Childhood: The fears and hairs that still haunt

What I heard to my hurt

My ears have a sense of betrayal of self, the sounds that syncopate with the rhythmic resonance of my ear drums taking me into worlds that I have never intended to visit. It was one such occasion when my aunt and our male valet or servant were having this conversation about the esoteric and weird, uncanny stories of the evil supernatural in the hearing of an impressionable 10-year-old.

Seeds sown into my vivid imagination would result in 2 terrifying encounters in which I believed I had seen the devil, a red-crested beastly creature at about 7 feet tall, arms raised like in surrender, but I saw terror and the spirit of fear that I never knew before took hold.

A dismissal of my experience

In the first sighting, my father dismissed my screams as some sort of juvenile exuberance and over-excitation, until late at night I woke up to a sound that brought everyone running to my rescue. My mother was both confused and perplexed by this strange change in my demeanour and as we sat in the living room this apparition appeared again.

My listening experience in the space of less than 30 minutes, the unguarded conversations of seeming adults unaware of the consequences of their discussion in the presence of a child would suggest that in the 1970s there was no knowledge of the serious safeguarding requirements to having anyone care for children and the result was a spectrum of child abuse, much of which I have written of.

In the grip of superstition beyond sense

I guess this informs why I curate what I absorb into my overactive imagination, fundamentally, I do not watch horror films, I have the capacity to imagine enough without have the stimulation of things that might go beyond my control.

Maybe I do now rationalise situations in which I find myself that I am more controlling of irrational fear, or so I think. Then I was walking up a road late at night when I realised the open field to my left was in fact a disused cemetery some gravestones displaced like a place abandoned and desecrated to the extent that the forgotten are indeed forgotten in terms of care for the place.

Between the temptation to look there and look away, I quickened my steps and still stole a few glances, for where in folklore have, I acquired the idea that a graveyard, the reliquary of the dead could be a hive of activity that would interact with the living? And yet, whatever schooled that idea into my consciousness has left it unlearnt.

I was ready to scream

Then the hairs still in their roots of my bald scalp were standing on their ends, in an excited state of sense something otherworldly. In the grip of unexplained fear, a wild guttural sound was forming in my throat and ready to explore into a torrent of the fiendish wailing of a banshee, and on the other hand, I checked myself thinking, why are you about to scream about nothing but the phantoms in your head?

It is however likely, if I had screamed I might have not only given voice to the fear, but also it would have allowed the extirpation of the tension, a release that might have brought people to enquire about the source of my discomfiture either for my embarrassment or in sympathy for hapless mental gymnastics with endearing pity for my need of some sort of help.

Time in a timeless appearance

It was not long after that, a homeless man in the recesses of a building along the way nodding to something asked for the time. A time I should have been ensconced in the warmth of my bed. The reckoning wondering is the person I told the time was homeless as pertains to the life in which we live or homeless from the displaced stones of the graveyard in an encounter I was not prepared to countenance.

If there is a lesson in this that has had lasting consequences for almost half a century, it is an admonition to parents to beware of the people they expose their children to, whether relations or employees. I doubt many parents fully appreciate what it might portend and, in my case, I might have been better helped by a child psychiatrist then being trafficked between religious and animist grottos of unlicensed practitioners of strange acts along with the rituals of reading Psalms in a language I hardly spoke into buckets of water for spiritual ablutions to ward away evil spirits.

You haven’t heard half the tale of this gruelling thing, much of which I attempt to forget as I also deign to forgive. Much as one was wronged there is grace that abounds to soothe and calm the troubled soul and it in that knowledge that I have found hope and redemption.

Related blog

Blog - Thought Picnic: A child has memories that last a lifetime

In the dead of the night, don't go changing money for strangers

It’s all on the money

It was a chance to eavesdrop on a conversation that left me wondering about human psychology and social engineering along with the ease with which one can so easily fall for scams or deceit by reason of vanity overwhelming essential self-awareness.

It was at first three people engaged in bargaining activity over money, I could hear the young man and the lady resist every entreaty, that I immediately thought the other man was trying to pawn off some baubles or contraband just to get cash in hand.

The couple was not persuaded and as they separated and this in the witching hour, the man wheeled his bicycle which I had not noticed before towards a black cab where he addressed the driver, and I got a full context of what was going on.

Pounding for a dollar in hand

He had a $100 bill that he wanted to exchange for Pounds Sterling cash and for some reason, this might have been so urgent that he was not ready to wait for a Bureau de Change to open for that business transaction, or so it would seem before my mind took a ponder on the brief scenario that I had witnessed.

