Notes
B. M. Nobrega
Many factors are involved in why we came. My story and experiences, though they may not be typical, still entwine many elements of the Caribbean migrant’s experience. We came because we were coming to the mother country. Years of colonisation had indoctrinated us with a sense of belonging to England, loyalty to the Queen and country, a willingness to fight to defend this mother country and all the values of this mighty seat of empire. We learned of it in church and from our school system, our text books. Even our exercise books, which we handled daily in our classrooms, had the face of the beautiful Queen Elizabeth on the cover. We were not royalists and yet the Queen was wonderful (I love the Queen even now) and so we sang the national anthem. For us, the Queen was everything that was wonderful about England and about empire.
So, with the ending of World War Two, with the call and invitation to the colonies, particularly to the Caribbean, to help with the reconstruction of England, it was only natural that the Caribbean soldiers who had fought for their mother country should jump at the opportunity to leave their beautiful, sun-drenched islands, stifled by the colonial restrictions of colour, class and privilege. So, the SS Windrush came in 1948, with some of the returning soldiers who would inititally stay in the Clapham Common bunkers. Then followed many immigrating Caribbean subjects, flocking to the mother country for work, opportunity and accessible education, and to help to rebuild it. None of us planned to stay. Nearly everyone had a five-year plan: to earn enough money and to return home.
The magical fantasy land sold to us through images of the Queen was nowhere to be seen. There was very little sunshine, and there was smog. One went to work and school in the dark and returned home in the dark. To me it seemed like perpetual night. In those days the cultural revolution, with the Beatles and so forth, was only just beginning and so the whole sense of colour was changing. At that time you did not have all these blue shirts and pink shirts, it was always just black and white and grey. In the Caribbean there is colour, there is light, there is space. England was so dark and grey. The houses were all joined together and belched smoke like bakeries and they were cold: paraffin heaters were the order of the day. Of course, the colonies had their own hierarchies and some workers in Guyana did not enjoy the luxuries of space – they, too, might live in a row of houses, all joined together. But when I came to England and saw that the majority of people were living in a house joined up to another one, I was shocked and confused.
Arrival brought a steep learning curve for Caribbean immigrants: we saw white people sweeping the streets and doing menial jobs, lacking education and speaking an incoherent language. I remember that on arrival we took a taxi to Wimbledon and the driver said – it was old money then – ‘nanty naan’. We thought, ‘What’s he on about? I thought they spoke English’. It was 9s. 9d.1 We could not understand many of the people, just as we could not understand where the motherland sold to us through images of the Queen had gone. The mystique of white superiority was totally dismantled. Seeing the realities of the mother country was a major factor in the emboldening of Caribbean peoples in our quest for decolonisation. And yet, there was still something about England that we loved.
For many in Britain the new arrivals were economic migrants, but for some Caribbean people this was the homecoming of an overseas citizenry. So why did we stay? This is an indomitable question which perpetually enters our thoughts. Was it just the audacity of hope? There was always the initial hope, dreams of upliftment and a better life.
Furthermore, there was a great investment, the investment of getting to the mother country, where things were so much better, perhaps with streets paved with gold, as we were forever told in movies and newsreels. As one Kitchener calypso said in 1948, ‘London was the place for me’.2 The investment was, for many working-class Caribbean people, simply tremendous. Goats had to be sold, sometimes cattle and other livestock, to raise the pounds required for the passage and costs on arrival. Another factor was the mass exodus of the young and strong from the villages and towns, thwarting the development of those places, in the hope that in a few years they would be able to return home with financial security and more knowledge and skills to help the brethren left behind. Others pledged their savings to come: not content with the ‘secondary’ education obtained at home and their clerical, administrative jobs, they took the leap in the hope that they would be able to work and study to enter one of those most lauded and respected professions like law or medicine.
One had to stay and persevere in spite of the shock of the weather and the lack of welcome. Returning without achieving anything would have inflicted such humiliation and shame on one’s psyche. We would have earned the disrespect of all and sundry in the homelands and have been seen as just wasteful good-for-nothings. So staying was a must. This entailed getting a job, finding housing, saving and coping with all the expenses and vicissitudes of daily living. These were all momentous tasks. Some were fortunate and were recruited directly from the Caribbean, especially for the transport services or the fledgling National Health Service. But most of us could spend all day at the job centre (then known as the labour exchange) and get no job and when a job was offered it was the most basic kind with the lowest pay, one that no Englishman would take up. Even the well-qualified struggled, perhaps more so. The ex-Forces folk were not welcome once the uniform of war was taken off. Jobs were largely low level; a position at Lyons tea rooms paying £7 per week plus meals was considered a blessed godsend.
I remember going to the job centre. I was asked, ‘Well, what can you do?’. I said I was a surveyor. ‘Right’, he responded, ‘I think I’ve got the exact job for you’. He rang up the employer and said, ‘I’ve got this guy here and he did this and he did that’, and so on and so on, adding, ‘Oh and he’s from Guyana’. And then he said, ‘Oh no, no, no, you must meet him, he’s a very nice guy!’. The boss decided to meet me. He liked me, found out what I could do and gave me a job in his surveying company on £10 a week. In this role I was teaching an apprentice, a young fellow not long out of school. His spelling was bad, his arithmetic was rubbish. I had to do everything because he and I were together in the estimates department. And one day his payslip falls out on the floor and he is getting £15 a week! I approached the boss and in his embarrassment he said that my alternative would have been to work ‘in the field’, on the M3, where I would get subsistence. My pay then increased from £10 to something like £20. It was all a struggle.
