Now and then the dialysis machine will clog up, or I will make too big a movement and it will react badly to the disturbance of the tubes, making me jump back to reality from wherever my mind has wandered, angrily bleeping at me to reset it, which I can do for myself now without always having to trouble the overworked nurses. I used to feel a surge of panic whenever one of the alarms went off, but I’ve grown used to them over the months. I know it is just part of the unpleasant routine.
They give me a drug to stop my blood from clotting during the process because apparently that can happen sometimes. It seems like nothing in my body can be relied on to do the job it’s meant to do any more. The machines here are second-hand ones, donated to us by Barnet Hospital and refurbished. We are very grateful to have them. If only there had been more machines around 20 years ago, maybe my mother would not have had to die so early and so uncomfortably. She was a good woman and she didn’t deserve any of what she had to go through. But I guess none of us does, and if you want your share of the lucky breaks you have to take the bad luck that comes along with them.
My mum and dad, Ivy and Ivan Ewen, arrived in England in 1958 on a Spanish boat called the Begona, which carried thousands of immigrants to Southampton from the West Indies with promises of jobs and glittering new lives in England, luring them away from the poverty of the islands. After the Second World War, it had taken hundreds more migrants from Europe down to new lives in Australia, and before that it was a troop ship going under the name of the Vassar Victory. It’s hard to imagine in these days of casual air travel how many people were being ferried around the world by sea in the recent past, moving at an altogether statelier pace, many of them travelling in the hope of exchanging their old lives for something more exciting.
It was also the year that Elvis Presley was being drafted into the US army and the newly launched Cliff Richard was singing ‘Move It’, which John Lennon would later describe as the ‘first English rock record’. It must have been an exciting time to be young and full of dreams for a better future.
In fact, in comparison with most of the West Indians who arrived on boats like the Begona and the better-known Windrush, my parents weren’t really poor at all. Dad was already a successful entrepreneur with a string of dry-cleaning and pressing shops in Jamaica, but I think he believed he would be able to rise to even greater heights in England, making enough money in a few years to return home a truly wealthy man, able to build his own house and live a comfortable life. It has always been a tried and trusted way for ambitious young men to establish themselves, heading to places where the wages are going to be higher than in their homelands, where they believe it will be possible to build up a little nest egg for the future. Dad was a man of dreams and ambitions, although those dreams never seemed to quite work out as well as he hoped.
I still miss Dad terribly. Although he was a small man physically he was a larger-than-life personality – I wouldn’t have been able to manage without him when the children were small and I was left to bring them up on my own. He would have been so proud to see what Alexandra has achieved, to hear her voice everywhere he went and to stand in places like London’s O2 arena and see her up on stage, singing in the New Year in front of tens of thousands of cheering people, standing alongside Will Young, with Elton John banging away at the piano beside them.
We are a real melting pot of a family, like many people from the West Indies: the result of many centuries of trading, immigration, adventuring and slavery. Dad was half Jamaican and half Indian, Mum was half Jamaican and half Irish, so I guess it’s not surprising that there aren’t many people in the world who share my blood group. Dad was a handsome man, but tiny and skinny. He was no more than five feet tall, but he had a big voice to make up for it. He was trained as a tailor before he discovered he could make more money out of cleaning and pressing clothes rather than making them.
He was never work-shy, and as soon as he arrived in north London he took a job with a Cypriot family who owned the Alex Dry Cleaners chain. They had a few branches, one of which was next to the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, which was where Dad went to work. He still used his tailoring skills as well to earn a little extra, doing alterations for people, and making clothes too if they asked, mainly slacks. There was always a sewing machine standing in the corner of any room we lived in and people would come to him with patterns and lengths of material to get him to make clothes for them.
The Rainbow was something of a landmark in the area. It had originally been an Astoria cinema but in the 1960s the management started staging one-night concerts by the stars of the day. Everyone from Shirley Bassey to Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra to the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin to the Beatles appeared there. Many of the great events of modern musical history happened there. It was where Jimi Hendrix first set light to one of his guitars on stage and where David Bowie later staged his renowned ‘Ziggy Stardust’ concerts. It was converted into the Rainbow Theatre in 1971, relaunched with a concert by the Who, and became a world-famous venue where everyone from the Jacksons to Bob Marley came to play. Now the live acts have moved on to bigger concert halls, stadiums and arenas but the building is still there, looking much the same.
Many of the biggest stars who played at the Rainbow would bring their costumes next door to Alex Dry Cleaners and they would ask for Dad personally because they loved the care he took over his work, often showing their appreciation by giving him free tickets to get us into their shows. To my child’s imagination, being given free tickets felt like we lived at the very heart of the show-business world, like we were personal friends of the stars who everyone else was having to pay hard-earned money to see.
Mum was a big, beautiful, buxom woman, who looked like Carmen Miranda with her coffee-coloured skin and thick, dark hair piled high. She had a beautiful singing voice but never thought of turning professional. She had worked in Jamaica as a hairdresser, which gave her a skill she could use to earn money once she arrived in London, and show business would have seemed a distant and inaccessible world to her. I wish she could have been around to see how far Alexandra has gone, how her granddaughter has benefited from the decisions and sacrifices she made all those years ago.
Both Mum and Dad had had children in previous marriages but I was the only child they had together who survived, and that made them incredibly protective of me. Frances was Dad’s daughter, who lived with us and as a child always looked on Mum as her real mother. Frances’s birth mother had handed her over to Dad as soon as she was born, saying she wanted nothing to do with the child. Dad took responsibility for her with the help of his sister, until he met and married Mum when Frances was two years old. Mum always treated the two of us the same, never showing any favouritism that I could see.
Dad was never married to Frances’s real mum but both Frances and her birth mother are dead now, so there’s no way of finding out the truth of what their relationship might have been like all those years ago, on those hot nights in Jamaica when Dad was probably as careless as most young men with only one thing on their minds.
Later, when she was grown up, Frances came to resent Mum, believing that she had split Dad up from her real mother, which was a shame because it seemed to me that they always had such a good relationship when Frances was young. The pressures of life so often drive wedges between family members as children grow up and begin to assert themselves.
Sonia was Mum’s daughter from her first marriage to a local Chinese businessman. (There is a large Chinese community in Jamaica.) Mum told me that their marriage broke down after their first son, Danny, died from consumption when he was two and she didn’t manage to conceive again. Mum continued to have problems conceiving again after meeting Dad and it was eight years after they were married before she finally found herself pregnant with me, which was, I think, another reason why they were both so protective of me. Having had so much trouble making me in the first place and having had to wait so long, they didn’t want to run any risk of losing me.
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