Casualties of the impossible dream

Press, 17 January 1986, Page 15

Casualties of the impossible dream

Their bitterness has overflowed on to the streets in violent acts; their disillusionment is etched on their faces. They are the West Indians who have become soured with life in Britain and made angry by the treatment they have received. LESLIE GOFFE of the London “Guardian” reports.

They came in hope 30 years ago, but their children are still not at home

When Euphemia Hamilton arrived in England from her native Jamaica 30 years ago, she had a two-point plan in her mind. She was going to stay no more than five years, and she was going to work long and hard to build up the little business she had left in her village back home. Thirty years later, her dream has long since gone. Her life made the headlines when the shooting of her daughter, Cherry, by police in her Brixton home, brought black people yet again into confrontation with the police. She arrived in Brixton in 1955 among more than 24,000 West Indians who had travelled that year from British colonies. Some wanted to leave Britain for the independence their countries were to achieve in the early 19605, but most wanted simply to better themselves, to return experienced and enriched to their corner of the empire. The Nationality Act of 1948 had confirmed the right of colonials to settle in Britain. Enticed by a campaign by London Transport and the British Hotels and Restaurants Association, more than 125,000 West Indians came to Britain in the decade after 1948. For many of that first generation from the West Indies, their ambitions have been thwarted — in a Britain entrenched in its own class and race discrimination. “When I first came here, I wanted to go back immediately,” Mrs Hamilton says. “It was only because I was too ashamed to return that quickly that I did not leave then.”

Back home, Euphemia Hamilton had her own clothes store. She used to employ two assistants and a home-help to look after her children and her house. In England she was a worker in a sewing factory, arid a tenant in an eight-roomed house with eight black families sharing two kitchens and two bathrooms. .

At the end of five years, things seemed to have got out of hand. “I couldn’t go back then,” she explains. ‘So I decided to stay another five years. By the end of the next five years my mind was completely off going home. By then you simply knew that you would go home one day. But there was no longer any set time.” Realising that her children ftould soon have to follow her to England, she began to make pre-

parations. A devoutly Christian woman, she had thought that England would be a godly society. She was disillusioned. ‘On every street corner there is a church, but you don’t see many people going there. Maybe they went there in the past. But as times got better for the British, they decided that they did not need God any more.”

Mrs Hamilton thinks that Britain could use some enlightenment now for the young generation of Britishborn blacks. “This generation is very daring, very fierce, and they are outspoken,” she says. “When my generation first came here we took a lot of abuse, and perhaps did not fight for our rights. This generation is more educated. They have not the patience, nor the faith.”

If Euphemia Hamilton had never left Jamaica, her son Mervyn Bartlett, aged 29, would probably not have become an honours graduate in computer and microprocessor engineering at Essex University. He used not to think that the police have one law for black. Now he’s not so sure.

“My impression before the police shot my sister was that perhaps there was a criminal element in the area, and the police were simply trying to close down on it,” he says. “But that is not the case. What they did to my sister was not justified. Nor has the way they have treated the family, and black people in general, been justified.” Bartlett explains that because he had gone to university, and then become a computer engineer, he had perhaps been cloistered from young blacks’ daily confrontation with the police. “My eyes are now open,” he adds.

He insists that he, and black people born here, are British. “I think it is wrong when a black child born here is called West Indian,” he says. He recalls the experience of his first visit to Jamaica. “My accent was different,” he says. “My dress

and general movement were different. I am a black Londoner, and that is that.”

Similarly, he believes that the dreams and aspirations of his parents are not the same as the demands and expectations of Brit-ish-born blacks. “Those who have gone to school side-by-side with their white counterparts, and who were encouraged to have the same hopes and the same dreams, will want to know why they have not been afforded the same opportunities.

“If you remove the opportunity for young blacks to progress and develop and become responsible, they have, to a certain extent, little choice but to become irresponsible. The Government response to this complex situation has been to use the police to dampen the youth’s energy.” The story of Euphemia Hamilton and her family is paralleled by those of countless others. Horace Parkinson was an early casualty. He was convicted of inciting riot, causing an affray, and grievous bodily harm, for an incident which took place in 1973 at a funfair at Brockwell Park, Herne Hill, near Brixton. Parkinson was sentenced to 2Vz years. “The whole business diverted my course,” Parkinson says. “My respectability was damaged.” Parkinson had been popular among local youth. He had worked at youth clubs, and been considered progressive. When he was arrested, a defence campaign — “Free The Brockwell 3” — was mounted to have him, and two other youths arrested in the incident, released. He is convinced that his high visibility as an organiser of the youth contributed to his being arrested. He still maintains he was innocent. “That was the penalty for my exposure.” He is now a community worker at the Ferndale Community Development project in South London. “In some ways my parents’ gen-

eration viewed themselvs as only guests,” Parkinson says. “They kept quiet because they considered it unwise to tip the barrel. They were concerned with respectability and recognition, and adopted the attitude: ‘Humble thyself.’ “They kept the shame of their experience here locked up inside them,” he says, “and this has now helped to create some of our own confusion.”

