History of England 1-6

Then there was the cold, which could steal through the thickest clothing, let alone the light but formal dress favoured by the new arrivals. Theirs was not solely, however, a tale of dislocation and prejudice. Warmth and friendliness could be found, often in the most surprising places. One immigrant recalls a visit to a butcher: ‘I got a mixture of genuine affection and a lot of curiosity. I always remember going into my first Dewhurst butcher’s shop, when I was about seven, and this big, large lady looked at me. She kept looking at me and then she turned to the butcher, and said, ‘Ooh, I could eat him.’ I’ll always remember Dewhurst butcher’s shops.’

The England to which they had come was hag-ridden and worn. The proud imperial nation of rumour or propaganda could be discerned with difficulty in a small, cramped island, still gasping from the blows of a war it had nearly lost. The promise of ‘diamond streets’ was belied by ones that seemed paved with lead, gashed by bomb sites, beside grey houses interchangeable in size and shape and a population which seemed so old. Along with anxiety, fear and relief, the immigrants sometimes felt a certain pity for the nation that had adopted them:

But what was most striking, I think, was the age of the people. At that time there were old men working on the stations, and on the buses there were old men or old women. There weren’t very many young people. And then we began to realise that the war had taken its toll of the young people between eighteen and probably thirty-five … and people were living in prefabs, and that was quite strange. You couldn’t understand why they were living in what we saw as huts.

Other customs also attracted bewilderment. There was a vast and varied network of child support, but many Caribbeans found it at once invasive and remote – the deeper support of family appeared to be lacking. Another novelty for many of the Windrush generation was being addressed as ‘sir’, which seemed bizarre rather than respectful. Some of the customs they encountered provoked fear and dislike among the immigrants, and for many it was difficult to determine which was harsher, the coldness of the climate or the coldness of the people.

It is easy to forget that while England might have wanted cheap labour, the early immigrants had other concerns, with education not the least of them. Among other blandishments, England had been touted as the land of educational opportunity, yet not all found it so. Russell Profitt found many sympathetic teachers but also a wayward and confusing secondary system. He had come from a culture where education was taken seriously as a tool for self-betterment; where study, not leisure, was the point of schooling. He encountered the new welfare-state approach to education, and racism was not quite the issue:

Most people in senior positions wanted to be helpful, but I don’t think they really understood the emotions I was experiencing, having to come to terms with the racial issue, having to come to terms with an education system that was quite different from the one I’d experienced in the Caribbean, where we were a lot more formal and a lot more structured and set in relation to work that we had to do by certain times. A number of black kids just got lost in the system.

Twenty years later, many mothers of Caribbean origin would be expressing concerns similar to those of Profitt’s mother: ‘My mother hadn’t gone through education in Britain, and so I don’t think she fully appreciated the way the system worked … The pressure was not on in the way I think Caribbean families expected pressure to be on teenagers.’ Baroness Amos recalls being relegated to the bottom of the class as a matter of course:

When I went to school, that was a bit of a shock, because I wasn’t tested before I was put into a class, and I was put into the bottom class, and I found everybody was kind of way behind what I’d been used to. But my parents were very assertive about that and went up to school and ensured that I was given a test, and I was moved. I think the other thing that I found difficulty dealing with was the environment, and the fact that it felt like a much less disciplined society.

She recalls reactions that derived from simple ignorance, an ignorance that was not unkind but inadvertently intrusive. ‘I was in the school choir, we would go and sing in what were then called old people’s homes, at Christmas. And they would all touch my skin and touch my hair, and I was the first black person they had ever seen.’ The empire had been an abstraction to most; now it was made flesh. Englishmen and women had new neighbours, new shoots in their garden, new influences to accommodate. The best in all major parties acknowledged a duty of care to the immigrants, whether because one should pay a debt of reparation to those colonized or because one does not let down old retainers. But no leader could afford to shout out the benefits of a multiracial community.