A Woman of Firsts

CHAPTER FIVE

Jessica and I flew to England in October 1954. I was seventeen years old and she was three months younger. Leaving all that I knew behind, I set off on my big adventure. I’d never been on a plane before so I was agog at our multiple flights in a DC-3 via Aden, Khartoum, Cairo and Athens with eight young Somali men who’d also been selected for a scholarship.

From the moment we arrived at Heathrow airport and were met by representatives from the British Council and the Colonial Office we were treated extremely well. The Somali boys were especially protective of us and anxious that Jessica and I wouldn’t be living with them but placed elsewhere. Traditionally, the scholarship boys were put up in a boarding house with older pupils already in the UK who could help them adjust. Jessica and I were such novelties as girls that they didn’t know quite what to do with us, so we were put in ‘digs’. Our new home was in Balham, south London with a family called the Rodgers. The father worked as a postman and the couple rented out their upper rooms to lodgers. Jessica and I shared one room and there was a tenant in the other. The Rodgers were very welcoming and they introduced us to their children, Gillian, Jacqueline and Roger, who were close to our age and kind to the two strange girls in their midst.

The first thing that struck me about Britain was how cold and wet it was. I’d read Dickens and the Bronte sisters, so I’d expected rain and autumn mists but not the damp chill. My English vocabulary immediately grew with words like fog and frost, slush and sleet. It also got noticeably darker so much sooner than in Somaliland, where the sun sets and rises roughly the same time all year. We didn’t have televisions in Somaliland but we did go to the movies, so we had a general idea of what London looked like. The big city was far larger than I’d imagined, though, with so many cars. What shocked me most were escalators and lifts, neither of which I’d ever seen before and was afraid to use at first.

Perhaps the most memorable initial experience in London was having so much of my own money. The Colonial Office paid us an allowance of £33 a month to cover our rent, breakfast and evening meal, provided by Mrs Rodgers. We could buy lunch at our college and keep the rest of the money back for bus and train fares, and other expenses. They also gave us £50 each with which to buy some clothes suitable for a British winter. Fifty ‘quid’ was a small fortune and we couldn’t believe our luck. A family friend of Jessica’s offered to take us shopping, which excited us until he took us to Woolworths and the Army & Navy stores where he insisted that we buy identical shoes, raincoats and hats. We reluctantly did as we were told but kept some money back and the next day went out on our own to the West End.

Oxford Street was like El Dorado to us; we were so amazed by how beautiful and shiny and silky all the clothes were. We blew almost all that was left of our allowance on impractical blouses and silly frilly things that were completely inappropriate. The only scary part of our big day out was taking the Tube. I’d seen trains before in Djibouti but I’d never actually been on one. I didn’t know that they could go underground, and that frightened the life out of me, for fear that the roof might collapse or there’d be a flood. To this day, I take the bus rather than the Tube.

Within a few days, I had run out of cash and couldn’t afford the train or the bus but I knew I couldn’t ask the Rodgers for money. Jessica had an aunt in Cardiff who helped her out, but I had no one, so I went to a post office and sent a telegram to my father.

‘Dear Dad. STOP. Urgently need money for bus fares. STOP. Please send money. STOP. Shukri.’

The reply came back surprisingly quickly:

‘Don’t waste your money sending telegrams. STOP. Make do with what is given to you. STOP.’

I was so angry with him then. He was a rich man by Somali standards. He was building his own house – as the first Somalilander who’d been allowed to purchase a plot of land in the exclusive European residential area. Yet he was refusing to even send me as much as the sixpenny bus fare to tide me over. I now know that this was exactly the right thing for him to have done and – thanks to Adan Ismail – I have always lived within my means. Embarrassingly, though, I had to borrow money and walk instead of catching the bus until my next month’s allowance arrived. That’s when I started saving – the best lesson I ever learned from my father.

Because I was not yet eighteen, I couldn’t enrol in a nursing programme immediately even if I’d been ready for it, which I wasn’t. My scholarship provided for two years of preparatory study that enabled me to complete my secondary schooling and a pre-nursing programme at the Borough Polytechnic in Elephant & Castle, south London. Jessica and I started together at the ‘poly’ where I was the only black girl in the class (being of mixed race, she was much fairer skinned than I was).

