Twenty-Eight Pounds Ten Shillings- A Windrush Story

By Tony Fairweather

After World War Two England was on her knees, so the call went out to the British Empire for volunteers to help rebuild the 'Mother Country'. Young men and women from different Caribbean islands were quick to respond, paying the considerable sum of £28.10s to board HMT Empire Windrush - the 'ship of dreams'

• Language: English
• Publisher: HopeRoad Publishing.com
• Release date: Mar 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781913109288

Book preview

PART I

Island Hopping

CHAPTER 1

TRINIDAD, PORT OF SPAIN

The first stop of HMT Empire Windrush

… Miss Mavis Walker …

‘Mavis, get up and fetch some fresh water from the well,’ Daddy said loudly.

I jumped up, rubbing my eyes and looking around the bedroom. My two younger sisters were on the other bed and my young brother was in the next-door bedroom.

My little sister Debbie starts singing: ‘You’re going to get it, you’re going to get it, Dad will t’ump you in yur head, go get the water …’ I lunged across the bed to lick my sister in her head but she was too small and too fast.

This was country life in Trinidad … you had to milk the cows, get the water and feed the chickens before you went to work or school, which was a one-mile walk in the hot sun.

As I was getting dressed I looked at myself in the mirror – at my twenty-two-year-old body, not bad … but I could lose some weight. My wavy, jet-black hair that showed the Caribbean Indian side of my family was always fighting me, but I got my mother’s bottom.

Many people say: ‘You have your mother’s natural beauty.’

I don’t see it.

I am now the mother and the big sister after Mother died, one year ago. Dad did the best he could, but he never got over Mother’s death. He drank too much rum, every day, and it took its toll.

Things got so bad that Dad’s sister, Aunty Bee, came to live with us after a year of hardship for our family.

Sometimes I daydream of life in another country, away from my job as a junior nurse. Every day I’m doing more work than I should be, and I know I will only move up the ladder in the hospital when someone around here drops dead or is moved on.

The hospital is just too small.

But every night I listen to the BBC World Service on my wireless radio … as I read my medical books by candlelight. One night the radio announcer started talking about the Windrush ship that was stopping in Trinidad in two weeks, how the Mother Country needs our help … if you’re a nurse you can get a special free ticket to England … but you must stay for five years and work for the new National Health Service.

I put down my pencil and started to think about working in the National Health Service, England and ships.

From when I was a child once a month Mother would take all the family down to the harbour to see the big ships coming in from all over the world. She would fill our heads with stories from around the world even though she had never left the island. She was well read and passed this on to us. I knew there and then I was going to see the big world out there.

Tomorrow, I thought, I will apply for the free ticket through my hospital. I thought, I bet I don’t get the ticket. Things like that never happen to me.

But it did.

Then my first concern was: how do I tell Dad that I have been accepted to go to England in seven days? I just knew it would not go down well because Dad depended on me to keep the kids in line.

As I sat on the bench in the yard with the sun shining down, the goats and chickens running around, Dad was sitting on a piece of wood across the yard drinking the strong local rum and smoking a cigarette. For the first time in a long time, I took a good look at him … a brown-skin man, very tall, with powerful arms and a fit body, strong legs with rough hands from working on the family land every day of his life, and he seemed to have aged more since Mother died.

‘Dad, I need to tell you something …’

He looked up from his glass of rum: ‘Na-bather tell mi you is pregnant,’ he said in his heavy Trinidad accent.

‘No, Dad, I am not pregnant. I am going to England in seven days.’

It just jumped out my mouth. I put my hand over my mouth but the words had got out.

Dad looked at me and erupted. ‘Come out! Tek your tings and come out mi yard!’

His big voice made the chickens and goats scatter to the corner of the yard; the glass of rum in his hand went flying. I just started to cry and ran into the house.

Moments later Dad’s sister Aunty Bee come out and shouted, ‘Man, how you’re so bad. You lose your one wife now you going to lose your first-born. Man, fix-up.’

