My name is Professor Stephen Delsol, so born on the island of Dominica in the village of Scotts Head.

My mother had a spot of land which used to be a Maroon colony. The Maroons were the slaves who ran from slavery into the hills of, what I call freedom hills. They were born free in Africa. Once you get to Dominica, being one of the most mountainous islands in the world, they decided to make a run for their freedom. So Grand Bay was where their condition slavery began and that’s where my mother was born. And that’s where they used to live, right in top of the mountain. I remember going up there as a little boy and once you get there, you used to have the feeling of peace. I always felt good in that place.

Daddy left in March of 1955 and I was six and a half years. I remember the day when his brothers took him on the boats, in those days we had no roads to go from Scotts Head to Roseau, so you had to row your boats. His brothers came, and I just remember that was the saddest day of my life. Everybody’s crying, daddy’s crying, we are holding on to each other, we didn’t want him to go.

And as a child it was very hard, so hard, that… I’m coming from a family of four brothers, the first two brothers, myself and my older brother, suffer from malnutrition. Because daddy didn’t bringing our fish during the day. My mother was a farmer, she found three small acres of land. And therefore it was hard, it was tough in Scotts Head in the 50s. And that’s one of the push factors that drew my daddy to England in 1955.

My dad first started by working at Cumberland Hotel in Marble Arch and then very soon he got a job at London Transport. He worked at London Transport for 30 years, fixing the rails when the trains were off in the night. That was the 50s.

This was the age of the teddy boys. So my daddy was going through group of teddy boys every night who were always at Westbourne Park Station or Ladbroke Grove Station, waiting for Black men to beat them up. Thank God my daddy never got beat up. He was a very courageous man because he was a fisherman, fishing the rough Atlantic Ocean.

I think 1959 is a very important moment for Black people in this country. Kelso Cochrane was killed on Ladbroke Road Bridge. And that drew a lot of men back to the Caribbean because they were not, did not feel protected by the police. And my daddy was one of them.

So he came home in December of 1959 and he was a totally different man. My daddy was an extrovert. He came with all these cuttings from newspapers. He was sitting in the same boat that he used to fish in. He became like a university. The men in the village would get around him and he was, he was boasting about what he was doing. You know, I was just curled in one little part of the boat listening in to all his conversations. If he knew… Some of them were very salacious, of course, I’m supposed to know that. But if he knew I was listening in, I would be… have the beating of my life. Laughs.

Very soon he realised the money was running out. And therefore he couldn’t stay in Dominica. There’s no work. So he had to run back to London in a year. He was back in 1960.

My mom used to bake, the old-fashioned way. And the savings, the profit from baking, was used to send her four sons to grammar school. And then, so I was promoted to fourth form. And I was happy when my mother wrote to my dad to say, my older brother was a bit out of control, and therefore he asked to play sports. She has had enough of raising four boys. You know, she was still in Dominica, my dad is here in London. That’s 10 years after my dad first came to London.

And my dad said, ‘Yes, I’ll send for Joseph, but I’m working nights. I can’t keep Joseph on his own in the house. What about having Stephen coming up with him?’ Like his chaperone, right? And that’s how I came to this country. So it wasn’t my desire at all.

And I arrived in London, Friday July 6th in 1965.

I should have gone to a grammar school, but in those days you can’t go to grammar school. I went to Paddington College. And there, that’s where I did my GCSEs and A-Levels.

But my break came that the Deputy Principal, for whatever reason, Margaret Rollins, just took a liking to me. And she was my mentor. And she gave me my first job, which was being a laboratory technician at Paddington College, working in science, chemistry, biology and physical laboratory.

The Pardner system is an interesting system because, when I came to London in ‘65, there were ten men used to come on a Friday afternoon with ten pounds. So every week a different man got a hand of 100 pounds. And that is the 100 pounds they used to send for their loved ones, a girlfriend or wife or child. Also some of them went on to buy a house as well, put a down payment for that, because in those days they couldn’t get any loan from a bank.

That was a small bank. And my daddy was a treasurer of that. I think he was a stabilising force, in that he helped the Windrush generation men to communicate by letter. He helped them get tax returns as well, fill in the tax returns.

But my daddy was a great love letter writer. And I remember men saying, ‘Ben, can you write a letter for my girlfriend?’ So my dad asked the guy, he said, ‘What do you want me to write?’ He said, ‘Ben, you know.’ Laughs.

So… I wonder what happened when those women received that letter, knowing that their husbands cannot read and write. And they probably said to themself, ‘Who is that man who’s writing me all these love letters?’

So my daddy had been in London now for 14 years. My mother is still in Dominica. Three brothers is already here in London. And my daddy had an accident, lifting a heavy rail, you know in the Underground. His back, his vertebrae got crushed, literally. He had a high pain threshold, that’s the kind of guy he was, okay?

I want to go to university. I’m seeing my daddy in pain. I’m saying in my head, ‘You know what? Dad needs mum.’ So I, myself, paid my mother’s passage. It’s not my daddy who got my mother here, I was the one that got my mum to London.

But once my mother got to London, then things began to happen, because my mother was part coming from Kalinago, part Igbo and Maroon backgrounds. So she was very enterprising, entrepreneurial. And she… used to have about three, four jobs all at the same time. And she began to save up and then get a flat, buy a flat.

So I went to university, I got a degree in biology and education, and I went into teaching to be a science teacher. First job at Walworth School off the Old Kent Road. It was terrible there. I mean the racism was awful.

One day I’m going in the class, the class is quiet. Unusually quiet. I thought, ‘Hey, they up to something.’ Laughs. When I went to sit on my chair, someone puts a bloody sanitary towel on the chair. And there was shock. Ah. I pick it up quietly, I continue teaching. I could see, I look at the eyes, I could see, I knew exactly where it was coming from. And that Sunday, I went to the house on the Aylesbury Estate, knock on the door, and there’s a silence.

So yes, then I met a young lady from Dominica, got married and then we had two girls. Then raising children on Elephant and Castle and Long Lane and those particular areas was tough. So the other Black families, we’re helping each other. We form a group for parents, for example, Milton Court Estate. Then we had a Saturday school inside of North Peckham Estate, back from 1973 on. It was called DACHWYN School. And from that, we formed the Caribbean Teachers Association in Southwark. And we started with the access to higher education, because we didn’t have enough Black teachers in the classroom.

I’ll be 77 in September but I arrived at a point in my life about, probably less than 10 years ago, I said, ‘You know what, I need to write a book on my daddy.’

My daddy was touchy-feely love, you know. So I called the book ‘My Dad and Mum and Me’. And that is a story, it’s all written in rhyming couplets from start to finish, but the story of me and my dad. It’s a love story of a son for his father, and a father for his son.

So it starts,

‘I am an apologetic poet who demonstrates

My story’s happily affectionate

I don’t want my daddy’s memories buried in his grave

I want his story revived and his legacy saved.’