My name is Jan, and I’m from Jamaica. My father left Jamaica for a better life in the UK. And it was around the time where the Windrush were taking people from the Caribbean to the UK.

I was seven years old when I came over from Jamaica. Obviously, my mother said, you know, she did this to give me a better life, because things are very tough in Jamaica. And she had every confidence that my father would take care of me. But as time went on, that didn’t happen.

It was a horrendous, horrendous time for me.

If you can imagine a child being separated from their home. My mother and my grandmother, that’s all I knew. And literally being dragged onto the plane. I can’t remember, to this day I can’t remember what happened between when I got on the plane until I arrived in the UK. That’s part and parcel of the trauma, really. The only thing I remember is getting off the plane and being greeted by these people, they were strangers. Because if I was three when my father left, he was a stranger to me. And then meeting his wife.

Driving from the airport or the train station to the family home. It was dark. And dismal. I’ve never seen anything like it, it was horrible. And during that time people were burning coal, right. So you had these chimneys with smoke, and brick houses. It was just horrible.

Our first home was in Brixton, just off Acre Lane. I then met my siblings from my father’s second family.

I left Jamaica as a child and came here as a house help to look after my younger siblings. You know, if they did something wrong, I would be punished for it. You’re called all sorts of names. And that was what happened with my stepmother. You know, branding me all sorts of names.

And one of the things I hate is being called Miss Mouse. Because I was really quite meek and that was a way of keeping me down as well. And it took a long time for me to shake that off.

Sometimes I find myself going back into that mode. But I’ve had to go through counselling. And then through my line of work I’ve developed this kind of resilience as well.

And I’m sure if you interview quite a few people who came over at this time that you would find that the children who were brought here from the Caribbean were actually treated differently to the children who were born here, as well. And that goes back to how England was put on a pedestal and deemed as the Motherland, right, because you were something special.

So I left school and then went on to do my social work. And in doing my written assignments and my research about Black people, right, where we came from, it opened my eyes to so many different things.

And I started to go to exhibitions. At the time there were people like C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Darcus Howe. You know, there were so many people that I gained this confidence that I never knew I had.

I qualified as a social worker and my specialism was probation. I also worked in the prison with women and that was another eye-opener.

One of the things that I recognised was the intergenerational trauma, right. That certain patterns of behaviour were passed down from one generation to another. I saw myself in some of those women, as well. You know that, had I not had the foundation of my mother and grandmother, I probably could have ended up in that situation as well, you know, as some of the young women.

My father, do you know, I have so much respect for him, right. 1995, ’94, he had a massive heart attack and passed away. I think it was a combination of all the trauma that he had gone through. Because that’s the other thing that we don’t look at, was their trauma. And some of the things that they had to deal with which they internalised. And took out a lot of their frustration on, within the family home as well.

The majority of my work involved me working in Lambeth. But I thoroughly enjoyed my work because I felt as though I was actually giving back to the community.

I’ve only been back to Jamaica, I think it’s two or three times, because I have no family out there now. Everyone migrated to the US or Canada or the UK.

I started to travel to Ghana in 2013. I was actually invited by a friend. So I spend half of my time in the UK, the other half in Ghana. And being in Ghana you have this sense of freedom because it’s home, right, it’s my ancestors’ home.

One of the first things I do when I go back to Ghana, I don’t live too far away from the ocean. It becomes dark, the evenings are, turn dark from six-thirty onwards. The sea is just black. And I stand by the ocean and I will look out as far as I can see. And just wonder about my ancestors, those who were taken from that land into the unknown.

My forefathers, they didn’t have a choice. I didn’t have a choice either, you know, to leave my mother and my grandmother. It was night-time when I left Jamaica. I arrived in the UK at night-time. That in itself is really quite moving. And it’s amazing, that I will stand there at night. It’s, it humbles you.

I thank God that I’ve been able to turn things around. You know, I’m just so blessed, I really am.