New life
Too old for the Orphans
Zenga Longmore
Olumba and I saw a most unusual sight whilst wheeling Omalara through Brixton's teeming market. Standing amongst the rotting coco yams and bruised plantains was a busker. Nothing so unusual about that: Brixton market is awash with
buskers, often of the white rasta variety, annoying harmless shoppers by banging insensately on bongo drums. This busker was my old pal, Clawhammer Jones Bingo. No longer a bush-tea vendor, he appeared to be suffering from a noisy attack of the blues: 'I'm gonna tell ya baby, as Torvill said to Dean, If you don't like my lovin' you can skate right off the scene.'
Omalara, the keenest member of Claw- hammer's three-strong audience, clapped, entranced. With a gurgle, she handed the maestro an invisible object, then watched keenly whilst he paused to examine it.
'Where you learn that style of music, Jammo Boy?' asked Olumba.
'Hoff a hold blind man call Blake, when me go crop pickin' in Florridy.' Then, with a grateful nod at the Irish 5p coin I had thrown him, he continued: 'I been having trouble, trouble, ever since I was grown.
I'm too old for the Orphans, and too young for the old folks' home.'
This time I could not applaud along with Omalara, for I was lost in meditation. I was reminded only too forcefully of a day last week when I strolled out with Omalara along Railton Road. In an endeavour to clear my head after a bout of flu, I thought I'd 'check out the Front Line', as Shaka Boom Boom might say. Near the tenement where punk squatters dwell, middle-class heroin addicts in flight, I came across a list- less black girl sprawled on the ground. Al- though not much older than 18, her manner- isms were stiffly old-ladyish. 'Are you all right?' I asked her. She told me that she had been kicked out of her squat. 'Can't you go back to your mum?' Got no mum. I was in a children's home, but when I got to be 18 they asked me to leave. The welfare found me a flat at Angell Town, but I can't cook, and I got lonely at night. So I met this punk Justin who brought me here. He went to a pop festival some time ago and never came back.'
I emptied my purse onto her lap and went on my way, musing. Have you ever known anyone who left a children's home at 18 who could live like a normal person afterwards? I haven't. Perhaps orphan waifs should be allowed to stay on in homes until eligible for the old folks' section, as Clawhammer Jones's song sug- gested. However, I wonder if this is a fate I ought to wish on anybody. Recalling the
dark, nightmarish days of the children's home I stayed in as a child, whilst my
mother recovered from an illness, I thought that the refuge offered by the punk-heroin-bohemia might even be super ior.
My reverie was shattered by C. J. Bingo's final verse: 'I was born in 1950, as my passport do tell, You know, ever since that day, ol' Claw- hammer ain't been doin' too well.'
Previous page
