CYCLE FIFTEEN

1. There is an ugly three-letter word which derives from what used to be the perfectly innocent 'golliwog', a black-faced doll which, since the coming of racist paranoia and sensitivity to countries like Britain, has tended to be softened and shortened to 'golly'.

2. One hears of 'golly', but not of 'golliwog', though the ugly three-letter word deriving from the suffix to the original name for the black-faced doll long associated with a well-known brand of marmalade, is anything but obsolescent or redundant, despite the anti-racist rhetoric of multiracial bigots and the thought-censure which sensitive or self-respecting persons - usually white - impose upon themselves in the interests of racial harmony and cultural uniformity.

3. But sometimes thought control of this nature is impossible or, at any rate, extremely difficult to maintain, and the ugly word pops out of the mind like a jack-in-the-golliwog-box of repressed archetypes and racial prejudices. Sometimes the would-be butt of this sad term of abuse even encourages it - knowingly or unknowingly - by doubting one's ability or inclination, as a white person, to refrain from some degree of stereotypical racial abuse.

4. However, even in the worst-case scenario, like the above, it is still, as a rule, merely a thought, not a spoken or, worse still, shouted word. Yet, even so, some people display a remarkable sensitivity, these days, to mere thoughts! The thought, any thought, in private is one thing; the thought in public - say in supermarkets or crowed shopping malls - quite another! The latter, one feels, is expected to be banished without a trace.

5. However, even if 'gollies' are more prevalent these days than 'golliwogs', there are still some of us - doubtless an unfortunate older generation in some people's estimation - old enough to remember 'golliwogs', and I myself was the proud or, rather, puzzled owner of one such black-faced doll as a young boy, exiled from his native Galway, in Aldershot who, one day, to the consternation of his mother, decided that the frizzy-haired doll in question needed a wash, and accordingly flushed him down the toilet.

6. Actually, he was too big to disappear, which is how my mother came upon him and, with obvious consternation and not a little disgust, felt obliged to fish him out of his waterlogged predicament in the toilet bowl and subsequently set about having him dried-out by the window or whatever. But the 'golliwog', much to my dismay, remained black, or 'dirty', and I must have felt pretty disillusioned with him thereafter and less than happy in his company.

7. This was also true of the black-skinned West Indian who subsequently became my stepfather when my mother remarried - though she hadn't really acquired a divorce from the Irish courts over her first husband, my father, but merely an annulment - while I was resident in a Protestant Children's Home in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey, following the demise of her mother, who, being staunchly Catholic, had evidently protected me from any such fate while still alive! She did the 'dirty' behind my back, so to speak, because I was never taken with the idea of having a black stepfather (any more than I had previously taken with the move from a Catholic upbringing in Aldershot to a Protestant one in Carshalton) and found that the use of the term 'uncle' in relation to him was, by common consent with my mother, more feasible than 'dad' or 'father' or 'sir' or anything of the kind.

8. 'Uncle Augustine', more usually abbreviated to plain 'Gus', occasionally paid me a visit with my mother while I was in the Home, but he never said very much, nor did I say very much to him. In fact, we hardly ever spoke even in the years after I left the Home and paid occasional visits to my 'parents' flat in Finsbury Park, north London (they having, in the meantime, moved from Aldershot), even staying there for a few months - to the manifest chagrin of my stepfather - at one point, after life in the Clapham hostel, to which I had been callously dispatched from Carshalton Beeches, quickly proved less than congenial.

9. Be that as it may, 'Uncle Gus', as he continued to be known, was, in any case, probably because he resented my presence, fairly laconic, even taciturn, and I, for myself, was hardly the most fulsome or outgoing of conversationalists, having developed a knack, over the years, in both Aldershot and Carshalton, of keeping my thoughts - some of which only a person of Irish descent could have had - to myself. We hardly said a word to each other, and when their marriage eventually broke up, as it was bound to do sooner or later, I was more relieved than I realized at the time!

10. Fortunately for me, my surname had remained unaffected (not that I like it much, in any case, but that's another story, one connected with the burden of bearing the name of a man - and an Irishman at that - without ever having had the benefit of his presence or companionship as a father), throughout the painful duration of their marriage, but I did not relish the one my mother had been obliged to adopt, and sought, as far as possible, to distance myself from it and its colonial associations. Frankly, she brought shame upon me by the nature of her second marriage, and I have still not forgiven her for it to this day, even though I am aware that her life wasn't easy and that she was badly let down by my father, as, incidentally, was I.

11. And I am still sensitive to blacks in a way that owes more than a little to my lengthy experience of having - and silently enduring - a black stepfather who not only had culturally little in common with me, but resented my existence as a stepson and the obligations this occasionally imposed upon him. Nothing could be further from my desire than to date, never mind marry, a black woman, and this quite apart from - or maybe tied-up with - the above-mentioned negative attitude to brown eyes which characterizes my estimation of females.