When my mum, Ruby Davis, came to England from Jamaica in 1959, she was making the journey to the mother country. The Queen’s country. Right or wrong, Great Britain represented values she’d grown up learning to respect, and I know she felt it was kind of a privilege for her to be here. Instinctively, she always deferred to authority figures she encountered: doctors, teachers, the police. She would never question those people.
I know she faced real difficulties, like so many others of the Windrush generation, when it came to finding work and somewhere half-decent to live: No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs. Whether she felt resentful or bitter about how she was treated when she first arrived, she never said. Mum always made a conscious effort, I think, not to pass memories of any bad experiences on to me and my younger sister, Sandra.
My mum’s story is, I guess, like a lot of West Indian family stories, which for many are Windrush stories: half-forgotten by the next generation, or the generation after that.
