COME ON OVER, VALERIE
The weeks leading up to her departure were exciting because there was a lot to do. She had to go to Kingston, the big city, to get the papers and her passport, which in itself was a big adventure for her and the family members who went with her. There was great anticipation, but the mood changed on the day she left because, when it came to it, she found it difficult saying goodbye to her family and daughter and making the break. She remembered hearing people crying as the minibus came round to pick people up. Those being left behind were in tears because they didn’t know whether they would ever see their loved ones again.
My mother and the others, mainly women, were taken to Kingston, to a hotel, where she paid £70, and the next day they boarded a huge cruise liner called the SS Peniah. The journey started in Jamaica, and then the ship went to St Kitts to pick up more people bound for the Motherland. When it was full of Caribbean people, it headed towards Europe. It stopped off on the coast of Spain, and my mother got off to buy souvenirs, which she found a peculiar experience. For the first time in her life she encountered people who didn’t speak any English. Suddenly she was very important; people wanted to shine her shoes, for a price, and offer her gifts, at a price.
On the boat there were hundreds of migrants carrying the many possessions they had brought from Jamaica and the other islands. They slept in bunks in large dormitory-like berths, and they were called into a dining area for breakfast and then called back again at dinnertime. The passengers were speculating about what it would be like when they arrived; they talked about the weather and the conditions they might encounter. They talked about the people: Were they clean? Could they cook? Would they be nice? They spent seventeen days at sea in total. The conditions were good, and they all had a reasonably pleasant time, but most of all they had great expectations.
Now, here’s a mystery. Mum says she came over on this ship called the SS Peniah, but I looked really hard – so hard I think I have the right to call it research – and I could find no ship from that time with that name. I spoke to the historian Arthur Torrington and other experts of the Windrush generation, who migrated from the Caribbean, and none of them have found a ship with that name, but my mum swears that’s the ship she came on. I can only conclude that either she has simply got the name wrong (maybe the Peniah was a nickname and the ship had a different official name), or she was an illegal immigrant. In which case it would have to be said that she did a great job, and I’m very proud of her.
When the ship (whatever it was called) landed at Southampton in the first week of June 1957, people from companies that had advertised for workers were waiting. One such group met my mother and took her to a train station so she could make the journey to Sheffield. One of her earliest memories was of English houses. As the train headed north all she could see were factories with smoke billowing out of their chimneys, thousands of them.
She clapped her hands in joy; with so many factories, work would never be scarce. Then a friendly native told her the truth. All those factories were in fact houses. It was a big letdown. In Jamaica only factories had chimneys, but in England every house had them, and every house lit coal fires to keep warm. She had made the mistake many people from the Caribbean made when they first arrived in England. Back in Jamaica most houses were painted in vivid colours and were usually only one storey, so Mum was confused by the small English homes, all drab and made from brick, and all so very tightly packed together.
She arrived in Sheffield and found her way to the small house that was to be her new home. It was in stark contrast to the comfortable conditions she’d enjoyed in Jamaica. She had to sleep in the same bed as the other people she was staying with – three of them – until she eventually got a room of her own. The landlady found it difficult to say Faleta, so she suggested that she change her name to Valerie. She stuck to it, and when people asked her what her name was she would reply, quite proudly, ‘Valerie.’ Faleta was a beautiful name that conjured up images of the Caribbean sun and dancing on the beach, but Valerie suited Sheffield; it sounded much more English.
Her Uncle Neville had wanted her to get straight into nursing but her first job was working for Batchelors Peas in a canning factory. She was swept away by the adventure of her new life but she missed her mother, Uncle Moody and other members of her family – and most of all she missed her baby, Tina. Like a lot of people from the Caribbean back then, she told herself she’d only stay in the UK for five years, make some money, then return home; but five years turned into ten, ten into fifteen, fifteen into twenty. The twenty turned into fifty.
She tried to make a go of things in Sheffield, but after a few months she realised that as much as she loved peas she didn’t want to spend her life processing them, so when one of the people who’d travelled with her from Jamaica suggested that she look over the horizon to Birmingham, she did, and after nine months she left Batchelors Peas and made the move to the Midlands.
She’d been told to be prepared because England would be freezing cold, but when she arrived in June it was quite warm. She’d also been told she would have to drink tea all the time, otherwise she would freeze from the inside out. There were lots of little stories about other people’s experiences, and lots of advice was offered, but everyone’s experiences were different. Much depended on the time of year they arrived, the city they arrived in and the houses they lived in.
She kept in touch with her family back home by writing plenty of letters in which she would describe her living conditions: the carpets (or lino), the wallpaper, the pictures on the walls, even the smells she encountered. The moment she received a letter from someone back home, she would respond straight away. If, for any reason, she took too long to reply, another letter would soon drop on the doormat, prompting her to write.
Her big dream was to one day bring her mother over to England, but it was a struggle raising the money, so when she wrote home telling the family she hadn’t yet earned enough they told her not to worry, they were happy just to receive her letters. Despite some difficult conditions, Valerie, as she was now known, had begun to make a life in England; she made it her home and she was growing to love it.
One of the things she found most exciting was the absence of authority. For the first time in her life she didn’t have anybody to answer to. There were no parents monitoring her every move, and if she wanted to spend her wages on soaps, perfumes, dresses or shoes, then she could.
The home in which she found lodging was being shared with a nurse, who very kindly asked her matron whether there were any more jobs. There were jobs, so matron gave my mum a form to fill in, and pretty soon she’d passed the interview. She flew through her training, taking the transition from factory worker to nursing in her stride. And that was it: she was now an SRN, a State Registered Nurse.
Now, my mother will tell you that she has never ever experienced racism, not since the day she arrived in England from Jamaica. She insists nobody has ever said anything racist to her or been unpleasant to her because of the colour of her skin. She doesn’t deny there is racism; she just says it’s never happened to her. This is something we disagree on. As a child I remember people calling her names as she walked past them, but she would insist they were saying something else and not talking about her. I remember being in shops where the shop assistant would serve everyone else before her, even when my mum was next in line, and she would say, ‘She’s serving them first because they’re in a hurry.’ Even when people were racist directly to her face she would make excuses for them, saying they were confused or upset. She was always trying to see the good in people, even when the people weren’t good.
She had only one close friend in Birmingham – another woman who’d been on the ship with her. Mum was always looking for somewhere better to live, so her friend got her a better room in a larger house in Aston. It was while living there that she met and started to date Oswald Springer. He was from Barbados and had started to work as a packer in what was then called the GPO, the General Post Office. Now that was a good job, a job with a future. My mother’s future was beginning to look good too. She worked hard and she studied hard and, after taking more exams and getting a few promotions, she was soon working in a mental hospital, in the Chelmsley Wood area of Birmingham. She began to earn good money; enough to start sending some home.