The exchange rate at today’s prices suggests $100 would be exchanged for something between £77 and £82 and that is not accounting for transaction costs, commissions, and other charges. I heard the man negotiating from £80 down to around £60.

I won’t know what an authentic $100 bill looks like and how to account for whether it is legal tender or a counterfeit, then a stranger approaches you in the middle of the night with what seems like a bargain, you none the wiser of where he got the bill, beguiled by whatever sob story he has to regale, and your better instincts see you parting with £70 for this unverified paper purporting to be the almighty dollar, you hoping at your convenience you can walk up to a teller at a Bureau de Change and get £80 or maybe £85 for it.

The vanity of half-knowledge

I hate to think of the number of people who have been suckered into the laundering of counterfeit notes and this is not to say the bill in question was counterfeit. Then, many of us might deign to think ourselves seasoned numismaticians (which might read like a neologism, but it is in the Oxford dictionary, I checked), take any bill and give it the handling, feel, sight, light, and smell test, convinced in our assured dilettantism that we have the Real McCoy, only to find at the end of the conversation with the teller, the next day, the teller goes out of sight for a few minutes and next you are being frog-marched by the local constabulary to the station to answer questions, you would never have convincing answers for.

And indeed, that is the quandary, you never got the name of the stranger, he offered no personal details apart from the soothing repartee that eased you gently out of the suspicious and cautionary into the trusting and persuaded, by a total stranger who could easily have been a ghoulish apparition from the city graveyard donning flesh and apparel for the night, just returning from whatever meetings the dead attend.

Always see strangers at night as strange

Yes, I am totally wary of strangers in the dead of the night, striking up conversation with them is something I so totally avoid even as I could be already backslapping strangers in the daytime after a few minutes of engagement. The most I would aver is to tell the time when asked and at a good arm’s length away.

I cannot say if the man did get to change his $100 bill before the breaking of the dawn, but what coursed through my mind was the need to have the presence of mind not to even countenance the thought of exchanging money for strangers, give them something for an urgency, if that is the case, but if you at all listen to the tales and get carried away in the moment that your vanity trammels reason and good sense to assume you are qualified to undertake that transaction, I’ll like to hear that your story is nothing like that worst case scenario I allowed my thoughts to drift to, such that my appreciation of the innate goodness of strangers and humanity is ever so slightly hit.

This could easily have been another Coronavirus streets of Manchester blog. It isn’t.

The low cost of a locust fib

A new locust menu

The bizarre is something you cannot begin to understand, it is like a tale you heard on the grapevine. Peeping at me through a phone screen was a head ahead of its game in fantabulous stories that astound beyond the reach of sitting at the feet of a vizier raconteur regaling us with tales in the Arabian Nights.

The baldie suffering in the African sun, weeding and tending his plants was overwhelmed by a swarm of locusts that had no appetite and thankfully so for his crops, they had acquired a taste for hair and those with non-black highlights too.

They stripped his scalp of every strand that he looked like he had just left a side-street Thai massage parlour that offers Brazilian waxes of places nether and places obvious.

That is his story, and this is for the record.

Lazy January is a call to change

Resolved not to resolve

I stopped making New Year’s Resolutions quite a while ago, not out of the lack of discipline to stick to a resolution but for the fact that the self-flagellation that follows any such decision is more brutal and guilt-ridden than necessary.

Whilst times, dates, and seasons offer much to reflect on and deliberate with some self-awareness of the lacking and the possible, any day can be chosen to resolve to do anything without becoming a hostage to fortune.

For instance, some people have attached themselves to the Dry January campaign, the resolve to keep the month alcohol-free until I saw some making exceptions for one thing or the other, and soon, the dry had become wetter than a fish in water. Exceptions and adjustments matter in terms of the inadvertent or the unexpected, the ability to accommodate variance makes for a better-rounded personality.

Stepping off the steps

However, it was when I checked my Huawei Health app to see if I was doing something as regularly as I had somewhat thought of doing but in the review was hardly even getting anywhere that I realised I have had a Lazy January. I had only exceeded 10,000 steps twice in the month, I could not bear to step on the weighing scales to see the numbers and I have gained a bit more to the circumference of my midriff as my belt would appear to suggest.

This is not what I expected as I had reached my lowest weight in over a decade just some 4 months ago. I have to do better, as my resting heart rate has increased and my blood pressure is reading numbers I have not seen in a while. Just some exercise should fix that.

