The only black girl at Malory Towers
THE GIRL FROM LAMAHA STREET by Sharon Maas (Thread €12.60, 288 pp) HELEN BROWN
‘YOU’RE just — you’re just . . .’ the angry girl spluttered in the face of her classmate, before finishing her sentence with the most devastating dismissal she could muster. ‘You’re just brown.’
The insult — which came from a white South African girl — cut through ten-yearold Sharon Maas ‘like a knife’. She was the only dark-skinned girl at Harrogate Ladies’ College in the early 1960s.
The shy little Maas had been raised to believe that all people are equal. But that day she realised that ‘It’s one thing to know, intellectually, that people of all colours and races are equal. It’s quite another to ignore the reality that was out there in plain sight: white people were at the top of the racial pyramid, and the lighter you were the easier it would be to rise.’
Now in her seventies, Maas, the author of 13 novels, believes the ‘hard struggles’ of her childhood forced her to develop ‘a strength of mind you simply can’t cultivate when everything falls into your lap unasked’.
A fiercely independent only child, Maas was born in Guyana in 1951. Back then it was ‘British Guiana’, affectionately known by its inhabitants as ‘BG’. As a child, Maas wasn’t able to understand the arguments against empire and felt that ‘Britain’s seemingly benign hand held us safe and cosy . . . you basked in the comfiness of it all’.
With both her parents busy at work and soon divorced, Maas was raised mostly by aunts and grandmothers in the family’s large Dutch Colonial house on Lamaha Street, where cooling, lime-scented breezes blew through the ornately carved windows.
As she grew, the solitary Maas lost herself in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories, although the books alerted her to the racism she’d later encounter, when Anne (the youngest of the Five) woke to see a man’s face at her bedroom window. ‘Oh Julian!’ the character sobbed. ‘What if it was a black man!’ Maas was stung by the fact that ‘even the children in the books I read knew that their race was a better one’.
Yet it was ‘thanks to Enid Blyton that my soul settled in England’. Maas longed for the boarding school experience she’d read about in Malory Towers and her ambitious mother worked hard to ensure her clever child got what she wanted.
Maas’s account of her time in Harrogate will resonate with anyone who attended boarding school during the 1960s. She’s funny about the deportment lessons, serge knickers and eccentric teachers. After the bountiful fruit platters of Guyana, she was appalled by the awful school meals, including ‘a dish masquerading as stew that we called “chewed-up-and-spat-out” ’.
Despite her differences, Maas made wonderful friends and still has happy memories of her Harrogate years. Looking back in this richly evocative memoir, she is aware that many dark-skinned people ‘have faced and still face horrific abuse and treatment in the United Kingdom’, but she says that she was ‘never mocked’ by her ‘polite’ classmates.
‘It’s all about perspective,’ she says, concluding generously that ‘the long lens of time has brought not only deeper love and understanding, but compassion and, where needed, closure.’