Dad looked at the ground, looked up to the sky. As if he was waiting for an answer from his dead wife. He sat on the log, swallowed all the rum left in the bottle then walked into the house and looked at me: ‘When is it you a go to Inglan? How you did pay?’ he said.

I answered though my tears, without looking at Dad, ‘I go in seven days … I get a special free tickets for nurses, but I must stay for five years, Daddy.’

Seven days later Dad took me to Trinidad Harbour in his buggy with all my brothers and sisters holding onto the buggy and me holding my one grip. All the neighbours had heard that I was going to ‘forin’. As the buggy was coming down the hill from the countryside where my family land was, all the neighbours young and old came out to say goodbye as we passed by. Local boys started running behind the buggy waving and shouting ‘send for mi’ and ‘mi a come’.

For the first time in my short life I really took notice of the bountiful red and yellow flowers, the vast palm trees, lizards crawling down the rocks, chickens running everywhere, goats eating the grass, the wonderful, wonderful colours of the Caribbean plants, green bananas, the blue of the sky; feeling the heat of the tropical sun on my face, the fragrance of the mint. Just as the buggy came around the bend, I saw lovely old Miss Wilson, Grandma’s best friend when she was alive, waving goodbye from her porch. My eyes were now wet, remembering the many Sunday mornings we went to church with Miss Wilson and Grandma. Miss Wilson in her church hat, with her white gloves and a Bible which had been handed down to her from her mother. Dressed in my Sunday best as a child and later as a young woman. After Grandma died I continued helping Miss Wilson up the hill to the church as the years took their toll on her ninety-three-year-old body. All the old stories she told me about the brutality of slavery that her mother had told her, she now passed on to me. ‘This is why I look the way I do and have a name like Wilson … Master’s blood was passed down from my mother to me; she was one of Master Wilson’s favourite toys.’

Plantation owner Mr R. Wilson from England owned you and could walk down to the slave quarters and pick who he wanted.

As we walked up the hill to church Miss Wilson would tell me how the slaves fought back on the slave estates throughout the Caribbean. ‘You must never forget where you came from and be proud of your brave ancestors.’ I will never forget those stories. As beautiful as the Caribbean looks to the eye, it has a dark history of brutality. Of genocide, slavery and colonialism.

I hope ‘eff God spar mi life’ I will see Miss Wilson when I come back home from England.

Dad was driving the buggy as if he was vex with the donkeys; we were bounced from side to side. As we got nearer to the docks I could see the outline of the big Windrush ship. My eyes could not believe how big it was. I had never been on a ship, I had never been off the island, I had never been away from my family.

The family just kept pointing at the big ship saying: ‘How it floats?’

I looked at Dad looking up at the ship; he had stopped drinking as much as he did. From that day in the yard he was a bit nicer than he normally was.

There were many, many people moving around the docks, different-colour people, white English soldiers, dockworkers and Trinidad police. The Governor of Trinidad was talking to the white official men sweating in their uniforms, soldiers checking people’s paperwork before boarding the ship. Boxes of rum and food flying through the air onto the ship, man unpacking boxes. Trinidad people were lining up to board the ship, people were crying, waving, hugging.

I took all this in as we got down from the buggy.

Dad handed the grip to me and wished me well. ‘Mind them white men, don’t get pregnant and come back safe.’ This was the old Dad I knew and loved. He did not mix his words.

I turned to hug all my family, one by one, telling them to behave and not to get Aunty Bee and Dad vex. I then turned to give an awkward hug to Dad, who looked at the big ship over my shoulder as he hugged me. ‘Send back some money for the pickney dem,’ Dad said as I started to walk away towards the ship in my best white hat and gloves, a cream cotton dress with my mother’s twin-set pearl necklace and earrings she gave to me before she died. Holding my one grip, and with tearful eyes, I looked back at the family, smiling, waving and Dad standing by the buggy as if he was frozen to the spot … Dad looked like a little boy who just lost his best friend. I stopped walking, put down my grip and ran back into Daddy’s arms: he held me like it was the first and last time. Coming from a hard country life he was not a man to show his emotions, but he had lost the love of his life, Pearl, my mother, and his best friend … he will not lose his first-born.

