Bernardine Evaristo on Woolwich / 'We weren’t allowed to play outside'

MADE IN

Bernardine Evaristo on Woolwich: 'We weren’t allowed to play outside'

The Booker-shortlisted novelist on the garrison town on the edge of London where she was first introduced to the writing of James Baldwin and Buchi Emecheta

Bernardine Evaristo
Saturday 7 September 2019

The Woolwich of my childhood was a predominantly white, working-class garrison town on the outskirts of London, the Thames obscured by the fortress-like wall of the Woolwich Arsenal armaments factory. Today it’s an incredibly multicultural district on the verge of gentrification, boasting luxury high rises with spectacular riverside views.

Cannon at Royal Arsenal Riverside, south-east London. Photograph: Loop Images Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

My family – English mother, Nigerian father and seven siblings – lived on Eglinton Road, which wended its way to the vast expanse of Woolwich Common at one end and a parade of shops at the other. My first primary school, Notre Dame Convent, was next door to our house. My second primary school, Plumcroft, was a 10-minute walk up Eglinton Hill. My next school, Eltham Hill Girls’ Grammar, took 20 minutes on the bus. My local youth theatre was a short walk, and the only relative we visited was my maternal grandmother, a 15-minute bus journey away in Abbey Wood. The library, where I stocked up on books every week, and St Peters church, where I went for Catholic indoctrination on Sundays, were both less than a 15-minute walk away. Holidays were unaffordable and I don’t think I travelled to the centre of London, other than for a couple of school trips, until my teens. My world was small, contained and familiar.

Woolwich library saved me from the boredom of uneventful weekends and long summer holidays, especially as we weren’t allowed to play outside our house because of my father’s fears for us in a racially hostile environment. Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes was an early favourite but I can’t remember other childhood books. In my teens I bought cheap second-hand books in a local shop, such as Thor Heyerdahl’s The Kon-Tiki Expedition, Aku-aku and Fatu Hiva, which transported me a million miles beyond my suburban parameters and inspired what would become a life-long love of travelling.

I loved Tennyson, and performed in plays by Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare. I read their words aloud in bed at night, enjoying the drama and rhythm of their language. The soaring choral music and incandescent poetry of daily mass at the Convent from age four to nine, and weekly church services until I was 15, were also subliminal linguistic influences. When I came across secondhand copies of James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen, I was first introduced to writers who wrote from black perspectives, which marked the beginning of my racial awakening, having lived through an overwhelmingly white childhood.

This year Greenwich and Docklands international festival commissioned me to be the Woolwich laureate for this year and to write about it. Walking the streets of my former home town is like visiting a memory map of my childhood.

I left at 18 and have never lived anywhere else for longer. Streets, parks, public spaces and old buildings stir up memories. I feel deeply nostalgic for the ways in which this town shaped my childhood and gave me the safe foundation to go forth and explore the rest of the world.

• Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other has been shortlisted for the Booker prize.

THE GUARDIAN