My Woolwich: Bernadine Evaristo

When I was a child, Woolwich was a white, working-class garrison town. Since then, the world has come to the area and if you sit in General Gordon Square you can see every nationality and hear every language. There are so many Nigerians I jokingly call it ‘Little Lagos’. It’s more rundown than it was, but I think its ethnic mix has also given it more vitality. Unfortunately, when something terrible happens in an area, such as the tragic killing of Lee Rigby, it marks it out as blighted. I am reminded of the IRA bombing of the Kings Arms pub in 1974 when I was a teenager. Two men died, one of them a soldier. Woolwich was a boiling point for the 2011 riots as well, but the truth is that, like the rest of multicultural London, the town’s mixture of races and religions generally co-exist peacefully.

Back in 1960 my Nigerian father was practically the only African in the area. My parents moved there because property was cheap. They wanted a big home for the eight children they would eventually bring into the world and paid £1,900 for an 11-roomed Victorian house with a large garden in Eglinton Road. To raise the deposit they saved my mother’s teacher’s salary for a year, and lived off my father’s salary as a welder.

My father came to England in 1949 full of the clichés of the ‘Motherland’, but instead of ‘Mummy’ welcoming him with open arms he faced racism at every level. He was constantly harassed on the streets and ended up in fights although, as he’d been a boxer back in Nigeria, he gave as good as he got. In the 1970s he was once arrested on the notorious SUS stop and search laws while walking home from work because the police suspected he’d stolen his bag of work tools.

As an interracial family in a white area, we didn’t fit in. Most of our neighbours didn’t talk to us (even some of my mother’s family didn’t talk to us), the priest at our local Catholic church snubbed us, my father slept with a hammer by his bed and our windows were smashed in on a regular basis by local kids. My dad would drag them to their homes to claim recompense from their parents. Imagine that happening now. He’d end up in court.

In the early days my parents took in lodgers and were once asked to put up an Anglo-Indian family from Goa. My mother recalls opening the door one night and her jaw dropping when two adults and 11 children traipsed in one by one. They stayed with us for two years. Another lodger used to dope her baby up with booze before going out on the town with squaddies. My parents kicked her out. Today they’d call social services.

As a teenager I found Woolwich dull and inferior, especially once I acquired friends who lived in houses in nearby Blackheath with parquet floors and Persian rugs and coffee percolators. The best thing about those years was the wonderful Greenwich Young Peoples’ Theatre, then around the corner in a disused church on Burrage Road. I loved it and felt completely accepted. It became the hub of my social world. Acting, photography, art classes — it was a free, safe and creative environment that I wish was available to every teenager who needs it today. I became an usher at the Tramshed, a local performance venue. I saw the mime artist Lindsay Kemp perform The Turquoise Pantomime there. He was bald, nearly naked, wore red lipstick, was caked in white body powder and writhed about on the floor. For a suburban teenager, it was mind-blowing.

As the years passed my father became a local character. He was gregarious, active in community politics and as Woolwich slowly diversified in the 1980s, so did his circle of friends, which included Englishmen, Eastern European Jews, Asians, Caribbeans and other Africans. They often hung out at the Catholic Club, their drinking den, even though most of them weren’t Catholic.

My sense of belonging to Woolwich began to change when I discovered, while researching my semi-autobiographical novel Lara, that my great-great-grandfather, Louis Wilkening, had settled in Woolwich in the 1860s after leaving Germany. A local newspaper had reported that his bakery windows had been smashed during the anti-German riots of the First World War. Some of his descendants had worked at the Royal Arsenal armaments factory that, for hundreds of years, had brought prosperity to the area before it was shut down. I realised that my Woolwich roots ran as deep as anyone’s.

I left Woolwich when I was 18 and have since lived all over London in places I consider to be much more suited to my arty, cosmopolitan image of myself — Notting Hill, Islington, Brixton. Most of my life I’ve dissed Woolwich as parochial but today I feel the urge to defend it from those who want to turn the killing of Lee Rigby into an argument against immigration. Yes, this London outpost has changed, but that’s the nature of big British cities with their shifting economies and demographics. London changes, and we adapt. I spent the most formative years of my life in Woolwich. It was once my home and these days, rather than fight it, I feel it in my bones.

Bernardine Evaristo’s new novel Mr Loverman (Hamish Hamilton, £8.99) is out in August