7. 3 Mixed marriage
It must have all seemed a bit bleak for Angie, arriving in England in January 1975. Although January was mild that year, it must have felt cold to someone fresh from the Caribbean. Angie always insisted that the weather did not bother her at all, but it’s hard not to suspect that the cold dampness of an Oxford winter must have added to the coldness of the welcome that she experienced in some quarters. She admitted that initially she was disappointed not to have stepped off the aeroplane on to a covering of snow. She had imagined that throughout the winter months the earth was covered with a magical blanket of whiteness, as pictured in the Christmas cards that she had seen, depicting robins on holly twigs and choirboys processing into ancient churches. She did get her wish a few months later. The weather took a chilly turn towards the end of March and she had her first sight of snow in April, when by rights things should have been warming up.
I don’t know what brought Angie to Oxford specifically. She had no ties here – but then she knew no-one in England, so anywhere was as good as anywhere else. Perhaps she expected the hospital in a great university city to provide better opportunities than elsewhere for an aspiring nurse. Angie would probably say that it was God’s guidance that brought her to Oxford – and she’d probably add that one reason for His choice of destination was to enable her to meet and marry me! In my opinion, if that were the case, it must have been for my sake, not Angie’s, because I’m sure He could have found a lot of more promising candidates for her helpmeet than I was. However it happened, she landed up working at the Radcliffe Infirmary and living in the nurses’ home.
In those days, a good proportion of the nurses lived in the home, although it was no longer obligatory for them to do so. Angie found herself living as part of a group of six nurses in what amounted to a self-contained flat. I’ve described the set-up elsewhere, so I won’t go into a lot of detail here. Angie always insisted that they were all friendly enough towards her, but there only seemed to be one of them that she really got close to. That was Elaine Gregg. She was a few years older than Angie and had been a staff nurse at the infirmary for five years. She came from somewhere in the West Midlands – Walsall, I think, or it may have been Wolverhampton – and spoke with a strong Black Country accent. Like Angie, she came from a large family and she loved to talk about the doings of her brothers and sisters, who used to visit her at the home from time to time. Elaine was the oldest of a string of children. I could never keep track of them – it seemed as if there must have been at least a dozen, but perhaps that was just me getting confused.
Angie became a sort of adopted aunt to the younger Greggs, who loved to listen to her stories of life in Jamaica. I remember Angie getting particularly fond of the youngest girl, Tracey, who reminded her of her own youngest sister Sonia. Tracey was nearly twenty years younger than Elaine. I think she was eight or nine when Angie first met her. I remember being introduced one day, when I visited Angie at the nurses’ home. They had been baking together and Tracey was very proud of her Jamaican patties.
As you may have read elsewhere,[i] Angie and I became acquainted during the course of my first murder investigation as a Detective Constable. Susan Parry, the nurse who occupied the room next to hers, was found dead in her room one evening. The police were called when it turned out that she had been stabbed in the heart. I won’t bore you with the details, but the upshot was that another nurse from the group of six was eventually charged with her murder, leaving just four of the original set sharing the flat. A short while afterwards they were joined by two newly-qualified nurses, twins who kept themselves very much to themselves. So Angie’s only real friend was still Elaine Gregg.
Outside of the hospital and nurses’ home, Angie found companionship through joining one of the local Methodist churches. They were delighted when they discovered that she had taught in the Sunday School in her home church, and soon she had joined the staff of the “Junior Church”. I may be misjudging them, but I rather fancy that they were quite proud to have a black teacher among their number. It showed off how broadminded they were and they probably thought that it would broaden the minds of the children as well.
It was indirectly through her involvement in the Junior Church that I got to know Angie better. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I was brought up by the National Children’s Home. (It changed its name to NCH Action for Children and then to just Action for Children[ii], after it switched from running homes for orphaned and abandoned children to more general ways of helping disadvantaged kids.) Back in those days, there used to be an annual fund-raiser, where Sunday Schools and Brownie packs used to “sell” photographs of children from the home[iii] to their friends and neighbours. Then, in each district, there would be an event where the cash raised was handed over. This was called the Festival of Queens, because each group would dress up one of their little girls as a queen and they would parade up the aisle on to the stage, accompanied by one or two maids of honour.