My maternity issues again

The other cause for concern is anaemia because of Vitamin B12 and folate deficiency (Yes, we all need folic acid, not just pregnant women.), this is something that appeared in the bloodwork from about 5 years ago. Not enough of it is getting in from my diet and the risk of peripheral neuropathy with its otherworldly feel is so strange. The feeling of intense pain at the back of the hand with numbness in the phalanges, and yet you can move your fingers with all dexterity, I might just give my doctor a call for injections instead.

One thing I have meditated about and quite resolved to do is to get back to walking again. Any dog that dares to approach me I will rebuke in the name of Jesus, I have no time for being nice to dogs out of control. Those who as I saw this morning seem to think their XL Bully dogs do not need to be on a leash and muzzled as the law requires are soon to have a tragedy of many proportions.

Let’s get to being fitter and healthier, for no other reason than it gladdens the heart, and you feel hale and hearty. We are consigning both the Dry and the Lazy January to the dustbin of irrelevance. Just be good to yourself loving yourselves each day.

Related Blogs

Blog - Resolutions unlimited (December 2003)

Blog - Happy New Year - 2007 (January 2007)

Blog - New Year's Considerations (January 2008)

Blog - Folate, I must, lactate, I can't (June 2017)

Childhood: How fostering or adoption shaped us

Children assuaging parenting yearning

It is the dichotomy of perception between privilege and deprivation that at this end of viewing things almost allows for the manifest evil of the past to be excused as a function of those times.

What is rarely considered is how singularly or even more certain experiences have shaped character, shifted identity, and quite possibly left one fortunate, there are positives and negatives, both of which need to be explored.

At the onset, after reading about adoptions instigated from the Netherlands for presumed orphans from Bangladesh against whom paperwork suggested tragedy or adversity, the apparently falsified documentation has been exposed as such.

The adoptees are now finding out they have or had parents, siblings, and relationships from which they were extricated for the market satisfaction (it had to have money involved, a kind of transaction that everyone deigns to forget) of the craving for parenting in the West. [The Guardian: The stranger across from me was my sister: how one adoptee uncovered a tragic past]

Every kind of living away from kin

It is in a spectrum, some situations not as bad as others in adoptions, fostering with the extreme case of farming, childminding, care homes, or orphanages, if I were to limit the scope of the options available for caring for children over a generation ago. [The Guardian: ‘Farmed’: why were so many Black children fostered by white families in the UK?]

The enthusiasm with which I started to write soon was overwhelmed by the gravity of the matter, it cannot be captured in a single story, rather, it is the bringing together of many experiences that can begin to create a picture of what really went on. I decided to press on if only to start a conversation.

The privilege over deprivation construct

I remember a friend on a walk around the shores of the lagoon bordering the University of Lagos saying to me that those of us born abroad just seem to have a daring and boldness that others do not naturally exhibit.

In myself, when I was in Nigeria, I suppose there were exhibitions of precociousness, questioning, challenge, and fearlessness that might have set me apart, at times advantageous, especially in expressing oneself but could be disadvantageous in not understanding norms, values, traditions, or the culture.

“As an adoptee you often hear, ‘You’re lucky, now you have a good life.’ But you cannot really compare the two,” says Kana. “In one sense I feel lucky that I have the best of both worlds. But nothing makes up for the loss you had to endure. Because I lost my family and my real identity.” Kana Verheul in the article.

My father would say, “You have always thought like a westerner.”, my brother did say in passing, “You are not one of us.” The fact is I belonged without actually belonging. The sanguineous ties are pulled asunder by other influences that in the experience of life can make us such radically different people.

The boy was starved

My parents as students in England had me quite early in many ways, I arrived 10 weeks prematurely, which meant for survival I was in incubation in another city for over 2 months.

Then primarily, my father was here for his accountancy qualifications and my mother had to work and, in the process, get an education too, not necessarily encouraged by him, at least, that is the story I am told.

My mother travelled around England into Wales seeking the appropriate kind of family to care for me whilst they were busy trying to better themselves. I cannot remember any of the people I supposedly stayed with, we called them nannies, but all the times I had with my parents in that childhood along with their friends and the siblings of their friends who were babysitters, I seem to recall.

One narrative I heard from my mum was on a visit back home from my foster parents, I was sneaking out to the refrigerator to steal food. She caught me a few times and could not understand why I would be stealing food until she found out that my wonderful foster parents were starving me. And these were people paid for the service, it was not a charity mission.

Radical consequences of childhood experiences

The consequences of the fear of hunger registered and were impactful long after we returned to Nigeria, and I was living with my parents along with having house helps to manage things when they were away. I do remember snatching food out of lunch boxes of fellow students, in fact, there were a few of us that did that.

