The Stairwell that haunts me.

In which the author recounts excruciating events and worries about his understanding of the subtleties of racism.

Photo by Serge Kutuzov on Unsplash

Once upon a time, quite a long time ago, probably at the peak of my professional career, I was Head of Legal within a local authority. I was in charge of a team of about fifteen lovely people. I sat at the board meetings and vetted all of the executive papers for legal issues. I was monitoring officer for the Authority and drafted reports for Council Committees, making sure public officials and officers did not act beyond their powers and answering legal questions on the fly. Mostly correctly.

It was a position that commanded some respect and required gravitas and the ability to project wisdom and authority. A sombre suit and tie (in a neutral political colour) was worn at all times. It required punctuality; careful thought; good grammar; the ability to bring people along with you and address a room of peers and senior public officials. I manifested a passable façade of all these qualities and was generally well liked - I think.

However; it is the way of the world that we are not remembered for our better traits. It is the little things that bring us low.

The offices of the Authority were served by a wide, open stairwell with flights of stairs on three sides and a landing on the fourth with doors onto the office floor. One could see all three flights of steps down to the landing below, and a couple more below that. At the top of the 4th floor stairs was a particularly wide landing off which was a corridor to the toilets and double doors into the main office floor. There was also a most commodious disabled toilet separate from the other WCs which opened right onto the landing.

The first incident to undermine my standing in the eyes of others involved this toilet. I am a person that does not like to exit their toilet cubicle whilst another soul is in the wash room. I am sure I am not alone in this. There should be no shame in one’s bodily functions; but yet, at the same time, we do not always wish to be known as the author of certain deeds.

The disabled toilet was, therefore, my destination of choice when the need arose for certain deeds to be done.

For some reason, the fourth floor stairwell landing served the unintended function of being a meeting place for those seeking not to be seen having a meeting. Careers had been ended and sticky rumours begun simply by having been observed coming out of a meeting room with the wrong person at the wrong time and without it having been in a diary; or worse: without having invited someone that would have expected also to have been invited. Such is local government. Such is the civil service, top to bottom, I am sure. Well, perhaps mostly at the top.

The beauty of the stairwell landing was that meetings could be slyly arranged to happen “by chance” upon it. Were others to happen upon such a meeting taking place, the sneaky attendees could swiftly disperse with a fake exchange of pleasantries and greetings as if no meeting had been happening at all.

It was one such meeting that I have no doubt took a grisly toll upon my reputation. I can only imagine the jokes and nicknames spawned on that fateful day of which I was never, thankfully, made aware.

It was a day when I had chosen to avail myself of the commodious disabled toilet - this of itself a modest faux pas, but for the fact there was not a single person (let alone five, for we had five such toilets) at the Authority who was disabled. If there had been, they would have used the one on the ground floor, and not toiled up to the fourth floor. I felt safe in the knowledge that I would never be usurping the throne of some more deserving colleague by settling myself into the luxuriously spacious and always spotless and fragrant loo.

I had just finished my ablutions when I heard the gathering of footsteps on the landing and the hushed discussions of an urgent conversation that was not meant for stray ears.

I shall just take a seat and wait until they pass.

But, like a pack of Balrogs, they did not pass. They stayed. In fact they were joined by others. The tones were hushed yet hurried. I could hear snippets but not everything.

After a couple of minutes, I began to get a little bit vexed at this. What on earth were they discussing? Surely they would leave soon? But they did not. Then someone made a call on a mobile phone:

“Are you coming? 4th floor!”

They were waiting for more attendees! The meeting had not even begun!

Shortly after, more footsteps and creaking doors signaled the arrival of at least two more people - I reckoned there had to be at least 5 or 6 outside my hiding place now, and a meeting began in earnest.

On and on it went. I could not even hope that a lunchtime rush would force them to vacate the landing because It was still late morning, approaching half past eleven. . Surely they would go long before noon? They had to. And I had my own meeting to get to.

Yet still it went on. There is something about sitting on a toilet that stirs in one the need to use it - and indeed, this was what was beginning to happen, but I had to hold it in. I was gripped by the fear that even the slightest tinkle, creak of the seat or jingle of a belt buckle would alert the lurking horde to my presence.