I went along to support the cause, because I was always grateful to the Home for having given me a good start in life. Angie was there with her Sunday School class. She had also had a hand in making the costumes, which seemed to me, at any rate, to be among the best there. By pure coincidence, we ended up sitting next to each other.
I tried, not very successfully, to make small talk with her. During our conversation, she let slip that there were people in the hospital who were suggesting that she was the most likely suspect in the murder of Nurse Parry, purely because she was black and from the West Indies. I’m afraid I reacted rather badly to that and probably embarrassed Angie dreadfully.
My “family” in the home had included children from all sorts of racial backgrounds and we’d all had it drummed into us pretty hard that everyone was the same underneath. Any sort of teasing or bullying on racial grounds would have been treated as the worst possible offence. I remember vividly a preacher at church telling us that God was colour blind when it came to people – and that we ought to be too. In the current climate of valuing diversity, I suspect he would have been condemned for suggesting that race and ethnic background are an irrelevance. Nowadays we would have been encouraged to see God’s work in the rich tapestry of different cultures and to celebrate the variety. However, I digress.
The good thing about my getting hot under the collar when I heard about this contemptible slur on Angie’s character, was that she agreed to come outside with me to talk properly. And the upshot of that was that we went for a lovely long walk in Christ Church Meadow and only went back to the town hall when it was time for Angie to escort her Sunday School class home. She told me about her family back in Jamaica – and especially about Joseph and how much she hoped that the money that she was able to send back home was helping him. I even plucked up the courage to ask her for a tentative date at some unspecified time in the future.
Of course, it would have been most improper for us to go out together while Angie was still a witness – and indeed a suspect – in a police investigation; so I had to bide my time and wait until it was over to realise my dream. Fortunately, we had an unexpected breakthrough only a week or so later and I was put out of my misery. I don’t know what would have happened if this had turned into one of the many unsolved cases that are left open for years. I suppose that eventually I would have stopped being actively involved and our relationship would have been permitted, but it would always have been a very awkward situation.
As I mentioned before, the culprit turned out to be another of Angie’s flatmates – Sister Catherine Spencer – who had killed Susan Parry to prevent her from revealing that she had been pilfering diamorphine from the ward stock. From my point of view, the main thing was that I was now free to ask Angie out.
It sounds rather corny, but our first date was the Police Dance. I’d been getting ragged for weeks because I wouldn’t say whom I was bringing with me. (Actually, I’d been planning not to go, but saying that outright would have provoked more comments, quite possibly including questions being mooted about my sexual orientation. The Police Service was still a rather blokey place to be in those days.) So, inviting Angie to accompany me killed two birds with one stone from my point of view.
I’m not a great dancer, but Angie is very patient and forbearing and she very kindly refrained from commenting on the way I kept missing the steps and getting my feet tangled. At least I managed to avoid stepping on her toes! By about halfway through the evening I was quite convinced that she was the only woman for me.
There was a very nasty incident towards the end, which could have landed me in a lot of bother if my boss, DI Richard Paige, hadn’t been there to take charge. PC Mark Adams was standing by the bar with a group of his cronies. They’d all had a few by then and he was getting unsteady in his feet. He lurched into Angie and spilled his drink all down her dress. Then he had the gall to accuse her of causing the accident and he used some quite outrageous racially abusive language towards her. I saw red and was on the verge of punching him on the nose – not that I knew how, but I was so angry I was willing to give it a go – when Richard stepped in between us. He ordered me to take Angie outside and then gave Adams a public dressing down. I wouldn’t have liked to have been in Adams’ shoes, I can tell you!