Indeed, on balance, my whole life has been a wonderful experience marked by interesting events and circumstances. There are very many character traits and inflexions I could almost definitely trace to something that happened in my childhood, some of which I have written about in my blogs. I do need to get a move on with my story.

However, what is evident from many of the stories people are sharing is the illegality and criminality that thrived in the trading of children for different levels of convenience in the view that the children were being given a better life to the exclusion of an environment that would give them an identity or present them with a serious identity crisis.

Finding our way regardless

We almost always faced some sort of discrimination because of differences, however, minute and I recall the time a slow development of my motor skills left me not as agile as one would expect someone of my age it annoyed my dad and he coined a phrase for it that suggested a kind of impairment, someone at school somewhat deduced I was prematurely born and decided to make fun of me, he never did again, after I was finished.

Concerning the topic in discussion, it was my accent that set me apart as probably those of a mixed-race provenance would have been, then talk of brown babies or children in largely white neighbourhoods and schools. At home or abroad and there was no clear definition of either, you tried to fit in, you could not account for the cards you were dealt, you played the game you were in.

Closure for many would simply be coming to terms with who they are, and possibly finding out about relationships they never knew they had. It is unlikely that any of the people who were involved in the abuse of the children would ever see justice, even if they are still alive.

References

British Council: Farming (film)

Related Blogs

Blog - Childhood: The pupils of Corona School, Shamrock House, Bukuru, Jos

Blog - Childhood: The pupils of Corona School, Shamrock House, Bukuru, Jos - II

Blog - Childhood: The pupils of Corona School, Shamrock House, Bukuru, Jos - III

Blog - Childhood: Standing up to the powerful

Blog - Nigeria: Gone is the Jos I knew

Blog - Childhood: My aunts saw red

Blog - Childhood: The fruits of a chicken napping dog

Blog - Childhood: Driving the languages of sacrifice

Blog - The masterpieces of memory

Blog - Even more memories of a child

Blog - More memories of a child

Blog - Rayfield, Jos - Memories of a child

Thought Picnic: Weeping for ourselves and others

Time is short

Ephemeral is the thought that creeps into the mind, the wonder about our existence that exists in a timeframe measurable and quantifiable, sometimes short and then for some quite long, that we are caught at the end in a kind of celebration of life like an account closed at the end of many transactions.

For those who have a faith, the belief of an existence beyond this temporal realm. We find that we battle between mortal morbidity and a hopeful eternity. The thought that this phase of enlivenment is the preparation for a timeless future that boggles the mind.

We never knew

The receipt of access to this bliss of promise that begins from herein provides the assurance that whenever we depart, the limitations of the senses pass away for the unlimited expanse of spiritual incredulity that the imagination cannot begin to fathom.

Though we have heard from scripture the phrase “the weeping and gnashing of teeth”, which is considered in the frame of reference of punishment, it was surprising to me when an inference was made to this emotional activity being found in paradise.

The realisation that we never fully understood the promise of heaven on earth, that regret and sorrow will require even the encompassing loving godly miracle from the Father of comfort and succouring for us to enter the grace into which we were called before the beginning of the world.

In Christ alone

For one, for the little and the plenty, for each day that is both eventful and seems without event, for each breath that one takes in sustaining life is a sense of gratitude and thankfulness.

For whenever our storied experience on this terrain ends, we might have lived knowing that we might not be worthy of anything but are still counted worthy of everything that was sacrificed. Not of what we have done, but out of what was done for us.

Foods and fruits to the belly

Eating too much

Get those spices and aromas wafting through the apartment block, the kind of entreaty you should expect from someone who enjoys your cooking when you do it right.

However, on the subject of food and eating, I was just braising some beef cuts and expressing the fear that once done, half of it would have been eaten before it landed in the next stage of cooking for a stew or something else.

Then, I remembered how on Twitter a friend talked of his wife getting a dozen succulent meat pies this morning and he has gone through 6 of them already, no one is any wiser of the fact until she returns and I can only wonder how the conversation would go.

Mangoes on the yellow

Brian had his aunt visiting with a big basket of fruits, his fear was wondering what would be the result of eating, sorry quaffing down 5 mangoes. I was waiting on this end to find out what lessons were learnt from this sudden penchant for gluttony. Unfortunately for me, he seems to think he should have more mangoes when in fact the colour of his effluent as he described it, might be from mangoes than vitamins.

Anyway, the beef is cooked, and I have had two or three bites, the battle of resistance begins if I must count myself more disciplined than the mango-eating meat pie-quaffing men. I know I can, I’m sure I would.