Coming to the UK: A Bajan Child's Experience

This is about my journey into space for the first time.  I didn’t travel on a spaceship, but the plane was big enough to look like one. Huge and silver, it had BOAC written across it in giant blue letters. I was leaving Barbados and going to join my parents in England. I hadn’t seen them in seven years, so had no idea what they looked like. I hoped they’d recognise me. My sister would be there, and she’d left after my parents. So she might still recognise me and be able to point me out to them.

At the airport, my aunts and cousins kissed me goodbye, and an airhostess took me up the wheeled staircase into the plane. Her uniform was red, and my dress was lemon. Together we looked like movie stars.

The plane was mostly long rows of seats with people talking very quietly. I was put between two women who were chatting to each other about London fashion, and something called tights. I don’t remember the airplane food just that it smelled delicious. It reminded me of Granny’s Iris’s cooking. She had looked after most of her grandchildren so that her daughters could go out to work. Granny could do everything except read. She could make soups; fry fish, roast chicken and cook split pea or black eye pea rice. In Granny’s house we all helped to peel vegetables, wash rice, scale and season fish and meat for cooking.

She grew fruit and vegetables to sell in the market which she carried in a tray on her head. There were yams, eddoes, breadfruit, plums, sugar apples, guava, donks, tamarind and ackees. I can’t remember ever being hungry in my grandmother’s house.

I’d miss many things. The beach, my friends, drinking Tiger Malt, swinging over the gully, and catching butterflies behind Mrs Bovell’s house. I’d miss playing motorbike with my cousins and friends. We’d crawl inside a giant rubber tyre from the factory and curl up like an O. Then someone would push you down Spooner’s Hill to join the traffic. I’d miss Mrs Skeete’s magic trick. Her house was next door to Granny’s, and the sides were almost touching. Mrs Skeete could stick her neck through both her side window and Granny’s. Her head would be in our front room, complaining about all the ‘wutless’ people on the street, while her body stayed in her own house.  

I wouldn’t miss the nurse who had given me my vaccination. The needle was long, thin, and silver; I knew it was going to hurt. She laughed when I started to cry, saying, “Girl, wuh you crying fuh? Dah needle ain’ even touch you yet!”

She said I needed a vaccination because people in England were riddled with diseases. She also said Barbados was the only country where the Queen of England wasn’t afraid to drink the water. I promised myself that if I caught anything from drinking the water in England, I’d come back to Barbados, find that nurse, and riddle her with all my diseases.

In England I expected to meet Spiderman, Christopher Robin, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and the Green Lantern. My suitcase was too heavy for books, so I had to leave my stories of Anansi Spider, Brer Rabbit and Rita, the little girl who lived in a mud hut in Jamaica. I hoped to meet the Beatles. I’d thank them for the song they wrote for me called, ‘Hey Jude’.

I definitely didn’t want to meet any of the men in the pictures from my father’s old medical books. They had giant goadies which had to be carried about in wheelbarrows. My cousins said that goadies were testicles, although nobody seemed to know what those were either.  

Aunt Maylene said the cold in England would stop my nosebleeds. That was good because I always got them even when the Bico ice-cream van came. It didn’t put me off eating them, but I was a bit tired of eating ice-creams with blood clots all over them.

My father would have turned white from all his years in England. By now he could be anyone. Auntie Maylene thought he might have become a serial killer, just like the ones running around in America. She said they‘d find him by his long name, Otho Chesterfield Hughie Nathaniel Ezekiel Hezekiah Hawthorne Sealy. Although she had a much shorter name for him. Slagoo.

England didn’t seem far because I closed my eyes and two minutes later we were there. My air hostess had to accompany me because I was a minor. I knew the difference between minor and miner so wasn’t worried about being sent to Newcastle to dig for coals. When she went to get my suitcase, a man in a uniform and cap stayed with me. He seemed very kind. He winked and said, ‘Welcome to England.’

I didn’t know how to wink, but Granny Iris had told me to be mannerly to everyone. So I bowed low and said, ‘Thank you, my good gentleman.’ 

When the airhostess returned with my suitcase, she said, ‘It’s very heavy for such a little girl.’ I knew why. There were things inside Maylene told me not to mention. Coconut breads, frozen flying fish, soursop juice, mangoes, and rum. All that food made me think of Granny Iris. I’d miss her most of all.  But then we were off to the collection point. As the air hostess took my hand, I smiled, and wondered how soon I’d get to meet Spiderman.