I walked Angie home and we arranged to go to the pictures together a few days later. I won’t bore you with a ball-by-ball commentary on our courtship, but suffice it to say that we saw a good deal of on another over the next few months. Angie’s flatmates seemed very accepting of my presence in their communal kitchen whenever Angie entertained me to dinner, and the members of her church welcomed me with open arms. (I think they had in mind all the jobs that a young man might be persuaded to take on once he became a fully-paid-up member. However, I was able to explain that my erratic working hours made it impossible for me to undertake the role of scoutmaster or property steward.)
I suppose this might be a good point at which to offer some sort of explanation of my relationship with the church. Lucy[iv] always says that I don’t believe in God, but it’s not quite as simple as that sounds. I was taken to Methodist church services when I was a child and I grew up accepting the idea of some sort of God-force behind the creation of the universe. Because of my upbringing, going to church always seemed to be the obvious thing to do on Sunday mornings. When I joined the police, I often had to work at weekends, and that broke the routine of church attendance. Moreover, moving to Oxford meant that I didn’t have a church that was mine so to speak. So, until I met Angie, I’d rather given up on religion, and it didn’t seem to have made a lot of difference to my life doing so.
Being thrown in with a new crowd of colleagues also brought into question the beliefs that I’d previously accepted without really thinking about them. For the first time in my life, I came across people who thought the whole idea of belief in God was comical. I also got some flack over having been brought up in a children’s home – except that my tormentors chose to call it an orphanage – so I kept my head down and didn’t admit to having been a church member. I was very busy swotting for my police exams and setting up home for myself for the first time; churchgoing wasn’t high up on my agenda.
Meeting Angie changed all that. For her, church was the centre of her life – ranking in importance marginally ahead of her job and neck-and-neck with her family – and she naturally assumed that I would share her enthusiasm. For a while, she swept me along – or perhaps more accurately, I was swept along by my devotion to her – and I even began to think that I really did believe in the sort of personal saviour God that she was so certain of. I’m quite sure that I meant it, a couple of years later, when I joined in with the amen after the minister called for God’s blessing on our marriage – but I’m getting ahead of myself.
It’s probably a deficiency on my part, but I’ve never felt the sorts of things that other people talk about when they talk about God. If never felt my heart strangely warmed, like John Wesley or known Jesus Christ as my personal saviour as so many of the evangelical preachers put it. I’ve certainly never had any sort of Damascus road experience. I’m a pretty down-to-earth sort of guy and it always seems to me that the chances are there’s nothing else beyond what we can see and hear and feel with our hands. But I’d rather like it if I were proved wrong.
I still like the friendship that I find in the church and I still enjoy singing the hymns, although I sometimes feel hypocritical because I’m not sure that I subscribe to a lot of the sentiments expressed in them. Singing the hymns that Angie loved makes me feel closer to her than anything else does – and I wish that I could believe that this is because she’s alive somewhere and waiting for me to join her – but I know the psychologists would explain that easily as being to do with past associations in my own mind. Anyway, that’s quite enough of me and my personal hang-ups; this story is supposed to be about Angie.
We’d been going out together for about six months, I suppose, when we started talking about marriage. But we didn’t feel able to become formally engaged because our financial circumstances made it seem like an impossible dream. A detective constable’s salary was meagre and I knew that Angie would not be happy if she could not continue to send a good part of her own wages home to her family in Jamaica. In those days, it was still accepted practice that women would give up work, or at least reduce their hours considerably, if they had children, so I felt that I ought to get to a point where I could support us both – and contribute to Angie’s family – before we tied the knot.
Fortunately for me, Richard seemed to like the way I worked and wanted me to progress. He pushed me to take my sergeant’s exams and supported my application for promotion. My detective sergeant’s salary was just sufficient to enable us to get a mortgage on a small terraced house in East Oxford, not far from Angie’s church. It needed quite a bit of work doing on it, but I could manage that – and some of her friends from church gave us a helping hand in lieu of a wedding present. Most of our combined savings went on the deposit, so we had to start saving all over again for the honeymoon, which we were determined was to be in Jamaica. Angie’s family could not afford to come over to attend the wedding, so we wanted to visit them right away afterwards. She said that she wanted to show me off – I wasn’t convinced that they would be impressed with her catch!
