Carnival day in London

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33101, 16 December 1972, Page 11

Carnival day in London

( By

, SANDRA JOBSON)

“What a wonderful, wonderful thing it is. O Jesus my Lord.” The sweet melodious song came from a large West Indian woman sweeping London’s Westbourne Park station in the rain. A bad-tempered traveller growled, “What d’ya want to make that racket for?”

To be black in London is pretty tough these days, with unemployment, inflation and unwelcoming whites. But somehow the blacks manage to keep their spirits up by singing, and smiling, and dancing to reggae, their brand of rock music which could become the English equivalent of American slave jazz.

In the black ghetto of the Golbome in Notting Hill—formerly Rachmann territory —they even hold an annual People’s Carnival, when, for one happy day, the blacks can forget that the rest of the year they’re at the bottom of the woodpile. Like the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, the Notting Hill celebrations centre on a dancing procession which winds through the streets. The music is made by a steel band using concave metal discs set in 44-gallon drums hit by mallets. Swaying crowds The compelling rhythm of the reggae soon attracts a motley crowd under the massive concrete expressway flyover cutting Notting Hill into halves — the good side and the slums. The steel band boards a yellow lorry lent by the council of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and the show gets on the road.

A Papa Doc character in dark glasses and cap stands on the roof of the lorry alongside the Carnival Queen, a buxom West Indian lady wearing a big silver star on her forehead. Soon the tatty streets of the “rotten end of

the Royal Borough” leading to Portobello Road are asway with dancing, shuffling people following the slowmoving lorry. The procession goes underneath the railway bridge passing 40-year-old faded graffiti calling on people to “Vote Mosley.” Little West Indian girls, rebellious springy hair tamed into tight pigtails, dance along the pavement dressed as princesses, while their aunts, obese and abandoned, give frienzied displays of the latest Trinidad dances. Joy and pride The police, not usually noted for their patience in this area, try hard to improve their image on Carnival Day, cracking jokes with the crowd and letting little boys try out their parked motor-cycles. The winding Portobello Road is jam-packed with people. Spectators lean out of windows in the crumbling three-storey terraces lining the route, looking down on an ocean of black, frizzy, bobbing heads. There is a look of simple joy and pride on the black faces. Today is their one day of the year. They wear every conceivable costume — blue jeans sewn with red carpet fringes, silver foil suits, armv regalia, sequins. It'is left to the whites to watch from the sidelines, unable to match the unselfconsciousness of the celebrating blacks. The Notting Hill Irish are there —red hair, babies in prams, tired expressions on the women’s The middle-class liberals are in trendy gear. And the white Notting Hill hippies and militants who have thrown in their lot with the poor dance alongside their black brothers and sisters. Tired but happy The carnival shuffles and lurches up Portobello Road and down Ladbroke Grove and the tired but happy

crowd dances on, sending up an aroma of incense, soap and marijuana into the soft English air. By evening it snakes back to the place it started from, underneath the concrete arches of the motorway. The carnival is over but it was great while it lasted. It was great to forget for a day the realities of being an immigrant in Britain. To forget that 14.6 per cent of West Indians are out of work, twice the national average, the first to be fired, last to be hired.

In pre-Enoch Powell days things were a little better. There weren’t so many slogans scrawled on walls saying “All wogs out” and “Gc home blacks.” And today in Notting Hill, inflation is adding new strains. Rising rents Property speculators have moved into the area, seeing potential in the seedy but basically sound Victorian tenements so close to Hyde Park and Portobello Road. Former tenants are forced to move out of their rooms, which are then converted into luxury flats to be sold to the middle classes for $30,000 upwards. And rents are rising. The Government’s recent Fair Rents legislation is yet another factor in the inflationary spiral, and the majority of West Indian wives are forced to go to work to make ends meet. This means that their young children must be put in the anything-but-tender hands of a West Indian childminder, who charges around $lO a week a child, often feeding 20 of them on bread and crusts and scraps and keeping them cooped up in a room rather than taking them to the park. Deprived generation The result is yet another generation of deprived black children whose minds have not been awakened during their early formative years. '4

They start school handicapped. Some cannot even speak. School in England for the average black child is a place to pass the time until the minimum leaving age. Then, freedom of a sort: freedom to hang about cafes all dav and to dance to reggae ail night; freedom to apply for unemployment relief—around ($l7 a week at 17 years of age. And freedom to turn to handbag-snatching and other crime for quick cash or diversion.

Unemployment especially cripples the boys. Not having a job saps their male pride, so they compensate by wearing lairy clothes and bv moving in on girls to live off their wages (black girls can find jobs more easily if they can type 30 words a minute) But then the girl becomes pregnant, the boy moves on, leaving her to cope with a small child. So she sends it to the child-minder and the cycle of deprival is repeated. Racial prejudice Such social problems add to the smouldering prejudice against black people in England. Ever since Enoch Powell began his black-bait-ing the West Indians have received the brunt of racial prejudice, but with the influx of 50,000-odd Ugandan Asians the circle of prejudice is widening. The blacks and whites in Notting Hill, however, have learned to live with one another and hold an uneasv truce. Young people of all races fraternise on Portobello Road every Saturdav. linked bv a common taste in music and clothes.

Even the shopkeeners find a wry humour in the situation. The other day 1 saw a black customer carefully

counting out his pennies at a comer wine shop. The white proprietor watched him for a while, then said, “You Scots are ail the same when it comes to thrift ”