Most of these houses had been built at a time when the people who lived in them weren’t expected to own cars. So there were very few garages and hardly any off-street parking. It took her a few minutes to find somewhere to leave her Audi.
Jim Bowskill was wearing his Harrington jacket. Well, surely not the original Harrington – the one she always remembered seeing him in. It would have been worn out by now. But he was a man who had never been without a Harrington. He once told her he’d started wearing one as a mod in the 1960s, and just found that he never grew out of them. When he reached his mid fifties, he’d thought for a while about having a change. But then he’d seen Thierry Henry wearing one in the Renault adverts, and that was it. The current Harrington was a classic tan colour, with the Fraser tartan lining and elasticated cuffs. Seeing it made Fry feel an intense burst of affection for him. It was probably just nostalgia – a vague memory of hugging a coat just like that.
He was a lot greyer than she remembered him. Slightly stooped now, too.
‘Hello, love. It’s good to see you. We haven’t seen much of you since you left to go to Derbyshire. Having a good time away from us, I suppose?’
He said it teasingly, but Fry felt sure there was more than a hint of genuine reproach. She immediately felt guilty. She thought of all the reasons she’d given herself over the past few years for not keeping in touch with her foster parents, and all of them seemed petty and contrived. Fry supposed she’d only been trying to justify her reluctance to herself. But she shouldn’t have made Jim and Alice the victims of her self-justification.
‘No, I’m sorry. I’ve been so busy.’
‘We understand.’
Fry knew from the tone of his voice that he saw the lie, and forgave her. And that just made her feel even more guilty.
Jim Bowskill had been sorting out his blue recycling box for the weekly refuse collection.
‘How do you like it here?’ asked Fry.
‘Oh, it suits me. The house isn’t too big, so it’s easy to maintain. And there are lots of shops. We didn’t have the One-Stop shopping centre when you were here before, did we?’
‘Yes, Dad. It’s been there for fifteen years.’
He nodded. ‘And there are plenty of bus routes, if I need to go anywhere. So, all in all, it’s very handy.’
The Bowskills moved from Warley to Perry Barr some time after she left home to live on her own. She wasn’t sure why – though Alice’s family was originally from this part of North Birmingham, so maybe it was another case of nostalgia, a woman drawn back to the past by those lingering memories.
In a way, this part of Perry Barr had come full circle. When the indigenous white community had first started selling their houses, the Indians had moved in. As the Indians became more prosperous, they’d moved on to other areas, and Pakistanis had come in. When the Pakistanis sold their houses, the Bengalis had replaced them. And now here was Jim Bowskill, living in his double-fronted semi off Canterbury Road, explaining that it was easy to maintain and handy for the shops, and close to a bus route, if he needed it. And it was in the heart of Perry Barr’s Bengali area.
Fry knew better than to talk about the Asian community round here. If you looked for an Asian community, you wouldn’t find it. Instead you’d see a whole series of Asian communities – Pakistanis, Bengalis, Hindus. And even within the nationalities, the complexities of caste and locality were impossible for an outsider to sort out. In some parts of the country, there were entire populations who had come from a handful of villages in one small region of Pakistan. The more you learned, the more you realized how undiscriminating the very word Asian was. It was a pretty big continent, after all. And she knew that no one around here would readily call themselves Asian. It was an outsider’s term.
And everyone knew there was a pecking order among the different ethnic groups. The cycle that had played itself out in Perry Barr over the years was repeated in other parts of Birmingham. Newly arrived immigrants lived in the poorest streets, until they could to move on to better areas and bigger houses. These days, the leafy avenues of Solihull were full of Hindu millionaires.
Once an Asian parent had explained it to her:
‘In the old days, we thought we would come here, send some money back and eventually go home. But the new generation don’t see it that way. A lot of people don’t consider this the host country any more, they consider it their home.’
‘But sometimes the old country is home, too, isn’t it?’
He smiled. ‘Yes. Sometimes when people say “home” you have to ask which home they’re talking about.’
Alice Bowskill looked frail. She wasn’t that old, really. But time hadn’t been kind to her. Nor had the years spent worrying over other people’s children.
Fry hugged her.
‘Mum.’
Jim smiled at them both, delighted to see them together.
‘Do you still support West Brom, Diane?’ he said.
‘Me?’ said Fry. ‘I never did, not really.’
‘It was just because the boys did,’ said Alice with a sly grin. Fry almost felt like blushing.
‘Not the Blues, surely?’ said Jim, missing the significance of his wife’s comment.
Of course, Jim Bowskill was another Villa fan. She wondered if that was part of the reason for the Bowskills moving to Perry Bar, so close to Villa Park? There were pubs round here where a Blue Nose would be torn apart at first sight.
But she wasn’t a Birmingham City fan. She wasn’t actually from Birmingham. She wondered how long it would be before some Brummie looked at her sideways and uttered the immortal phrase: ‘A yam-yam, ain’t you?’
There was no point in trying to deny it. People in these parts were acutely sensitive to the differences in accent that marked you out as Black Country. In a way, she was as much of a foreigner in Brum as she was back in Derbyshire. ‘Not from round here’ might as well be permanently tattoo’d on her forehead.
The Black Country was the name given to the urban sprawl west of the city of Birmingham. It encompassed old industrial towns like Wolverhampton, West Bromwich, Dudley, Sandwell and Walsall. And many smaller communities, too – like Warley, where Fry had lived with her foster parents, and which was nothing but a string of housing estates tucked between Birmingham and the M5 motorway.
In some ways, those small Black Country communities were far worse than the estates of inner city Birmingham. Some of them were completely cut off, isolated by the collapse of the manufacturing industries from the affluence evident in the new apartment blocks, the new Bull Ring shopping centre, stacked to the roof with consumer goods and designer labels. It was in places like West Bromwich, rather than Birmingham itself, that the BNP were getting a foothold. It was there they found the disaffected white working classes, desperate to find a voice.
Jim sighed. ‘Moved allegiance altogether, I suppose. It’s Derby County, then. Tragic’
‘Dad, I don’t even like football.’
There weren’t many people like Jim and Alice, who would be willing to take on other people’s children, especially when many of those children were deeply troubled and disruptive. It took a lot of dedication and commitment. A lot of love.
She wondered about some of the other foster children who’d passed through the Bowskills’ lives. There must have been many of them. She supposed that most of them kept in touch better than she ever had. It had been too easy for her to forget the debt she owed them. She’d been too quick to put everything behind her when she moved from the West Midlands, cast the good aside with the bad when she started