‘Mavis, walk good, my little gal. U-madda spirit a walk with you,’ were the last words Dad said to me.

I returned to the big ship with tears in my eyes and a lot of hope in my heart. ‘I will be back in five years,’ I said to myself. ‘I will be back.’

CHAPTER 2

TAMPICO, MEXICO

The second stop of HMT Empire Windrush

… Pele … with Anton and Verndo

‘Keep running, don’t look back!’ Anton shouted.

We were three young boys running through the backstreets of Mexico in the middle of the hot night with four men in pursuit.

‘Quick, get under the rubbish bins, pull over the cardboards on top of us.’

We lay perfectly still. We could see the feet of the men who were looking for us.

‘They must have come this way,’ said the biggest man. He was unfit, taking deep breaths. I imagined sweat running down his round face in the heat of the night and onto his multi-coloured shirt. ‘Look in the bins,’ he said to a short man carrying a gun.

‘I not going in any dirty bin in my new suit – to hell with that! This cost mi more than six dollars.’

‘You were rob,’ the big man said. ‘Now look in the damn bins.’

‘Over there – that looks like one of them crossing the street!’

All three men ran over the road.

Under the pieces of cardboard, beside the stinking bins, I watched the men running away across the street. We lay still.

‘No one move,’ Anton said.

‘It smell, I am getting up,’ Verndo declared.

‘Don’t you move if you want to live,’ Anton growled.

We lay there for the next ten minutes, then very slowly got up and came out, looking left and right.

‘They have gwan,’ Verndo said.

‘For now,’ I replied. I felt worried.

Aged nineteen, twenty and twenty-one, wearing old T-shirts and shorts, we walked back down the alley. We knew we had to get out of the city: you don’t rip off the local drug dealers and live to tell the tale.

Walking down the backstreets, out of sight of the bad men looking for us, I thought about how the hell we got into this mess …

This was meant to be a robbery that no one got hurt. The drugs and money were in the gang’s office; our job was to stack the boxes with cigarettes they used to move the drugs around town. We had left the back window just a little open. We waited till the drug runners went for their nightly drinks in the bar next door … we were going to get in through the window, take the money – then go. But Verndo had to go back for the drugs and ran right into one of the dealers’ women.

‘What the hell you doing in here?’ she said. The world stood still. She turned on the bright light. We were caught like a deer in the headlamps of a car. She knew every one of us.

SHIT… Verndo shoved the woman, who fell backwards on the floor by the door. As she landed Anton was trying to keep her from shouting by pushing his shirt into her mouth. The drug dealers were next door.

‘Let’s get the hell out!’ We all ran to the half-open window, but got stuck in the window space trying to get out. The woman was shouting out loud and we knew the drugs men with the big guns would be in the room any minute. We were stuck in that bloody window … no way we could all get out the window at the same time.

‘Pull back,’ I said.

‘NO – you pull back.’ We all pulled back, but shit – the men were coming. It was like a scene from a Marx Bros film, but we would get a real bullet in the ass if they caught us.

BANG! The door was trying to open but the woman lay behind it; we knew that four very big men with very big guns were trying to get in. We were still stuck in the window, with our legs in the office and our heads and bodies outside the window in the car park.

‘We are going to get shot in the ass, then they will slowly pull our eyes out,’ Anton said. Don’t ask me how I took note of this when so much was going on, but Anton was wetting his pants. Piss was running down his leg. The door was moving but the big woman was lying in front of the door blocking their entrance.