Despite standing out physically, I didn’t feel different and quickly made friends. I was popular with the teachers and loved my studies, apart from domestic science in which we had to make hot cross buns and a Sunday roast – things I would never make in Somaliland. If only they’d asked me to make rice custard! As in Djibouti, my biggest challenge was the language. Jessica spoke English far better than I did because she’d done all her basic schooling in it, but once I grasped the language I was away.

There were so few coloured students that I was in demand as a model for the art students to practise pigmentation and skin tones. One of the teachers there also taught in a studio in St John’s Wood and paid me £1 per session plus my bus fare to go there one night a week. The students only ever painted my hands, learning how to mix the colours to achieve my particular shade of brown. It may have been unusual for the times, but I don’t honestly remember encountering any racism in London. I was more of a curiosity than a threat, like the time I was on the bus and a mother and her young son sat opposite me. The child couldn’t take his eyes off my Afro hair and finally asked his mother, ‘Can I have a golliwog doll for Christmas?’ I didn’t say anything but the woman was clearly embarrassed, even more so when I made some response to the ticket collector and the child piped up, ‘And can I have one who talks like that?’ Seeing the mother’s horror, I just smiled and said, ‘And I sing too!’ as his eyes came out on stalks. I think that put us all at ease.

Later when I was nursing, old ladies seemed especially fascinated by me, but were still always polite. They’d rub my hand with their white sheets to see if the colour came off, or ask questions about life in Africa. One pensioner thanked me for helping her with something before asking, ‘Tell me dear, do you people have houses in Africa?’ I masked my surprise and told her that, yes, we did. It was a question I was asked very often, and I eventually came up with an answer that tended to prevent further enquiries: ‘Why would we have houses when we have trees to hang from?’ Perhaps the strangest question of all was, ‘Is it true that Africans have a tail?’ I was so taken aback that I replied, ‘Yes, but I had mine cut off.’ Seeing a Nigerian nurse working on the other side of the ward, I suggested, ‘Why don’t you ask if she still has hers?’

Aside from the Rodgers family, Jessica and I were also under the benign supervision of a guardian from the Colonial Office, Colonel William Vernon Crook, who’d recently retired from his position as Director of the Department for East Africa and Aden affairs. The colonel, who had a daughter our age and an unmarried sister called Mouse, took Jessica and me under his wing. He had a cottage on the Thames where he kept a boat, so he and his family would take us on cruises up the river and to Kew Gardens to see the tropical plants. He introduced us to horticulture and took us to the Chelsea Flower Show, an annual event attended by the Queen that we’d never otherwise have known about or made time for. I don’t know if the colonel’s prize-winning roses ever made it to Chelsea, but that kind old man with the handlebar moustache gave me a lifelong love of growing plants.

Around this time, I found myself some part-time work reporting on life in the UK for the BBC, which had a relay station in Berbera that broadcast a daily Somali programme of news and events across East Africa. The ‘Beeb’ constantly required new material and would store future fillers, it’s not like milk that can go bad. Somebody at a party asked me if I’d like to contribute, as they wanted female voices for a female audience. I told them I didn’t know how but they sent me to a woman who taught me how to speak slowly into a microphone, take the right number of breaths and never rustle my papers. An engineer and an editor guided me and my reviews about British cultural events were never live so they could always edit out my many mistakes.

To my delight, I was given tickets for the Ideal Home exhibition at Olympia, the ballet at Sadler’s Wells, and concerts at the Royal Festival Hall, reporting on them to my people. I also provided the female voices for some of their regular entertainment programmes such as 1001 Nights. One of my fellow reviewers was a Somali Army cadet called Abdullahi Said Abby, a charming young man who was training in London and who I frequently bumped into at receptions. The BBC paid me five guineas if I was working from a script written for me, and extra if I wrote the script myself. That was a lot of money for a student in those days. If I recorded two or three programmes at once, I’d take home fifteen guineas when a student nurse would only earn eight guineas a month. Working for the BBC helped pay for driving lessons (something I wouldn’t have been allowed to do back home), and enabled me go on holidays to Amsterdam, Paris and the Austrian Tyrol with friends.

The biggest thrill about my work for the BBC was that my father heard me on the radio, and wrote immediately to express his surprise and pride. ‘How do you find the time in between your studies?’ he asked. My mother, who only ever signed the bottom of his many letters to me with, ‘Love from Mum’, didn’t make any comment.