Predictably, there was quite a lot of friendly – and not-so-friendly – banter at work when I announced my matrimonial plans. Adams in particular made some very crude remarks and even a few of the officers that I regarded as friends seemed a bit taken aback at the idea of my actually marrying a black woman. One even took me to one side and asked point blank whether it was a shotgun wedding and suggested that I should not allow myself to be pressurised into doing something that I might regret later.
People from church all seemed delighted at the match and they were falling over themselves to help. I suppose they had probably heard the same sorts of sermons about God’s colour blindness as I had.
The one big surprise for both of us was Elaine Gregg’s reaction. She had always been very friendly towards me and had never said a word against our going out together; but when Angie told her that we were going to get married, she looked first shocked, then disapproving and finally upset. Angie didn’t know how to interpret this or how to reassure her friend that all was well. She wondered if Elaine was in some way jealous of me, so she tried to make her see that their friendship wouldn’t change. She talked about how they would still be working together afterwards, even though they would not be living together in the nurses’ home any more. She talked about our wedding plans and asked Elaine to be her chief bridesmaid. Elaine looked horrified at the idea.
‘I really appreciate you asking me,’ she said, after a long pause, ‘but really, I couldn’t. It would be hypocritical of me, when I really do think you’re making a big mistake marrying Peter. Not that I’ve got anything against Peter,’ she added hastily, ‘but I’ve seen mixed marriages back home and they never work out. It’s not fair on the kids – being neither one thing nor the other.’
Angie was really upset by her friend’s reaction, but luckily for me, she didn’t accept her arguments. To be fair to Elaine, she didn’t say anything more after that outburst. She’d stated her case and then left us to it. She even came along to the wedding service, with some of the other nurses, and behaved impeccably, pretending to be pleased for us. But she and Angie could never be the close friends that they had been before.
Richard had been so instrumental in bringing us together that he was the obvious candidate for Best Man. Angie had a whole string of little bridesmaids – all the girls in her Sunday School class – with one of the other teachers as chief bridesmaid. People sometimes comment that our wedding photographs look rather odd, with so many little girls clustering around the bride. They usually go on to say how sweet it is to see them all. I think that often what they really mean is that it’s strange that Angie’s is the only black face among so many white ones, but they are too polite to put that into words.
We were on a strict budget, so Angie made her own dress, I wore my best suit and all the bridesmaids simply wore their best dresses. The cake was also home-made – a present from another of Angie’s many friends.
Everything went off wonderfully well. I think I can truly say that it was the happiest day of both our lives, so far – up until a few moments before we left for the airport for our flight to Kingston. I was waiting outside for the car to come to drive us to the station, while Angie was changing into her going away outfit. The wedding guests were all standing expectantly in a cluster behind me waiting to wave us goodbye. Everyone was chattering away and I wasn’t really listening to the various conversations that were going on, but unaccountably I overheard a brief exchange between two of the older members of the church congregation.
‘They make a lovely couple, don’t they?’
‘Well, you may say that, but think of the poor children!’
[i] Chapter 12 of Despise Not thy Mother is Angie’s version of our first meeting, as she told it in her contribution to Lucy’s book about her father, DS Richard Paige. I’ve also written about it in one of my earlier memoirs, DC Johns Meets his Match.
[ii] See https://www.actionforchildren.org.uk/ for more information about this remarkable organisation.
[iii] It’s hard to imagine this happening now. We would be accused of exploiting the children and exposing them to danger of harm but, at the time, we thought nothing of it. I was never chosen to have my photograph included in the Sunny Smiles booklet – I don’t think I was photogenic enough – but I would never have minded if I had been.
[iv] Bernie’s daughter and my goddaughter. You can read all about her in Despise Not thy Mother.