The first shot went over our heads as all the men fell over the woman on the floor – they did not see her laying there. Somehow we got through that window and ran through the car park, dodging bullets, jumping like antelopes. How the hell we did not get shot I do not know.

‘We can’t go home,’ I said. ‘They will be waiting for us.’

‘Shit, let’s give them back the drugs and money. We can say it was a joke?’

‘Have you lost your damn mind? They will kill us.’

Then as we sat on the wall in the alleyway (Anton in his wet pants) thinking about what we had just done and what to do next, Verndo peeled off a piece of newspaper that had got stuck to his feet. He was about to throw away the newspaper but the headline got his eye: ‘One-way tickets to London on the HMT Empire Windrush. Docking in four days.’ We all looked at each other, and then at the newspaper.

‘Can we stay alive for four days?’

CHAPTER 3

KINGSTON HARBOUR

The third stop of HMT Empire Windrush

… Miss Norma Bell … with Miss Lucretia Grey

Kingston Harbour was full of boxes with London/England stamped on them. Men were shouting, boxes coming off the back of people’s vans and buggies, ropes being lowered from the side of the ship. Plenty of local food, water, rum and other provisions were going on board the ship.

The ship was so big it blocked out the sun. Seeing all that steel and the guns made it feel real.

As I stood on the docks, taking in the size of the ship, I thought about Mother and Father, my brothers and sisters all combining their savings to pay the cost of the cabin ticket and putting together the living money to survive in the ‘Motherland’, England. The family knew I would make more money in England than in Jamaica.

So there I was, standing on the docks in my yellow cotton dress and red head wrap. I always liked to be neat and tidy and have everything in place.

I had it all worked out. I would be sending back money every month to repay my family, but would save the rest – ‘so when I comes back in five years’ time I can marry a man and will have my vex money so he can’t mess with me,’ I thought.

I loved teaching and had just turned twenty-five years old. I had been teaching for two years. But the money was bad in Jamaica and there were more teachers than schools. Country life was good, with its green palm trees, lovely flowers and sweet ackee and mango trees. Once a week my family would go down to the beach and enjoy the baptisms and church services – there is nothing like a West Indian church with its Sunday hats, dresses, handheld Jesus fans, good food and white gloves, and ‘when the spirit take them’ God is in the house, with the pastor banging the Bible, the handclapping, the choir of older women very slightly out of tune but no one cares, people ‘talking in tongues’ and rolling on the floor, dancing like the world will end if they stop, and the deacons helping them back to their seats … this was the life I knew.

My school was set on top of the hill, with a wonderful view of the countryside and a cool breeze that helped to keep the school building cool. It was one big room for everything – teaching, playing, sleeping. My family was not poor, but not rich either; they had done well farming the plantation land that my great-great-grandfather Mr U.N. Bell was born on. About 300 acres. Originally Caribbean Arawak Indian land.

My great-great-grandfather purchased a small piece of land from the estate that was cut up into smallholdings once emancipation came to Jamaica. The plantation owners went back to England fully compensated. The slaves received nothing, not one English penny. They were just abandoned on the plantation.

He squatted on the land until he could afford to buy it from the Jamaican government. My family, the Bells, supplied the local market and some small hotels and hospitals with fresh fruit, herbs, hot scotch bonnet peppers and some handiwork.

Many nights I sat on the porch of my wooden house listening to the night orchestra of sounds in the Caribbean air mixed with the heat and mosquitoes. I knew there was more to my life than teaching in the countryside.

All my life I had read about England at school, the King and the Motherland, and I now needed to see what was out there. ‘This island can’t be it … it just can’t be all my life will add up to,’ I thought. ‘I am a good teacher and I will teach in England.’

One day I was taking a lunchbreak at school, sitting in the shade of the palm tree reading the Jamaica Gleaner when I saw the ad: ‘The King of England invites the peoples of the Empire to live and work in England … Help to rebuild the Mother Country … special-priced one-way ticket to England …’ I read on, learning that there were many jobs in the Mother Country that paid well, and so much overtime. I sat the paper on my lap and thought about England, the end of the war, living with white people, cold weather in England, finding a job, being away from my family … I was never a person to rush into anything, and thought about it all day.

