on the other side of Union Street one afternoon. When she arrived home she found him maroon with rage. He told his daughter that he would not tolerate her seeing or being seen with a black man.
Later, in the little attic flat my father shared with Dan Sama, he listened to an account of the scene from my tearful mother and knew exactly what to do. ‘I’ll call on your father at home,’ he told her, confident he could put things right.
Gairn Terrace is a row of plain semi-detached houses built on the edge of Aberdeen close to the river Dee and the road to Perth. There is nothing to distinguish one house from the other, except the colour of the woodwork that brightens pebbledash facades the colour and texture of porridge. The Christisons’ window frames were painted pale yellow and two net-curtained windows faced the street, one above and one below. Curiously, in a world in which appearances mattered, the houses were built with no proper front door, just an entrance reached by a dark side passage.
When my mother was growing up there was an army training ground opposite and, farther on, a crater where a fighter plane had been downed during the war, in which wild blueberries grew. In 1935 Robert Christison bought one of the new houses for four hundred and twenty pounds and from then on he kept three boxes on the dresser. For the next eighteen years he put two and sixpence into each one every Friday to pay for the mortgage, insurance and bills. In all respects life in number 38 was equally regimented.
My grandfather’s chair was closest to the fire and faced the bay window onto the street. To the left was the wireless, which replaced the old crystal set after the war. It was a magnificent piece, in two-tone polished mahogany, and stood about three and a half feet tall, occupying the entire corner of the room. From his place my grandfather could reach it comfortably. Its prime location was really the only outstanding feature of my grandfather’s chair, which was just one part of a three-piece suite, upholstered in rust and sufficiently yet not excessively comfortable. A lace-edged antimacassar covered the headrest. My father, wearing a suit and tie, took the chair opposite.
My mother and grandmother stayed in the kitchen – Maureen preparing the tea things and Lydia smoking Woodbines – while my father asked Mr Christison’s permission to continue seeing his daughter. Mr Christison listened, though not with his lean, sparse body nor with his brisk blue eyes; he sat with his arms crossed and never once looked my father in the eye, but he didn’t interrupt either. My father spoke fluidly and directly, describing his many aspirations, including his plans to specialise in obstetrics.
Mr Christison was not impressed by the black man’s credentials. Nor did he like his forthright manner. ‘Arrogant’ is how he would dismiss him later. He stated his position, an entirely simple one: ‘I’m not prejudiced. I’m sure you’ve done well enough. But I won’t have Maureen going about town with any man of a different colour. It’s my view you stick to your own. There are black women for black men, Chinese women for Chinamen and, for all I care, green women for green men.’
‘Forgive me, sir, but if Maureen dated a teddy boy, would that be all right…as long as he was white?’
‘I wouldn’t tolerate that either, as a matter of fact. But that’s as much as I have to say to you on the matter.’
Mr Christison stood up, shaking the newspaper from his lap. He was much taller than my father; he once tried out for the Rhodesian police. He said: ‘Thank you for stopping by.’ Their eyes still did not meet and he excused himself from the room.
While the visitor was still in the house Mr Christison remained outside, standing on the steep slope of his garden digging at his rhubarb. His wife fed the visitor angel cakes and tea and chattered nervously all the while. If her husband was unimpressed, Lydia Christison was secretly delighted by Maureen’s African doctor, who in that hour charmed her entirely. For years afterwards she defied her husband, paying visits to her daughter carrying petits fours and children’s clothes, and allowing my mother and her little ones back for hot baths in the years we lived without a bathroom.
Afterwards my father told my mother what had transpired in his conversation with my grandfather. And I can imagine exactly how my grandfather behaved during the exchange, because almost forty years later, shortly before he died, he was the same way with me when I asked him about the day he met my father for the first and only time. There we sat in the very same room, the decor barely changed in all that time. A clown doll made by my grandmother after she had her stroke sat on an occasional table. A set of tiny ornamental sabres I used to play with as a child had gone. Those were the only differences I could see. He sat in his chair and I, cross-legged on the floor, my back leaning on the chair where my father had sat. Between us on the leather pouf was a great pile of photographs and a tape recorder.
My grandfather was preparing to die: emptying drawers, sorting through closets; he had even finally given away my grandmother’s clothes. The next day the two of us took a trip up the coast towards Inverness. By then he was over ninety, had trouble walking and had been forced to stop driving, but he read the map and worked out different routes there and back that carried us through the finest scenery. On the way up we stopped at a roadside tea room – a lodge, he called it – and told me how he used to bring my grandmother there. Among the trinkets for sale I found a pretty rococo coffee cup and saucer, but when I showed it to him he called it tat and said I was daft to want to buy it.
In the morning I stopped by Gairn Terrace to say goodbye: I was on my way back to London. He called me upstairs, to one of the bedrooms. Inside, piled on the bed were dozens of different household objects: framed pictures, coat hangers, an old heater. He handed me four yellow and black coffee cups and a set of tea cups in the same florid style as the single coffee cup I had chosen at the lodge. They were my grandparents’ wedding gifts, entirely unused in almost seventy years.
I smiled and kissed him and he hugged me back. Three months later I was up in Aberdeen again, in the snow and sleet, this time for his funeral.
The end of my father’s first year in Scotland coincided with the culmination in Ghana in 1957 of years of brokering between the Ghanaian leaders and British rulers over a new constitution which would bring self-government to the colony. After the Second World War Britain had promised her colonies independence in return for their military assistance. Hundreds of thousands of black and brown soldiers died and, though India was granted independence in 1947, the African nations remained colonies. Virtually overlooked by the Marshall Plan, which gave millions to rebuild Europe and the Far East, impoverished by the low, fixed prices paid for cash crops while European middlemen grew fat, African leaders began to rally their people against the inequity of colonial rule.
In Ghana the independence movement was led by a charismatic former teacher called Kwame Nkrumah, a pan-Africanist who had been imprisoned for several years by the British. Nkrumah was Scottish-educated, and during the 1940s a leader in the influential West African Students’ Union. It was inside WASU that the seeds of pan-Africanism and anti-colonial politics germinated, fuelled by the hostility of British society and the humiliation of the colour bar. Later these sentiments were re-imported to Africa, where they ultimately flowered in rebellion.
All the African students watched and waited as one after another the colonies were granted independence. Shortly after my parents met, Nigeria celebrated its break from the empire, alongside thirteen French colonies – practically the entire Francophone empire, with the exception of Algeria, which remained sunk in a bitter and frustrating war of liberation. For the West African states autonomy was not so much a question of if as when, and the anticipation ran like a fever through the exiled students.
Gradually the topic began to dominate every gathering; people turned the record player off at parties the better to be heard and huddled over the paraffin heaters in each other’s apartments late into the frosty night. For Maureen the talk soon palled. Mohamed, on the other hand, was already deeply
