F.X. Christodoulou
When Anna and her family leave their comfortable lifestyle in sunny Nigeria for an insecure life in Britain, little do they know of the hardships awaiting them there. . .
They eventually find themselves in Merseyside, where life in the nineteen eighties is tough for everyone, but how much more for a mixed race family, totally ignorant of the area, and its social and racial problems.
English Anna and her Nigerian husband, Shola, have to battle for the survival of their family, and face their own personal differences and failings, as parents and as a couple. . .
While Shola joins Militant, and works as a race adviser in a comprehensive school in Liverpool, Anna suffers as a supply teacher in one of Liverpool's working class outer suburbs.
Shola takes out his frustrations on their children, but Anna is too weak to stop the physical and psychological abuse to which he subjects them.
A major crisis strikes when one of their daughters is taken into care, but it takes years before Anna is strong enough to take a stand.
Anna's physical journey takes her from Africa to Britain, but her most difficult journey is within her soul, as she struggles towards a measure of self knowledge and inner peace.
Frances Xanthos Christodoulou was born in 1946 to a Greek father and English mother. She has lived in the United States and Nigeria as well as Britain, frequently visits Cyprus and Greece, and is the mother of three now adult children.
Educated at Manchester University, and at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, F.X. Christodoulou has been a teacher/lecturer in English Language and Literature for most of her working life. Now retired she is realising a long held ambition to write fiction, though she has previously published an academic textbook on study skills.
Her personal experiences and observations, as well as her imagination, have inspired her writing, as has her desire to share her insights and ideas with her readers. She is currently working on her second novel.
F.X. Christodoulou lives in London with her Greek Cypriot husband.
For Anna work was hell, life at home was often hell, but even going out food shopping, or using the launderette, could also be a humiliating and traumatic experience. They could not affort a car at this time, so they had to travel by public transport, and in the early years they could not even afford a washing machine. This meant that while Femi was still small they would have to take the pushchair on the bus, as well as their bags of washing, or when they went shopping, they had to return on a crowded bus with all their shopping bags, and the awkward and unwieldy pushchair.
Sometimes they would return home by taxi. Anna used a false name for the purpose of getting taxis. She had learnt to do this the hard way. On the first occasion when she called a Birkenhead taxi, using the name Mrs Banjo, the taxi failed to turn up. Anna phoned the company again.'I called for a taxi over half an hour ago. Why hasn't it arrived yet?' she demanded.
There was a silence at the other end of the line. Then a thick Merseyside male voice replied, 'We thought youse was joking.'
After this Anna always used the name 'Bancroft' when communicating with the taxi office, to ensure that a taxi actually turned up.
Usually, Anna would make these trips on her own with the children. On some occasions she would be verbally abused or mocked. In Birkenhead market, bustling with seething humanity, but full of cheap and affordable items, she was shocked and shamed to be abused by the men on the smelly butchers counters, being called 'whore' and other similar epithets. After this, she avoided that side of the market, but the abuse could come from any unexpected quarter. She tried to protect the children from awareness of this abuse as much as possible, but inevitably they absorbed the hostile atmosphere more and more as they grew up, and started to understand the dynamics of their environment.
Birkenhead at this period was extremely and notoriously racist. When they told other black people in Liverpool about where they lived, these people were shocked that they had not known about the Wirral town's reputation. Liverpool blacks did not live in or even visit Birkenhead. In fact, not only Birkenhead, but the whole of Merseyside was rife with racism. Anna heard stories of how black people living in Liverpool, who had innocently found themselves in localities outside of the black ghetto of Toxteth, were invariably told by the police, in no uncertain terms, to get back to their own area.
Even when she did not receive actual verbal abuse, Anna was conscious of the hostile eyes on her and the children as they walked round the town centre, and of course their own residential area. Later as the children got older and would travel home from school by bus on their own, they would be called racist names as they walked through the estate, after a long day at school. They would tearfully tell Anna about it, asking why these people acted in this way. Her heart would break within her, but all she could say was 'They're ignorant. Just ignore them.' Not much help to her miserable children.
