Special Risks

OF z o ) tn I Before you began your travels you were told how essential it was to define your intended role. Were you going to be a tourist, or an explorer, or an infiltrator? Those are choices that confront anyone arriving at a new place. Each bears its special risks. Robert Silverberg (Trips) Special Risks by Tony Bugeja Special Risks For hundreds of years the Mediterranean Sea was a half-forgotten lake. There were Naval skirmishes on its waters every few decades. These encounters are recorded in history as battles and have grand sounding names. Some may have influenced the balance of power in Europe, but most were a waste of gunpowder. During these centuries sea trade was conducted by extended families with little interference and no documentation. Then everything changed. The Book of Beglnnings. We returned from Malta in 1947. London was cold and foggy, and everybody seemed weary. I went to a school that had been half demolished by a flying bomb four years previously and the building was still unrepaired. Returning soldiers searched for family homes and found vacant lots. People travelled to work on buses and trains that were so under-maintained that they could no longer keep to time- tables. Broken window panes were replaced with cardboard, and paint was allowed to peel. England's green and pleasant land was brown and dirty. Our home was a room that led out into a back alley; but in that street there was colour and action, and the rebirth of glamour. The lane fronted the stage entrance to a theatre. Because of the bomb damage, theatres were in short supply in London; sometimes there were three drama or ballet companies working in the same building. Rehearsals would spill out into the alley. Shakespearean performers clashed fake swords while ducking and diving over the pavement. Ballet dancers limbered against a high brick wall. I became a pet of the backstage, and ate sticky buns with actors and stagehands. I once shared an orange with Margot Fonteyn. By the time I was eight I knew the plots of ballets and plays as well as other children knew characters from the comics. I built up a son of business, washing tea mugs for the theatre people and getting tuppence a week off each of them. Actors and dancers were always arriving and Special Risks 2 leaving, sometimes to work in the provinces, sometimes to join other companies in London, but often they just disappeared at the end of a run. I asked the doorman the big question about it when returning a washed cup. 'Do actors have a home?' 'The big names, like Miss Fonteyn, do, but most just live in a suitcase.' I walked home trying to imagine living in a suitcase. Special Risks 3 John was a patriarch and the last of his kind. He owned many boats. John traded along the African coast between Algiers and Alexandria. The big change happened during his lifetime The Book of Beginnings. We got a house and went to live in a shiny new suburb. All of the houses in our street were semi-detached and they all had green front-doors and window frames. I suppose the colour was the Council's idea of making England green and pleasant. I didn't like my new home; I wanted to live in a suitcase. We had only returned from Malta ayear previously but already it was spoken of as a place that wasn't quite real. This was pure fakery, the time overseas and the period of homelessness afterwards, had altered the family forever. At the time I saw it in terms of the family but it was really much bigger. Before we went to live in the house the world was divided up into empires. Nearly half the world's population lived in some sort of colony and were ruled by people who lived in the other half. My father, Joe, said this was the natural order of things like a father going to work and a mother looking after the house. It was an unfortunate simile because shortly afterwards my mother, Elizabeth, went out and got a job. When I was told at school about lndia becoming an independent nation I wondered if Mum had something to do with it. Joe was angry when Elizabeth told him she was going to work in a factory. He forbade it. Nothing happened for a week, but then one day I came home from school and the house was full of shiny new furniture. By some smooth talking Mum had obtained the lot on Hire Purchase. Joe had no choice but to accept that Elizabeth was part of the workforce. The alternative would be the shame of a row of furniture vans outside to repossess the tables and beds. Special Risks 4 Everyone in the street was poor, but there were degrees of respectability. The respectable poor lived in fear of public shaming. The major causes of humiliation were things like father going to jail, school-age daughter getting pregnant, or having your furniture repossessed. The un-respectable poor regarded such things as a normal part of life's adventure. To me they seemed to have a much better time of it. Elizabeth's view of respectability was centred around food. When there was cake on the table we knew Mum had baked it. Shop cake was denounced as rubbish and was purchased by people who knew no better. Elizabeth was a good cook although she had that English talent for doing terrible things to vegetables. Joe had been undermined. I knew it was to do with our time in Malta although I did not understand why. When I spoke to him in Maltese he did not reply and I lost the language. This was a problem because I had a stammer when speaking English which I didn't have when conversing in Maltese. I was able to make myself understandable by speaking slowly but this created an impression of a dull mind in the ear of a listener. My speech defect coupled with left-handedness worried Joe at the time sinistralism was treated in medical books as evidence of retardation. 'Cack-handedness is nothing to worry about,' said Elizabeth. 'Five hundred years ago Larry would have been thought a witch. lt was probably based on expert advice at the time.' Now that we had a proper house and garden Joe started acquiring pet animals. We got a succession of guinea pigs and rabbits. They were supposedly for us children; but we had acquired a Maltese attitude to animals, unless they are cats or dogs, you either work them or eat them. Joe housed and fed and conversed with Special Risks 5 these furry moppets. He was always ¡mmensely pleased when they gave him some recognition. I told the blokes at school and they said their dads were the same except that it was usually with pigeons and greyhounds. I suppose it was to do with stages of life. The time in Malta had confirmed in Joe's mind that he was now English whereas l, who was born in England, had become a foreigner. I went to a variety of schools over the succeeding years, I played Soccer and was a reasonable long distance runner. These skills helped me to survive school life without too much trouble. My inability to understand or play Cricket was regarded as an eccentricity. It was not rare for strange women to walk up to me in the street and ask me how I was. I may have appealed because lwas small and polite and foreign looking. An alternative explanation is that the women of England were suffering from a kind of war guilt. I have no childhood memory of experiencing prejudice on the grounds of racial origin. At first glance our suburb was English to the core, but closer inspection showed us to be a pretty mixed bunch. Our doctor was lndian; the couple who ran the fish and chip shop were Polish; and many families in our street were from lreland. Older people did refer to a past when everybody was 'English,' but that was probably selective recall. As Tacitus wrote sardonically of the British in the First Century A.D. : Who the first inhabitants of Britain were, whether natives or immigrants, remains obscure; one must remember we are dealing with barbarians. There was a residual anti-semitism which had probably existed in Britain for hundreds of years. I don't think Jewish children suffered baiting in the school yard, Special Risks 6 the teachers would have stamped on it, but I remember a skipping chant that was sung by the kids in the street. Get a bit of pork, and stick it on a fork, And gíve it to a Jew boy. Jew! The prohibition against eating pork was the only thing these children knew about Judaism. Paul, my grandfather, had explained to me that the Jews were book people. Many of the men and women in our street had serued in WW ll to fight the Nazis in Europe; others had been sent to the Middle East to fight the Jews in Palestine. Our local shoe repairer had been a soldier in the Holy Land. 'A real balls-up,' he said. 'We were holding this line of barbed wire and trenches between East and West Jerusalem. The Jews were shooting us from one side and the Arabs were firing at us from the other. 'lt was only at night-time; during the day everybody walked around doing their shopping and praying, but when the sun went down the balloon went up.

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