves from the past. After all, we have to move on from the past, don't we? Well, yes and no. We have to move on in the respect of not being ruled or defined by it, but equally we have to learn its lessons, because 'those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.' The two things are not mutually exclusive - it's possible to have a good knowledge and understanding of the past, but, at the same time, not be hindered by it.
My intention in witing this book was to cast a light on the period between 1956 and 1964 and to tell my father's story, hopefully with insight, candour, humour and some generosity; not to beat anyone over the head with a stick, but, equally, not to shy away from uncomfortable issues. To what extent I've achieved that is for others to decide.
So, to those who may ask the question: 'Why do you want to bring all that up?' the answer is simply 'Because it's our story'.
Leon LeBlanc