Horace’s father, Astel Parkinson, is senior youth worker at St Matthew’s Meeting Place in Brixton, chairman of the local community and police consultative group, and most recently a magistrate. He agrees with his son.

‘I think the attitude that we had as guests here meant that we have lost a generation,” he says. “We did not give the young any reason to believe that this was their country.” He says that his generation was perhaps too busy, and too selfish. “We cloaked our children constantly with talk of our leaving,” he says. “We did not realise that they would have a life here to live. This is their country. This will be their tomorrow.” Astel Parkinson came to Britain as a student teacher in the late 19505, but limited opportunities in teaching forced him towards London Transport. He remembers being attracted by the London Transport advertisements in Jamaica. He says that when in Jamaica; even if he did not quite expect the streets of London to be paved with gold, he did expect it to be a “beautiful land of opportunity as it was advertised. I thought this was the Motherland,” Parkinson says. “I have found out that it is nothing of the kind.”

A series of introductions to British prejudice taught him this. “The only sight that the taxi-driver showed me on my way from the airport was Brixton prison,” he recalls. He remembers sitting on a crowded bus. “The bus conductor would not even take my fare,” he says.

He explains that it was the job of the early-comers, who understood the ways of the host, to teach the late-comers. “We would be asked by whites to read the time from the sun. They would follow us to the toilets because they were looking to see if we had tails.” It is not surprising that although Astel Parkinson has managed to achieve much of what he setjjut to do in Britain, he says that he has

never once regarded this country as home. He visits Jamaica often, and has been making preparations over the years for his return. “Every time I go to Jamaica, I plant something in my garden, and return to marvel how it has grown,” he says. “My dream has been forever to get back as soon as possible to what I have planted, to what I have created. I have something to return to.” But for many of his generation, the dreams are now too late to put into effect. “Time has run out for a lot of my generation,” Astel Parkinson says. “Some will continue to dream. Once upon a time you would never have seen a West Indian in the pubs or at the betting shops.” people came here to work. “But people now have nowhere else to go. These places have become their only recreation.” He says that few of his generation expected to become senior citizens; jn Britain. And now that they are,,, few can accept it. a ‘They are suffering even more now that they are old.” Parkinson, says, “but they still maintain dream of returning to places that

they have not seen in 30 years.” Another old-timer approaching retirement in Britain is Princess Alley. She admits to having harboured the dream of return, but now she does not think it would be worth it. “Everything has changed out there from the way things used to be,” she says. “If I go back now it is another strange life and having to start all over again.” She says that when she came to Britain in the early 1960 s she left a quite comfortable life in Guyana. He husband was a builder and she was a housewife. They separated after a few years here, as the frustrations of their new life began to take its toll.

“When we arrived here, we realised that we had made a terrible mistake,” she says. “All of the black people were at the same level here. It did not matter whether they had education or not. We came here big. We would have had to go back small.’ Her daughter, Donna Alley, aged 25, is a book publisher. She would have preferred her family small in Guyana to invisible in Britain. “I have been fortunate to have visited

Guyana, and I was very unhappy that my parents came to this country,” she says. She was born in Guyana and came to Britain at the age of seven to join her parents. “I lived in a village called Paradise, and that was the operative word for it,” she says. “I don’t believe my parents needed to come here, and I have never seen my future here.” Donna Alley sees her future, and that of her two children who were born in Britain, not in Britain, but in the Caribbean. “The Nationality Act of 1983 has made my decision to look elsewhere seem more sensible,” she says. “Though my mother worked the best years of her life here, though I have grown up most of my life here, my children who were bom here are still not British.” She says that she had to go through an insulting process of having her British-born children naturalised. “I want them to grow in a society where they will be allowed to develop, where perhaps they will be given a greater opportunity to contribute. I would like to be part of building something.”

Donna Alley admits that a lot more black people will stay in Britain than those who will leave it. “Those that are going to stay will have to get involved on every level of this society if they are to survive Jiere,” she says. Many of the first generation of West Indians who came to Britain in the 1950 s have only lately come to recognise that what they set out to achieve in a few years was perhaps not ever really possible in a system with little upward mobility. Perhaps they were the victims of their own ambition, fostered by their colonial existence. It is more likely that they were the victims of institutionalised discrimination. The second generation have divested themselves of their parents’ illusions about Britain. Any future that black people are to have in Britain will lie entirely with the coming generations. It will be their responsibility to redeem something of the hope and ambition that the earlier generationsJost — in a metropolis not conixraed with either the or fiction of those dreams.