A Ghanaian in England — Part 1

Big stones, Henry VIII, a horse and some dreadlocks

November 2018. There’s a bitter wind slicing across the Salisbury plain. The sun might be out, but it makes no difference to the number of layers we’re wearing. We are two African women in England.

One of us — me, that is — has been living here for nearly 30 years but I’m just as wrapped up as Anita, the tourist, and my hands are made from ice. The winters don’t get any easier.

These stones, however, have withstood the elements for quite a while and will continue to do so for some time yet.

It’s a bit unreal actually, this place. It’s disappointingly unimpressive viewed from the A303 but once you get up close and allow the imagination to take over it’s clear why Stonehenge is so steeped in enigma. It’s one of those moments when you really, really wish you had a time machine.

We’re told the henge was constructed at least a couple of thousand years BC and there’s an awful lot of speculation about exactly why you would go about creating a ring of vertical megaliths in the first place. Not content with this, the ancient builders then chose to further confound future generations by placing lintels on top of the standing stones as if to link them all together. I’m not about to start analysing the history and the theories here but the builders must have had a powerful incentive because these things are, in a word, BIG.

Anyway, here we are now, in the twenty-first century, and the civil engineer in me is less interested in the ‘why’, being completely taken up with the ‘how’. Five’ll get you ten that the project was over budget and behind program and that the risk register was all red. The stones have been rearranged several times, according to archaeologists, and some of them have toppled over, possibly more than once. Maybe they should’ve allowed for the piled foundations in the tender after all. Or some sort of foundations anyway.

Years of too many druid solstice celebrations have taken their toll on Stonehenge and nowadays tourists are kept at a distance on a path that circles round the ring of stones; I understand the reasons for trying to preserve them. The visitor centre contains many gems of information, however. The creators have made a commendable attempt at telling a story without knowing the plot or the motivations of any of the characters.

November moves into December and we take ourselves off to Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard. It’s a potted overview of Britain’s naval history and is a must-see place if you ever find yourself in Hampshire. You can explore every corner of both the HMS Victory and the HMS Warrior and easily lose three hours in the Mary Rose museum.

Given that we’re at the “Dickensian Christmas Market” though, the last person we expect to see is Henry.

He’s got his timeline mixed up for sure. He’s never heard of this Dickens bloke and he’s not overly concerned that all these plebs are gawking at the remains of his Vice-Admiral’s flagship — and at the remains of some of his crew. He’s on the prowl for women. He chats up Anita for a bit but all she’ll agree to is a photo. He then proposes to me.

Me: “You’ve got to be kidding. With your track record?”

Henry: “Aw, c’mon. Own house, GSOH, full-time job, lots of money, a ship….. Well, okay, I can always get another one made. I’m the King.”

Me: “Two wives sent packing, one expired and two for the chop. The sixth one managed to stay married and in one piece, but what would be in store for me? Hung, drawn and quartered? Thrown out of a helicopter?”

Henry: “Thrown out of a….sorry, what?”

I drew his attention to Ebenezer’s personalized number plate but he just looked blank, lost interest in me and wandered off after identifying another potential mate. I think he’s being way too optimistic about this.

Charles Dickens, however, is having significantly more luck in getting noticed. I haven’t spotted the man himself, but his characters are turning up everywhere. What I can’t quite figure out is why Miss Havisham’s set up camp on board the HMS Warrior. Better not let Henry know she’s here…

And so to some riding lessons nearer home in Basingstoke. Having never sat on a horse — or even been near a horse — in her life, Anita proves to be an able pupil. Two sessions on the amenable and tolerant French Trotter, Floxy, and she’s confident, comfortable and guiding him in pretty accurate 20m circles.

She buttered him up first, though. Gave him a good brush, teased out his tail and had a few words with him before mounting up.

Then she informs me that a radical makeover is long overdue and books herself into the local salon specializing in styling Afro-Caribbean hair.

The Jamaican barber is cautious: “Are you absolutely sure you wanna lose the dreads?”

She’s had them for 12 years, she says, but now is the time to move on.

It’s sad to see them go, but at least the riding helmet will fit better now.

A Ghanaian in England — a short note of explanation…

Friend requests from complete strangers on Facebook are to be treated with caution and it’s my habit to ignore them. But way back in 2008 I was a member of a group uniting Africans scattered across the globe and Anita popped up and asked me to connect with her. I did. She lived in Accra and was studying film production, her chosen career. She has since become well known as a maker of documentaries that have been screened at festivals and has also worked with the BBC.

We tentatively messaged each other a bit, then she pulled out of FB and we exchanged email addresses. Over the years our correspondence grew in length and frequency until we were sharing personal heartache stories and having evening conversations on WhatsApp about the day just past. She had done a fair bit of traveling, including film industry-related trips to such far-flung places as Singapore and Columbia, but she had never visited England. Early in 2018 we hatched a plan for her to stay with me for 3 weeks. By this time we’d known each other for ten years and had never met face to face but I don’t believe either of us had any doubts that we were doing the right thing.

Random, complete-stranger Facebook friends had become sisters.