A Sheffield Hallam University Thesis
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Novel: No More Yellow. YEARWOOD, Susan J. Available from the Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive (SHURA) at: http://shura.shu.ac.uk/20588/ A Sheffield Hallam University thesis This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Please visit http://shura.shu.ac.uk/20588/ and http://shura.shu.ac.uk/information.html for further details about copyright and re-use permissions. Sheffield Ha Ham University] Learning and IT Services j Adsetts Centre City Campus jj Sheffield SI 1WB ‘ REFERENCE ProQuest Number: 10701235 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10701235 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 Novel: No More Yellow Susan Jenifer Yearwood A novel submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Sheffield Hallam University for the degree of Master of Philosophy October 2005 Chapter One All the words of my mouth are in righteousness; there is nothing froward or perverse in them. (Prov. 8:8) I don’t think about it anymore - that summer. Too many things came to pass that made me what I am today - and that’s not saying much. When I say that I mean that I don’t add up to much these days despite what I had dreamed for myself - me and Frankie against the world. Frankie was my imaginary friend (I hate to even think about it now) that I conjured up at nights. When I say that she was my friend I use the term loosely as she had started to became a bitch to me that summer, asking things of me that even I balked at. Like telling me to have sex with the next man that offered, even if it was the funny Asian man who walked down the street noisily jangling his keys. Me and Baljit called him the finny-finny-hand-man after he invited us into his house one day and we ran away from him, the vision of his spotless kitchen through the front doorway staying with me. I’ll go in next time, I thought to myself, or rather Frankie thought through me. I’ll see what he has to offer. That’s one of the things I remember about that summer without Baljit, the loss of what I came to decide were childish things. It reminded me of the time we had gone to the finny-finny-hand-man’s house the Christmas before to sing carols and he had answered the door with a wide belt in his hands. Whatever threat we posed wasn’t clear, me with a battered carol book in my hands and Baljit sporting a bobbly, worn woollen hat over her waist length hair and sucking on cola cubes. I imagined that he saw more than one black girl pressing his doorbell through the obscured glass of his front door and a legion of long-haired Sikh girls. He flew out of the open door and screamed out, only to be confronted by two cowering children. I’ll never forget the look on his face when his senses returned and he stared at us in bewilderment. My momentary terror faded as I watched vulnerability creep into his face, to be quickly replaced by fear and loathing. After that we played Knock Down Ginger like the girls that we were then, but that all ended that summer when I decided to take Frankie at her word and become someone else. I didn’t think about it at the time as such, but I had just found out some devastating news and Frankie was fighting with me to reveal it to someone - anyone. The news was that my grandfather Stanley was not really my grandfather. He was my father. I had been lied to all these years. That wasn’t the only overwhelming fact. My Mother was supposed to be his daughter but was in fact the daughter of a drifter who had come into Grandma (literally) by chance on a dismal day in St. George - Millicent had written as much. That was a lot for a young girl like me to take on, too much perhaps, but I didn’t think like that at the time. Just felt hurt at Mum going away and not taking me with her, especially as Baljit was taken to the Gujurat that summer without even a word to me. The whole family, except for Dev, gone for six weeks. Without a word to me. I hadn’t been outside the country, only to Wales, but had heard of kids from school that had. I bet their mothers wouldn’t have even thought of leaving them at home. I thought about my Mother’s excuse a lot that summer - she couldn’t afford the both of us going; I would be bored; next time - and felt the tyranny of being a child under an adult’s care. I wished 2 myself older more than anything and Frankie encouraged me in her sly, underhand way. I like being sly and underhand though I’m not too good at it. Not in the way that Frankie is. I chose the name because of its hidden ambiguity, as Miss Scott, my English teacher would call it. Frankie. It was cute to me, even cool. Better than my name - Ella. Better than anything I represented. It was just so easy for everyone to walk all over me when I was me but when I was lying in my bed in Frankie-mode nothing could touch me. Just look at what Mum had done to me. That wouldn’t have happened if I were truly Frankie, body and soul. So I thought then, but they were childish thoughts, fit for nothing but the childish adult I was to become. Never quite grown yet, never quite coping. That summer was the start of all my downfalls. Grandma’s leaving was just yet another thing to contend with and the fact that I lost my grey pencil skirt to the new owners of the house on the Avenue, to be replaced by a blue mini skirt that showed off my black-kneed, skinny legs. At least by then I had grown out of the baby thing as that had started to get embarrassing, especially after the beating Mum gave me the last time it happened - wanting a baby was too much of a burden for any fourteen year old to bear. I slept in a dead man’s bed. Before she left for the island my Mum warned me that the mattress wheezed and told me it was the dead man coughing under my weight. I slept uneasily sometimes, thinking Frankie thoughts more and more. I pulled the mauve bed blankets over my head and slipped lower into the covers just in case he pulled his rough head from under the bed and asked me my name. Silly, I suppose, and considering I had begun to think of myself as a woman it all smacked of me being childish, not quite there yet. I didn’t suppose my Mum would be scared of the man if she was 3 sleeping in this bed, if her shoulders had to nuzzle into springs instead of foam. I didn’t suppose she would sleep anyway, as all she seems to do is listen to music into the small hours, old tape cassettes whirring into daybreak - Do you really wanna know about hard times.I didn’t at the time. The bed I slept in was in one of the spare rooms at my Grandma Lillian’s house. I was staying while my Mum was away. She is four and I am two - that’s what she used to say whenever I called her “she”. Not the usual “She’s the cat’s mother” but something else to put me in my place, to steady me. I hadn’t heard her say that to me for a while and even if she did say it I wouldn’t listen. I hadn’t even finished secondary school but I was still a woman. Didn’t she say that I was? So she can’t stop me. No one could stop me. Doing what? I didn’t yet know. I listened to myself closely at those times. This was new to me, this listening, because before I came to this realisation, I didn’t know that there was anything to listen to. It seemed that the moment I stopped sucking on Blackjacks to harass the liquorice into making my tongue black, and by the time I hesitated in the dance that told me not to step on cracks in the pavement for good luck, that I had to listen for what was to come next. The past was all that was left of a missed opportunity, something unsung and dead in me.