On the way home from school I stopped off at my best friend Lucretia’s farm, just down the lane from our house, and showed her the newspaper.

We read the advert together. Then we stopped, looked at each other, then read it again. We screamed out loud, our voices filled with joy: ‘We are go to Inglan.’

There was a buzz in the air on Kingston Harbour. The sun was shining as Mr Brown, my neighbour and a good friend of the family, pulled into the harbour in his pick-up truck. Lucretia and I had said our goodbyes at home; in the truck there was room only for our bags and grips. Otherwise, the vehicle was filled with supplies Mr Brown was planning on selling to the ship.

He placed our bags beside us on the docks and wished us a happy trip: ‘You’re going on the adventure of your life, my children, enjoy the good days and na bother about the bad ones.’

As he drove off we had to pinch ourselves – we were here in Kingston Harbour, going to the Motherland. We looked up to see wooden cargo with London stamped on the side being placed onto the big ship, boxes flying through the air, supplies of meat, rum, food, water, fruit being loaded. Jamaican people were boarding in their Sunday-best outfits.

The ship was so big. I had never seen anything like it. Everywhere there were people moving, in no particular direction, just moving. Then I saw my first white soldier in uniform and it all became very real. I was going to England to be a teacher, make lots of money and come back to Jamaica in five years.

‘Bwoy, the ship big, how it will float? Why it called Windrush? We all a drown in the sea,’ Lucretia said in her broad Jamaican accent.

‘Stop it,’ I said.

But Lucretia kept talking, paying me no mind. ‘The soldier- man look good in dem uniform anyway. Mi a watch them white men, mi hear that the white man love to beat women on the bottom! I just don’t want any of them white men trying to get them bony tings next to mi. I will lick them with my coo-coo- maker stick,’ she said.

I just shook my head from left to right.

Lucretia Grey was my oldest friend. Stout in build, velvet dark in complexion, she was very proud of her breasts, which defied the laws of gravity, and of her ample backside. She was very pretty, very funny: every word that came out of her mouth was true Jamaican, or just funny. She’d been a country girl all her life, living with cows, pigs, goats – and horny men she had to fight off as her young girl’s body developed into that of an ample woman.

Lucretia still believed that London’s streets were paved with gold. That’s what everyone in Jamaica was saying. Her grandma had to sell two cows, a pig and the old goat to pay for the Windrush ticket and give her living money. Lucretia’s grandma had a little land in the hills that had good mango trees and green bananas that they sold at the market. Her grandma raised Lucretia from the day that her daughter just got up and left Lucretia in Grandma’s care, when Lucretia was five years old. Grandma knew Lucretia needed to see the world and get that country life out of her or she would end up barefoot and pregnant.

‘Gweh,’ said Grandma. ‘Gwan and see the world. Na bader end up like mi, old and alone,’ she said.

Lucretia kissed her on the cheek and held Grandma’s old hands, with veins that pushed against her old black skin. She looked at Grandma’s worn face, which had seen hardship, the loss of her husband and her no-good daughter, and old age that time can’t stop … ‘I love you, Mother,’ she said.

Grandma looked at her through her moist, hazy blue eyes in a way she never had before: it was the first time Lucretia had used the word ‘Mother’ in all the years she had been raised by her. Grandma was certain that ‘if God spare mi life’ she would live to see her come back to Jamaica in five years to bury her in the family plot.

People who didn’t really know my best friend Lucretia thought she was funny, a bit ‘country’ and rough around the edges, but she used this persona to cover up her insecurities about not being that well educated and feeling abandoned as a child. The only family she knew was her grandmother, me and the church. She told me she dreamed about the mother and father she never