And that would never do! What manner of able bodied man uses the disabled toilet? NOT the Head of Legal!? And just HOW long has he been in there?

Perhaps worse would be the fact that I had now been in the toilet for at least twenty minutes. This was agonising.

In the end, my 11:45 meeting with the chair of some committee or other forced my hand. There was nothing for it but to brazen it out. I debated whether to flush or not; not to flush was surely more sinister than flushing, but only just.

I shall never forget the sudden silence beyond the door as the sound of the flushing toilet broke into the landing. I shall never forget the stunned, incredulous faces of the six senior colleagues and one external committee member as I exited the cubicle and marched between them and through the double doors with a brisk “Morning”, a nod and a smile. I could feel their eyes burning into my back and all seven of them thinking the same things:

He’s been in there the whole time…what the fuck was he doing…what has he heard…did he even wash his hands?

---

Terrible though this incident was, the one that haunts me even more deeply is the one that involved the banana and a young officer in the transport planning team. This genuinely makes me feel ill, even now, some dozen or so years later.

My team lived on both the fourth and third floors. At that time, there was a health drive against all the cakes and donuts that infested the place, and large fruit hampers were delivered every week to each floor. The fourth floor being for the senior exec team, politicians offices and committee rooms, it was usually half empty. The fruit bowl was typically barely touched by the end of the week.

In the spirit of camaraderie and not wanting the fruit to be left and go to waste, I bundled up an armful and headed to the stairs to take them to my team on the third floor.

It was as I started to descend the stairwell that the terrible thing happened. Somehow, of all the fruit, in all the world, it was the banana that slipped out of my arms and flew over the bannister into the void of the stairwell. As I fumbled a hand out to try to grab it, this had the effect of knocking it with enough force that it cleared the well and landed on the far flight of steps coming up on the opposite side, where it landed right at the feet of the transport planner who was bounding up them.

This young man, was, as you may have guessed, a black man. The only black male member of staff in the Authority in fact. He immediately looked up to see where this banana had come from, the banana that had hit him squarely on his feet, and he saw me, Head of Legal, arm outstretched for all the world as if I had just deliberately thrown it at him. It might as well have been raised in a nazi salute.

He was most gracious in the face of my embarrassed and stammering apology, and my explanation was at least credible, in view of the unwieldy armful of fruit. But all that fruit was innocent non-racist fruit and the potential gravity of this could not be overlooked. I knew it; he knew it; we both knew it as we smiled at each other. The Head of Legal had thrown a banana at him. Any other fruit? Not a problem. Banana? Totally a problem.

Despite that it was truly an excruciating accident, there would surely always be in his mind a nagging suspicion that I might be an horrible racist taking my chances, faking innocence and smirking to myself inside. I like to hope the following is not the conversation that was had on the 2nd floor, but could it have been otherwise? I doubt it.

“You know that Nick Winney?”

“Yeah, Head of Legal? What about him?

“Well you’ll never guess what he just did.”

<leans over and whispers in ear>

“What? WHAT? A banana? A fucking BANANA? You’re fucking joking me mate!”

“Nope. Not a joke. I mean he said it was an accident right, but… yeah. Exactly.”

“Oi - Oi - Diane - Come here and listen to this. Andy, tell her what you just told me… you won’t believe it…”

In seeking to write these tales of my own embarrassment, I have tried to make some humour within them, but of course, racism is not funny. It can be funny to mock racists, but racism itself is not a joking matter. To Andy it will have been far from funny. That he never sought to take the piss out of me about it afterwards, which he could certainly have done, makes me sure that he did not see it as a matter for a joke between us.

“So Nick, what you going to chuck at me today then you old nazi? A watermelon?

I would have taken that with gracious good humour. If he had said this, or something like it; accused me of something “classically” racist, it would be acknowledgement that he didn’t think I was a racist. But he didn’t.

As a white middle aged man I can never appreciate or feel what black people endure day after day in this country and in others in terms of subtle, implied, idle and, indeed, blatant ugly racism. In telling this, I want the joke firmly to be on me, but as I read and re-read it, I am concerned that even telling a story involving this most tired of racist tropes can only be racism. If it is, then it was not my intention to offend or to be racist, but that’s such a white person thing to say, isn’t it?