Double Lives by Helen McCarthy

Author:Helen McCarthy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

10

Newcomers

When Doreen Phillips arrived in London in 1964 with a baby on one arm and a small child gripping her other hand, everything seemed dismal and dark. Accustomed to year-round sunshine in her native Guyana, Doreen found fault at every turn, from the shabby rooms occupied by her husband and eldest son, who had migrated to Britain before her, to the strangeness of the London Underground. ‘I used to stand at the top of the escalator looking down,’ she recalled, ‘asking, “do I have to go on that?”’ Finding work was easy – ‘as long as you were prepared to do the menial jobs’ – and Doreen soon started an evening shift in a sweet factory, with a neighbour watching the children while she was out. She was dismayed by the racial prejudice that she found there:

The Blacks were on one side, the Whites were on one side. We sort of got all the worst bits to do, the sweeping up and things. We were packing sweets, they were packing the sweets, handling the things, but all the dirty jobs the Blacks were doing. Then they would use remarks like ‘What’s smelling like that?’, you know, them sorts of things because they used to say Black people stink.

By speaking up and standing her ground, Doreen got herself moved to a better job in the factory, although she remained ever-conscious of her status as a ‘dark stranger’, as the title of one influential study of Commonwealth immigration put it, in an overwhelmingly white society. Doreen could at least draw for emotional sustenance and practical aid on Caribbean friends in London:

We used to visit each other’s homes, you didn’t need appointments, you walked in, you’re in one room, you sit together round the paraffin heater, you put the kettle on the paraffin heater, you make tea. You keep my children, I keep yours … We used to arrange to pick up each other’s children from school, you pick up mine today, I pick up yours tomorrow.1

Doreen’s testimony, recorded in the early millennium, bore the classic hallmarks of the migrant narrative: a long journey, shock and dislocation on arrival, a lasting sense of living between two worlds but belonging to neither, and the comforting embrace of the tightly knit communities which migrants quickly built for themselves within a hostile host nation.2 Travelling to Britain after the 1962 Immigration Act, which limited the eligibility of ‘coloured’ colonial subjects, Doreen was classed as a dependant of her husband. Yet like most migrant mothers, she fully expected to work, earn and save. There was no ‘dual role’ for women like Doreen, who were far less likely than white, British-born mothers to take an extended break from paid employment for child-rearing and home-making. A survey carried out in the mid-1970s found that nearly three-quarters of Caribbean women in Britain were wage-earning, compared to the national average of 45 per cent.3 In inner London, foreign-born mothers with children under the age of one were twice as likely as their British-born counterparts to be working, and four times as likely to be working full-time.

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