Perhaps its because of my work, or simply a feature of my personality, but I am interested in people, their origins and their lives, arguably to the point of nosiness. Thus I observe that it took four men of African heritage to get me through Manchester Airport and onto a flight home to Derry.
I use crutches, a wheelchair and a mobility scooter at home. I used the same set of equipment, hired in Manchester, to help me have the fullest possible visit to my daughter and her family on the occasion of ‘the big girl’ starting school. Her ‘wee sister’ did the school run in her buggy, occasionally craning her head round and looking back, making sure I was keeping up. Nanny, my wife, pushed the buggy. The ‘big sister’ trotted gamely beside us.
Where equipment supported me on the school run, four men supported me at the airport. I had my own crutches and I took them with me in a taxi from a local firm in Thameside. If the driver ever fills in a Home Office questionnaire on national identity, he will tick ‘White English’. I tick ‘White Irish’.
The journey was enlivened by the driver’s chat and our enjoyment of it. We all liked Thin Lizzy, playing on the taxi radio. We suggested he search out Rory Gallagher. When the chat turned to football, he revealed he was a Manchester Red and made a racist remark about Manchester City and Pakistanis.
I pulled him on it, saying he was out of order. He echoed the worst of racist verbiage that underlies racism in England and football. He didn’t make another racist remark and we parted on cordial terms at Terminal 3.
I crutched my way into the Terminal Building and readily found the Special Assistance area, where airlines and airports provide a support service for people with disabilities.
A man, ‘White English’, confirmed my booking and we took a seat. All the other staff were of migrant stock, first or second generation. They would tick boxes as ‘African English’ or ‘Black English’. The language gets clumsy, when you try to pin identity on colour, countries or continents.
Almost immediately, a slim young man brought a wheel chair towards us and said he would take us to bag drop. I have never been to the north east corner of the African continent, but by his build and expression, I wondered if he would tick the box ‘Ethiopian English’, ‘Sudanese English’, ‘Eritrean English’ or ‘Somali English’.
We chatted about how quiet the airport was. He advised it would get busier later. He took us to the RyanAir Bag drop area. He lugged our suitcase onto the conveyor belt, then he pushed me back to the holding area, where we sat again, our wheelchair beside us. We were in the system. Our Assistant smiled, as he said good-bye and was immediately given another assignment, an older ‘White English’ woman with a bag to drop.
We weren’t seated long when a tall man came to us. He was neatly dressed in the livery of the company handling Special Assistance, right down to an expertly knotted neck-tie. He introduced himself as Jallow. I missed his first name, being in mid-swing back into the wheelchair. I said I was Dave. I said I knew people called Jallow when I lived in West Africa. He said he was from The Gambia and a member of the Fulani people. The Fulani are renowned traders and pastoralists. Some 30 million of them live along the western side of the continent. He said his wife was related to the politician Adama Barrow. My wife walked beside us, joining the conversation.
The chat livened up, when I told him myself and my wife met in The Gambia in the late 1970s and that we had been visiting our daughter and grandchildren in Manchester. He said he had two grownup daughters in Germany and a wife in The Gambia. He returned home as often as he could. When we said we were with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), he said he knew VSO people, mainly teachers in schools and agriculturalists in the villages, but of a later generation than us. He knew the Canadian equivalent, Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO). He knew Irish Catholic mission people-priests and nuns. He was born and raised between Basse and Fatoto, where the river Gambia acts as a colonial border between British imperialism in The Gambia and French Imperialism in Senegal.
My wife told him she had taken books to the primary schools in the villages in that area, as part of her role as stand-in national children’s librarian. A Gambian was in Nigeria on further training. She said she still had a carved and painted wooden crocodile given to her as a gift on a visit to the school in Song Kunda. Jallow told us, without missing a beat in his wheelchair pushing, that it was the village where his mother was born.
It was like getting news from an old friend.
He told us how much change the bridges across the river had brought, some good, some not so good. He sounded like he missed the ferries, though small manually-punted ones still traded. He named people and places with which we were familiar. It was the classic discourse of an economic emigrant recalling his homeland with pleasure. We were glad to be with him on the long push to the security area, where a Nigerian Londoner deftly managed the intimacies of getting me in and out of the wheelchair, through an x-ray gate, dealt with the dilemma of ‘shoes on/shoes off’, given my inability to stand for an extended period or walk in stockinged feet.
He passed us back to Jallow again and we pushed on to the departure gate, where Jallow settled us in a final holding area. We saw some of the travellers we’d seen earlier. We said goodbye to Jallow and thanked him.
We started the last leg, well-negotiated now by a man I guessed to be of North African heritage – Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian? Like his colleagues, he spoke clear English, though there was not much chance of a chat, as we were deep in the hubbub of converging crowds for departing flights. He took me to the bottom of the steps of the plane and I climbed them, one step at a time, holding hard to the handrail, right to the top, then turned to make my way into the cabin and to my seat. The flight was short. I read a magazine article.
On landing, I expected to hobble along the passageway to the front, then down more steps and into an awaiting wheelchair. Instead I was directed to the rear exit, met by a member of ground staff (White Irish?, White British?), who directed me to turn left, away from the steps and into another wheelchair in the hoist, a crate on stilts. I hadn’t been in one for a number of years.
We descended and I was pushed across tarmac once more. The light drew my eyes west to the low ground where the river Foyle ran and, beyond that, to the rolling hills of Inishowen. It was dry and sunny. I was home.
People from countries on the continent of Africa have been exploited for centuries, by a form of ‘special assistance’ known as colonialism. A contemporary version of that assistance helped me get home from a visit to my emigrant family. I am grateful to those men and their families. Without them, my life would not be as good as it is.
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