Heart and Soul - The Emotional Autobiography of Melissa Bell, Alexandra Burke's Mother. Melissa Bell
and Katie because I was fixated with girls. I would draw pictures of girls all the time, making up names and life stories for them, colouring in their patchwork clothes. Patchwork was really fashionable at the time and I longed to have outfits of my own like that, but no one would buy them for me. I was living out a sort of fantasy life through my cats and my pictures.
‘But this is a boy cat,’ my sister would try to reason with me. ‘He should have a boy’s name.’
‘No, I want to call her Mary Jane!’ I was adamant, so my sister would just laugh and shrug and leave me to it.
Although we were living in a small house and I never had a bedroom of my own, Mum and Dad were both always working hard, which meant we were never without money for the necessities of life, so in the beginning I didn’t realise we were hard up at all. I just thought we were normal.
In 1972, having been in England for 14 years, Dad must have felt that he had made enough money, because he decided to sell the house in London and return to his homeland to build the house he had always dreamed of and set himself up in business again. So the first time I saw Jamaica was when we returned that year, when I was eight, flown into Kingston Airport by BOAC, as British Airways then was.
This was the year when Michael Jackson was singing ‘Ben’ and ‘Rockin’ Robin’, Sly and the Family Stone were singing ‘Family Affair’ and Roberta Flack had her first monster hit with ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ after Clint Eastwood chose it for the soundtrack of his directorial debut Play Misty for Me.
My grandmother decided to stay in England and not to come with us. She rented a room from the Charles family, some friends of ours who had a house not far away in Tottenham. Even though we moved around a lot in the coming years, we were always renting from friends or staying with relatives; we were never in strangers’ houses. No matter where we were or how cramped our living conditions became, we were always surrounded by familiar, friendly faces. It’s the same in my house today, with people coming and going all the time, sharing rooms, sharing beds, sleeping on bunks and sofas and floors. People always need to have places to go where they will be among friends at difficult times of their lives when they are newly arrived in a city or between homes of their own for whatever reason. If families and friends don’t open their doors to people when they need shelter, that is when the unlucky ones end up sleeping on the streets and sliding to the bottom of the pile. That sense of community spirit and sharing is so important when you are relatively recently arrived in a country and it is hard to get established. The Charles family were from Trinidad and were another of the families that always used to come to my parents’ Saturday-night parties.
In Kingston, we stayed with the family of my sister’s best university friend, Beverley Randall. Mum had been very kind and welcoming to Beverley when she was studying in England, making her part of the family in her inimitable way, so the Randalls were happy to return the favour. Theirs was a lovely house in a district called Greenwich Farm and Mrs Randall spent all her time sitting peacefully in her rocking chair on the veranda, watching the world go by in the street outside. I expect that was the sort of peaceful life Mum and Dad were imagining they would achieve for themselves once they had built their house.
The two families had known each other since before Mum and Dad even came to England the first time, and Beverley lived with us in the holidays when she came over to study: yet another person cheerfully crammed into our overcrowded living space. Because she was older than me, Mum insisted that I show her ‘respect’, which meant I had to call her ‘Sister Beverley’ and not just ‘Beverley’. When she graduated from university, she went to Miami to become a nurse, which seemed incredibly exciting to me because America was where all the best music seemed to come from. It was like some distant promised land that I dreamed of one day visiting.
After a few weeks, Dad managed to rent us a room of our own in Acacia Gardens, a nice middle-class suburb of Kingston, which we moved into while he set about building us a house of our own on a plot in Spanish Town, an area where the singer Grace Jones was born and lived until she was 17, when she moved to New York with her parents and grew up to become a complete legend.
As usual, things didn’t work out quite as smoothly as Dad had hoped and it wasn’t long before the money started to run out and we had to go back to the Randalls while the builders continued to work on the house in the sun at their leisurely local pace.
Some of Dad’s original dry-cleaning businesses on the island had closed down without him there to oversee them, but a few still had customers and so he hired new people and tried to get everything up and running again as it had been before he left for England. He was always looking for new business ideas, talking to people, dreaming of making it big, imagining that he was about to solve all his problems and become a wealthy man. At one stage, he even opened a bar in a premises next to one of the dry-cleaning businesses. He stocked it up and there was a big opening night with free food and drink for all comers, which attracted freeloaders from all over Kingston. It wasn’t unlike the sort of parties he and Mum used to throw in England on Saturday nights except that I didn’t know all the people who came to drink with him at the bar. Dad was in his element as the owner and the centre of attention and everyone went away having had a fantastic night out at his expense. But I think that that was the only marketing idea he had managed to come up with for the venture because nothing much seemed to happen after that and there never seemed to be many customers.
Dad was always coming up with ideas, always busy, always talking to people, but he never laid proper plans or did any research or took good business advice. As I grew older, I noticed that he always seemed to end up floundering at everything he tried, moving on from one thing to another with a great fanfare of optimism. A few months after its riotous launch, I wandered into the bar and went behind the counter to get myself a soft drink, as I often did.
‘Your dad doesn’t own this place any more,’ a woman leaning on the bar told me.
It was the first I’d heard of it. I think there may have been some problems with his licence but, whatever the reason, that was the end of another of his little dreams.
He was a very stubborn man and would never listen to anyone if they weren’t telling him what he wanted to hear, so a lot of the time Mum gave up bothering and just let him get on with things. He didn’t get violent with her, like a lot of men do with their wives if they don’t agree with them, but he would shout so loudly that it was impossible for anyone else to make themselves heard and so he would always win any argument.
That trip was my first time abroad, which made it an even more intense and exotic experience to my young eyes. I can remember so many vivid details from the moment we first landed, coming out of the plane into the unexpected heat and gazing around me at the airport shacks and what looked like jungle foliage beyond. A porter in the little airport building tried to persuade Mum to allow him to take her bag, and I remember her sending him on his way, telling him he was charging too much, that she could ‘carry her own bag, thank you very much’.
Despite the heat and the tropical look of the place with its palm trees and colourful local people, the thing that struck me first as we drove through the streets of Kingston was that I couldn’t see any fish and chip shops or Wimpy Bars. To be deprived of the places that had always brought me the most comfort in my young life was disquieting and immediately I began to worry.
The mood of the spoiled little girl who had been brought up pretty much as an only child, allowed to have whatever she wanted, grew gradually darker in the following days. I threw tantrums at the slightest provocation, like when they told me there wasn’t a sweet shop in Kingston and I was just going to have to eat fresh fruit like everyone else. As the weeks went by and I grew increasingly hot and hungry and bored, I was making life hell for everyone. I was determined to force them into taking me home to England, where I would be able to indulge myself with all the things I was used to. The only advantage to all this deprivation, as I saw it, was that I slimmed right down for the first time I could remember.
Despite my tantrums, Dad was determined to make a life for us on the island. He refused to listen to my pleadings to be returned home and enrolled me in a local school, confident that I would get used to the idea eventually,