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Blood In The River (part two)
Asserting my identity positively wasn’t easy. The members of my nuclear, and extended, family were racist.
Following this weird introduction to scripture, in which only Christianity was studied, there followed a test of ten questions about the Bible. My score was very low and, after the test, Mr. Leaky aggressively criticized me in front of the class saying, ' …with a score like this you have no right to call yourself a Christian!' I replied that I did not call myself a Christian and, as a punishment for that remark, I was told to '...go to the Library and sit with the Jew-boy...' The Jewish boy asked me if I was a Jew too and was not surprisingly a little disappointed when I said that I didn’t believe in any religion. Later in the day, I was indoctrinated by my classmates about the meanness and cruelty of Jews and, knowing no better, I did, for a while, think that the word Jew did not describe a religion but a negative attitude of mind. Luckily the Jewish boy put me right about that a few days later.
Jenny remembers a different experience:
'I always said C of E. and hoped that no one found out that I hadn’t been christened. Or later on, when I went to the Convent I would say ‘Christian’ and hope that no one would find out that I wasn’t a Catholic.' Jennie Suttie 2006
Asserting my identity positively wasn’t easy. The members of my nuclear, and extended, family were racist. My mother less so by commission but her objections to the rest of the family’s comments were infrequent. When friends and family visited over Christmas or on other occasions, the jokes around the dinner table were often of a racist nature. Wogs, coons, natives, japs, yids, spiks, niggers, blackies, pakis, chinks, frogs and krauts peppered the conversation.
In the Essex days, my mother’s attitude to life was decidedly liberal, libertarian and creative. By the time we had settled in Devon, she started dating one of her old childhood friends who later became my stepfather. And, in line with his thinking, my mother stopped voting Liberal, started voting Conservative and would only counter racist remarks when it came to making fun of the Irish. Ed, my stepfather, seemed to think that there was a hierarchy of races. Yet his views that black people lacked intelligence, that the Irish were dishonest and that Jews were out for what they could get, were not applied in some circumstances.
Click here to visit the Nick Nakorn website:
