![]() By the mid-90s there was even talk of the "Windrush generation". ![]() Over the next decade or so the name of that ship kept cropping up – in TV documentaries, books, newspaper articles. My dad had died in the 1980s, but I remember him mentioning, almost in passing, that he had sailed to this country on a ship called the Empire Windrush. I was gripped from the start as those two familiar parents of mine began to emerge as fully rounded human beings with an amazing story to tell. Whatever the truth, that silence was finally breached and my mother, reluctantly, began to speak to me about her life before I was born. ![]() ![]() But the way I remember it, neither she nor my dad ever seemed to want to talk about their lives in Jamaica, or about why in 1948 they made the momentous decision to leave that island to come to another. She always claimed that I was never interested in her past when I was younger. I hadn't realised I was starting a novel, I thought I was just being curious about my own family history when, in my 40s, I finally got my mum to tell me about her experiences of emigrating from Jamaica to Britain. ![]()
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