***

The departments and classes at Borough Polytechnic were enormous and I had to adjust to being surrounded by hundreds of teenagers also studying for their O levels in everything from pre-dentistry or pre-medicine to engineering and catering. Those two years were a great experience and forced me to develop better study habits. During my time there I prepared for the state preliminary examination for nursing and also did the equivalent of the first term of Nursing School. This exempted me from one semester of the nursing programme once I was admitted.

One day a week we were taken for some practical experience to the Victorian Belgrave Hospital for Children near the Oval cricket ground in Kennington, south London. In huge, efficient wards, unrecognizable to me from anything I’d experienced in Somaliland, I worked alongside nurses, washed babies, fed and changed them, read to the older children, and helped give them their medication. It was our job to get the more mobile patients out of bed and take them to the window or wrought iron balcony for some fresh air. It was basic, uncomplicated care and we were given no responsibility in case we did something dangerous. I’d done much more practical nursing at home for my dad and was itching to get on, but I wasn’t old enough or good enough yet.

My early years in London weren’t all about work, though – far from it – and Jessica and I could be quite mischievous at times. On the last Saturday of every month there were college dances known as ‘hops’. As this was the Fifties the music was largely swing and jazz featuring singers like Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Perry Como, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Although I’d listened to my mother’s records when I was small, it was in London that I really discovered music for the first time. I bought my first record player, a secondhand Grundig, and spent ages browsing through the Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong albums in record shops. I even queued to see Harry Belafonte perform at the Hammersmith Palais. A few of us also learned to dance so that we could show off at the hops. From then on, dancing became my number one hobby. With my pinched-in, 22-inch waist accentuated by a flared tulle underskirt and my Afro tamed into the tight chignon, I learned the tango, the quickstep, the foxtrot and the rumba.

The music department provided the musicians for these events and the catering students made the food and sold the drinks, so the whole college was involved. Dancing is thirsty work and one night Jessica and I spent so much on orange squash that we didn’t have the Tube fare home. We began to walk, but had no idea of the direction. The Rodgers had told us that if we ever had a problem we should find a policeman, so we walked and walked looking for a ‘bobby’ until we found two on foot patrol. We always carried a piece of paper with our address in it – 137 Ramsden Road – so we showed it to them and explained that we were lost.

‘Goodness, you’re a long way from home!’ one of the officers exclaimed. ‘Just a moment.’ He went to a telephone box, called up his police station and before we knew it a squad car arrived to pick up two ‘lost’ girls – who weren’t lost at all really – and drove us all the way to Balham. We arrived at about 1 a.m. and a policeman rang on the doorbell (waking the whole household) and handed us over to the Rodgers, telling them, ‘We found these two waifs.’ Mr Rodgers thanked them for their kindness and we all went to bed. Very cheekily after that we made one more attempt to use the Metropolitan Police as a kind of personal taxi service. We even made a game of it, walking miles in the search for different policeman to trick into taking us home. In the end, word got around and the long-suffering officers told us, ‘No more!’

After my first Christmas in London, I attended a New Year’s Eve ball for overseas students and their host families arranged by the British Council. This gala event had a big band and lots of dancing. I don’t recall the venue, but I do recall the handsome man who came up to ask me for a dance. While we were waltzing, he asked, ‘Where are you from?’

‘Somaliland,’ I replied.

He stopped dancing and stared at me.

I laughed. ‘What, don’t you know where Somaliland is?’

He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Yes, I do. I am from Somaliland too!’

It was my turn to be shocked. ‘No! Then w-who are you?’ I stammered. I thought I knew all the students from Somaliland, but here was a Somali I’d never encountered.

‘Well, who are you?’ he countered.

‘I am Edna Adan Ismail,’ I told him, knowing that the mention of my father’s name never failed to impress someone from my country. It worked. He couldn’t believe it and said that he was directly related to my mother. His name was Mohamed, the twenty-six-year-old son of Haji Ibrahim Egal, whose family I knew. I spent the entire evening dancing with him after that and when we parted I gave him my address and phone number.

The next day the first bouquet I ever received in my life was delivered to Ramsden Road. The enormous cluster of roses from a handsome older man made quite an impression on a naïve seventeen-year old. I kept the note I found nestling in among the blooms for many years. It said:

‘Thank you for such a wonderful, delightful evening. Do you realize that we made history – probably the first Somalis who danced together in England? Mohamed.’

