England, My England

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Tom and Irene are a pair of incompatibles on the day they get married. He is forty-six. She is twenty-one. The semiliterate shoemaker from the parish of Saint Mary, Jamaica, had charmed the virgin school-ma’am whom they all called “Queenie” – a woman younger that his oldest daughter.

Quite why this bright and ambitious young woman settled for England over America, and life as the wife of a petty Landlord in the East End of London in 1956, is still the subject of her regrets. Some said she married beneath her, but since “she black, black, black so ‘til” and with all that education - what more could she expect?

Although he wore no dreadlocks for hair, she finds her new husband gives his praises to an Ethiopian/Rastafarian God, Jah; recites endless tales from an African grandmother he simply calls Nana; speaks of roots in the West African Gold Coast; and even follows the teachings of the ‘back to Africa’ leader Marcus Garvey.

What would she be going back to Africa for? She is a Jamaican after all. They’re in England now anyway, and contrary to popular assumptions, she did not feel like an outsider. All her years of privileged education on the British colony of Jamaica had taught her that she is, in fact, some kind of an English person and that England is The Motherland. Furthermore, her British passport had given her the right to live and work anywhere on the mainland for the rest of her natural life.

She knew her husband had no such aspirations. His dreams were simple ones. In seven years of marriage, she had not once conceived. He longed for a boy. She wanted neither boy nor girl. Then on a chilly winter’s morning in the early 1960s, a baby boy is born with his eyes wide open. For his mother, it had been exceptionally cold winter starting 9-months before in January. To his father, “I would have bred a mule that year just to have a son!” A baby girl follows some fourteen months later. Shortly after that, Tom and Irene separate, citing ‘irreconcilable differences’ as the source of their discontent. In reality and on reflection the facts were a little bit more complex.

Tom was an uneducated man who had anticipated many of the leading ideas of Pan-Africanism: Racial solidarity and self-awareness; Africa for the Africans; opposition to racial discrimination; emancipation from white supremacy and domination, etcetera. In his young wife, Irene, he had found a dedicated anglophile, one who delighted in the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bronte sisters, while hanging on every word of Winston Churchill and any member of The Royal Family. Britain was the centre of a large empire then. It was here that Africans, West Indians, Afro-Americans, and Anglo-Africans could most conveniently meet, exchange ideas, create networks of contacts, and organise.

But employers didn’t want to employ the new arrivals. Even when they took their exams and passed with flying colours, they didn’t want to upset their white workers. Irene’s Headmaster from Jamaica had a job as a station platform attendant. Another very well qualified teacher, she knew, worked as a packer at Clarnico Sweets. But because Tom had come to England and managed to buy himself an eight-room boarding house through a very nice Jewish chap they knew in the East End of London, she wasn’t too desperate for work at first. Most of their peers couldn’t find a decent job or housing anywhere. “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish” was the motto.

Against the political backdrop of racially divided Britain, the couple’s relationship was sure to falter as their clash of identities soon became the stuff of every single argument. Tom hated this country more daily. She sought opportunity and knowledge in the great corridors of Britain. By 1966, when Tom finally sold up and went back home and Irene had to go out to work because she didn’t want to leave England, he had four properties, a shop, and thirty-odd tenants. He wanted a righteous life in the mountains with his son. She had the little girl to look after now so she just had to accept any old foolish job people offered.

Like many other immigrant couples then, disillusionment with England and ‘Englishness’ had quickly become the dominant theme in a series of marital breakdowns shared among their generation. Yet each would constantly remind their children of being ‘English’. They were the ‘Citizens of the British Empire’ who came looking for work and a better life. Their off-springs were children of the sixties, part of the ‘born here generation’ for whom they expected more from the country, by right of birth, and their investment in Great Britain.

Even today, Irene’s brother Lloyd is the only person she knows who has managed to settle down and do well in England. He has her to thank for that, she says. He got a job on The Hackney Gazette but The Printers’ Union refused to give him a union-card: until she wrote them a stinking-letter. “…the only black man producing newspapers in Fleet Street for thirty years,” she’s proud to boast. “He said when they finished with him there he nearly had a nervous breakdown. Him alone amongst eighty white men … He said it didn’t bother him at first, the bullying; the insults; the constant under-minding.”

Her brother worked at The Guardian for ten years and then took voluntary redundancy from The Daily Express in 1988. “He must drink a bottle of Vodka a day now. And he never used to drink at all before, my brother.” She doesn’t talk about her children. They seem to be just reminders of the greatest regrets of her life. Husband Tom passed away in the blue mountains of Jamaica eighteen years after leaving her from Dover. “They say Tom died poor and happy out there in his Rasta Heaven,” Irene tells me, scornfully. “All I can say is good for him,” she continued.

“England is a bitch!”

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