Six Views of Britain

Six Views of Britain Fred D’Aguiar (bio) 1 One abiding image of South London from 1979 was of a line of Nation Front marchers protectively sandwiched by police striding through Lewisham High Street to the jeers of locals with astonished or outraged expressions on their black and white faces. The police asserted the democratic right of the marchers to freely express any viewpoint, however inflammatory or provocative it might be to the community. At the time I felt hurt to hear the racial slurs chanted in public and to see the police vigorously deployed to ensure that the racist marchers could in all safety and security launch their racist insults in the midst of a black community. If as a black citizen you were not certain whether you were welcome or not in the UK, if you needed more evidence from a ruling power of your exclusion as a black person from the national picture—this Nation Front march was it. The counter demonstration drew equal numbers of police. Keeping the two sides apart had to be a challenge but the democratic principle had to be upheld (so the purist argument said). Back then, not a single young person I knew bought into that perspective. Few people who resided in the Lewisham, Catford, Deptford, New Cross, Greenwich areas believed in the principle. It seemed convenient to invoke a democratic right as a basis for protecting the National Front’s public display of hatred of blacks in a black settlement. In fact using a democratic platform to mount an undemocratic agenda turned out to be a contradiction of the democratic ideal given the incitement to blacks of a white supremacist group parading in a black neighborhood. Locals viewed the democratic argument as a smokescreen to bring home to blacks the more important message of just how unwelcome immigrants and their descendants were in the UK. On my way home from the counter demonstration as I walked hand-in-hand with my then girlfriend away from Lewisham towards Deptford (buses weren’t running because of the police barricades) a van full of police pulled up and grabbed as many young blacks as possible and herded them into vans. Two policemen ran up to me, grabbed me in a headlock, and threw me to the ground. I was punched in my face and my glasses were smashed. Before I knew what hit me I was hurled into a police van where I blurrily made out several bruised black and brown faces of other young men. I happened to be one of the lucky ones. My companion—university educated and when it comes to authority very savvy for a youth in the way the middle class always enviably appear—called everyone we knew for help, including a lecturer at Goldsmiths College whose evening class I attended at the time, and luckily, the lecturer knew an up-and-coming lawyer who agreed to defend me pro bono. The police said I kicked them [End Page 490] and they arrested me. The lawyer, Paul Boateng, walked them through their statement, dismantled its credulity, and had witnesses, along with my girlfriend, who testified to my calm demeanor at the time and the sudden appearance of the police and their strategic pounce on me. The lecturer, Helen Carr, gave me a glowing character witness. She made me feel valued as a student in her class and with some ability as a beginning poet. Her estimation showed me in altogether new light to myself. I say this because it struck me at the time that young black males rarely earned this kind of accolade from the whites around them who were in positions of authority. Mostly, the meeting was for a dressing down of the former by the latter. After the trial we had tea at a café across the road from the court. The case against me was completely dismissed by the presiding judge. I do not remember much afterwards other than a feeling of giddy relief and of thanking Paul and Helen repeatedly for saving me from getting a police record and perhaps a custodial sentence. Many of the young men who were arrested that day

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