Rent had to be paid for accommodation that was in short supply, so scarce that we huddled together in rooms in shared houses under ruthless landlords for whom new words in the English dictum like ‘Rachmanism’ were invented.3 But out of all this, savings were to be made: there were ‘Boxhands’, ‘Sou Sous’, ‘partners’, all terms for ways of pooling and saving money. This was particularly so for the first generation, who would put money together and then would buy a house, an old rotten house, for a lot of us to inhabit. The bed was so cold and wet. You had to get these blankets and wrap up in them and just wait for your body warmth to warm you up. There were no duvets in those days! Indeed, I have seen this England come a long way. We dealt with the cold by using paraffin heaters with their blue and pink flames. We had to clean them out constantly or else the place would smell and you would get soot and smoke all over the place. And you had to wash your hair almost every day and your clothes smelled because of the condensation that caused. But we used our skill and energy collectively to repair these buildings and create homes. Then we would buy another one and another one. And slowly we began to own those houses. Fortunately, many of the second generation got jobs in housing offices. They would not, of course, discriminate against other Caribbean people and so council housing then also became more available to us.
Am I glad that I left the Caribbean? I wish I had not had to. In many aspects I am glad that I left. But I wish that I had not had to leave. I am glad I left because I was able to come and get an education. Not that I did not have an education, but I was unlikely to have obtained a tertiary education. And it was not all bad. There were some nice folks among the English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish who already resided here. Some were friendly, some were helpful, some were polite and not overtly prejudiced. Some socialising occurred. Not much at first, but the two groups were slowly growing together. We were learning and getting used to British ways, like queuing, fish and chips and the general pace of life, to the extent that on visits home the returnees were called ‘British people’! We may have toned down our parties but, by some form of osmosis, our joie de vie, our sense of colour, style, dress and music were permeating and changing our host society. There were even interracial marriages and partnerships occurring, leading to mixed-race children. Such relationships were an anathema, a huge taboo for the native population, but in time tolerance occurred.
We took root. This is now our third coming or fourth, depending on the count. We bore offspring, we managed the cold and the damp, we managed the prejudice and discrimination, we fought our ground and fought for fair play. Things got better. The race laws were passed.4 Our five-year plans became ten-year plans and later retirement plans. Things changed at home. Some returned there, some went back but returned to the UK to be with children and grandchildren. Some left for other shores like North America, some entered those lauded professions and either stayed or left. Some came back for health reasons and to make use of the National Health Service. Home is where one’s family is. So we are here. We have integrated into and, indeed, made great contributions to this society. Now we pass the ‘cricket test’ – a test coined in 1990 by Conservative politician Norman Tebbit, which sees if one supports one’s native land or the English team. The demise of West Indian test cricket may have contributed to this, but with so many of the children and grandchildren making the representative sports teams of the UK, the football and athletics teams, the British team is now our team. Other inroads that we have made into this land are in medicine, diplomacy, trade unionism and parliament. Such successes have helped to make us feel like we are here to stay.
I want to end this reflection by commenting on the Bronze Woman Monument, the brainchild of my mother, the poet Cécile Nobrega, which is in Stockwell Park, near where most of the Windrush settlers first resided. The statue is depicted on the cover of this book. It displays a Caribbean mother lifting her child as if to reach the limits of the British sky. It symbolises our hope and struggle. It was Cécile’s vision that some monumental record should be established, not merely to the Windrush settlers, our third coming and all loyal subjects of the British Empire, but to the strength of womanhood – particularly Caribbean womanhood. Her poem of the same name was penned in Guyana before she settled in the UK, the mother country. The statue embodied the reflections in her poem. In her life here she trailblazed as a teacher, campaigner for increasing adult literacy and against the government programme ‘Educationally Subnormal Schooling’ into which many Caribbean children were being dumped.5 In her early 80s she tirelessly campaigned for this monumental statue to be built. Fairs, tea parties and numerous fundraising events were exhausting and largely financially unrewarding. But never giving up, the charity, Presentation Housing, with its section for Community Charitable Engagement (OLMEC), came to the rescue and provided all the remaining funding required. They are now the caretakers of the monument. The statue has been up for ten years and is a symbol of how …
Together we will all lift this land. We are here to stay, we can and must RISE.
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1 Just under 50p in modern decimal currency.
2 See https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jun/16/lord-kitchener-empire-windrush [accessed 5 Feb. 2019].
3 Perec (or Peter) Rachman was a Polish-born London landlord notorious for exploiting and intimidating his tenants in the 1950s and early 1960s.
4 The Race Relations Act in 1965, amended by the Race Relations Act in 1968 and repealed by the Race Relations Act in 1976.
5 For more on this, see B. Coard, How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal (London: New Beacon Books, 1971).