Time travelling

I'm time travelling through my own life. Karen and I have been friends for so long that there are only a few years of my life before knowing her family. Watching the news today on TV5 made me think of those short years. The news report moved from the avian flu in France, through Europe and back to Nigeria, it showed healthy looking chickens being collected, killed and burnt. Petrol was thrown on them and ignited. I can remember my father telling me about rough justice in Nigeria, Nigerians who would kill other Nigerians in a horrible manner, rubber necklace, put a petrol-soaked tyre around their neck, set fire to it.
British imperialism, by implication, was better than that, we meted out British justice, created the country itself, taught them government and legislature and then handed the country back to them - the year my sister was born.

My mother must have flown back to England to have me. I say must have because I have left it to late to ask, to clear up the little gaps in the story. Unbelievably I can't find my own life on the internet. Well, I haven't really tried, but obviously it's not there.
I was born in Birmingham, but I have never actually lived there. This is where my mother's family was so it stands to reason that she would have flown back there from Nigeria to give birth in a British hospital, far away from the diseases and heat of Africa.

Somewhere there are pictures of me in my old-fashioned metal pram, little sunshade bolted to the side, sitting up and looking at the camera, white blonde hair, sometimes a cotton sunhat. My father is in some of the pictures, young, bearded, dark-framed spectacles. Sometimes it's my mother, also young, dark, wavy hair, perfectly made-up, slim in cotton fifties dresses, so glamourous. It wasn't until she died that I even thought of her like that. My cousin Mike said to me, ' Your mum was always so glamorous, she and your dad would arrive at our house in that convertible with the hood down and your mum was like a film star, headscarf, shades, lipstick.' And that's how she was in the Nigerian pictures, years before.

My father referred to the servants who looked after me and kept house for us as 'boys'. The boys, Ironbar, Georgie-gee-wee, Daffodil. Yes, even Daffodil was a boy. When we went through my parents' stuff, we found letters from them that my mother had kept, beautiful copper-script handwriting, 'Dear Missus,' asking to have their pay early and for why. I'm sure my mother would always have given them what they needed, that was how she was.

And then my mother's worst fears came to pass, I caught maleria. This wasn't something you could fly back to the National Health Service for, this had to be dealt with there and then. I was saved by the Catholic mission, but not in the spiritual sense. I suppose that had I died they would have been there to give me that too. But my mother had taken care to have me baptised in the Church of England before taking me back with her to Africa. The Catholic mission served another purpose too. This was where you could always get a cold drink on the way back from work or from town. Not for the fun-loving Catholics the straitjacket of teetotalism.

But time, politics and the Crown Agents delivered us back to England and to the Royal Fleet Auxiliary in Portsmouth before the birth of my sister. And now the pictures are of Karen and me and our respective sisters as little girls, birthday parties, dressed in frocks and ribbons and glittery shoes.

Halfway through the sixties, a military coup tore Nigeria apart, threatened the republic and the very existence of Nigeria. Some said the British should have stayed, some said it was better to let the Nigerians sort it out for themselves. It's difficult not to look back at that time of stability in the late fifties and wonder though.