Marijuana made me

Colin Grant reflects on his father's small-time drug dealing

Clinton George Grant (Bageye) in Luton, 1972 – Colin Grant’s Bageye at the Wheel was published by Vintage in 2013

In the winter of 1971, the sheets of brown paper used by my mother Ethlyn when ironing our clothes began disappearing from the chest of drawers. Around the same time, my siblings and I made an odd discovery on the shelf in the airing cupboard: a set of kitchen weighing scales.

One spring afternoon, just after my 10th birthday, a white van pulled up and parked outside of our house in Luton. Half a dozen policemen leapt out and barrelled through the front door. The police had been tipped off that my father, known as Bageye (because of the permanent bags under his eyes) was operating as a small-time drug dealer.

Although I didn’t know its name at the time, I knew what the police were looking for. The brown paper had been used to make little sachets, drawn and weighed, I imagined, from the tightly wrapped bundles that Bageye increasingly brought into our home and stored in the airing cupboard. Without divulging the contents of the sachets, Bageye recruited me as his accomplice. My school bag was stuffed with the sachets and we drove around Luton dropping them off.

I was always intrigued and bemused if ever we were stopped by a policeman on patrol. My father would promote the police officer immediately, subtly bowing and addressing him as ‘Chief Constable’ or ‘Detective Inspector’. The bobby on the beat would usually laugh and wave us on our way. I marvelled at Bageye’s strategy and welcomed the warm smile that would play across his face as we drove off. But my relief was coupled with an unspoken sense of shame that my father had purposefully, if temporarily, debased himself in front of a white man. I remember thinking this was not a lesson I wanted to learn, even as it led to great hilarity when Bageye recounted the ruse to his West Indian spars.

There was no laughter during the police raid on our home. An onlooker, though, might have been amused by the comic attempt at passing the parcel between ourselves to hide the bundle from the police. Eventually my father put an end to the charade, handed over the bundle and surrendered himself — sacrificially, so I thought — to the police. I recall it now as the moment I most admired and respected my father, as he was arrested for the possession of and dealing in cannabis.