Mrs Rodgers found a vase to put my flowers in, and for several weeks they brightened up the living room we shared. I was not a very romantic person and had never been out with any boy before, unless in a group. I was too passionate about my work to have time for romance and anyway the Somali tradition was that you never ‘messed around’ until you got married. Not that I could – my circumcision made that decision easy – and any boy who violated the daughter of Adan Dhakhtar Ismail and robbed me of my virginity would be considered to have raped me, with terrible repercussions for his family. There would have been vendettas and rebellions, as this was one code of ethics you did not break.

Nevertheless, a few days later Mohamed invited me to dinner and I accepted. To my surprise, he arrived in a convertible sports car. This was the first inkling I had of his fondness for expensive, showy things; but then I remembered that his father was reportedly one of the richest men in Somaliland. All the neighbours peered out of their windows and I could almost see their blinds twitching as I climbed into the red MG. We had a lovely evening and he took me to dinner a couple of times after that, but then he simply disappeared. I never heard a word from him. Mrs Rodgers would ask, ‘Whatever became of that nice young man who sent you flowers?’ I had no answer, because I didn’t know what had happened to him. We hadn’t fought, we hadn’t argued. He just vanished. It was almost a year later when I learned that his father had suffered a stroke and he’d flown back to Somaliland in a hurry. As the only surviving child of a mother who’d been pregnant eighteen times and lost her other son to a snakebite, Mohamed’s duty was to be by her side. Haji Ibrahim Egal died six months later, and Mohamed remained to run the family business, forgetting to write to a girl he’d once sent flowers to in London.

After a year with the Rodgers, Jessica and I bade them a fond farewell and moved into a boarding house run by nuns at 24 The Boltons, off the Old Brompton Road in Kensington. It was a place that took in mainly rich girls from abroad studying the arts. The property was a fine white stucco building with individual bedrooms and a common dining room. It was located in a very fashionable part of town, closer to the station and with a more frequent bus service. We loved living there and when we weren’t working, we went to the movies or to dances with friends. I recall that one of the films I saw that I enjoyed the most was called The World of Suzie Wong, starring the Hollywood heartthrob William Holden. Once a week we’d have social evenings where we were each invited to discuss our cultures. Jessica and I learned all about Ireland, the Gambia, China, India, Portugal and Finland from the other girls before it was our turn to don traditional Somali nomad dress – six metres of unstitched white cloth tied a bit like a sari and adorned with amber beads – and sing Somali songs. It was a great way to break the ice.

It was a lot of fun living in the centre of cosmopolitan London. I was made so welcome and enjoyed my newfound freedom. Despite the parties and the pranks, however, I remained a diligent student and passed all my exams – including anatomy and physiology – with good grades. I did so well, in fact, that my teachers hinted that I might consider switching from nursing to medicine, but I was undecided about that and resolved to ask my father’s advice when I was next back home. The previous few years had brought about such momentous changes, yet there I was, eighteen years old, living in a very different kind of world and with my nursing studies about to begin. I was no longer a frightened little girl, confused by life’s mysteries and holding onto my father’s hand. I was a young woman doing as I pleased, on the brink of my chosen career. Life was good.

***

In the summer of 1956, I went home for the first time in two years. This was something that had always been promised by the Colonial Office and was much anticipated by those of us who’d been away so long.

Everything seemed smaller than I remembered but it was good to be back. I’d been especially homesick for spicy curries and chilli peppers. The food in London seemed so bland by comparison to our Indian-influenced cooking. I had also missed my brother Farah and my younger sister Asha, then eight. I wished my grandmother Clara were still alive so I could go to Borama with her and drink cow’s milk, but the herd had been sold long ago and she’d died of cancer of the uterus before I left for Britain. Most of all, I wanted to see my dad. By then he’d finished building his house – one of the first in Hargeisa to have electricity and a telephone (connected to an exchange) – and he even owned his own car. For the first time in his working life he was no longer dependent on the British government for accommodation or transport. My parents were proud of me, or at least my father was. Mum never said much and I’m sure she wanted me to give up my dream, come home and settle down. Her most oft-repeated comment was, ‘I married a crazy husband and he gave me a crazy daughter.’