Black man on the run

Seventy-five years ago, on June 22, 1948, the HMT Empire Windrush, carrying servicemen, nurses, and others invited by the Crown as Commonwealth citizens to rebuild Britain after the war, docked at Tilbury in Essex. It was the first of many ships over four decades. Last month, what ought to have been a celebration of the enormous contribution of West Indians in the UK, was overshadowed by the 2017 immigration scandal when many from the Windrush generations were denied re-entry to Britain after trips abroad, and some 160 people deported. June 22 was a reminder of the systemic racism faced by Caribbean people in the UK.

Wasfiri is the leading UK magazine for international writing, renowned for publishing distinguished writers, including Trinidadian Sam Selvon, Nadine Gordimer, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite and others. When guest editor of Wasafiri 114, Henghameh Saroukhani, asked me to contribute fiction alongside Gary Younge and Kittitian-British novelist Caryl Phillips, I knew I had to come good and emptied myself out to inhabit my character. If a glimpse of that time through the imagination felt traumatic, I can’t begin to think about what Caribbean people have suffered for 75 years in the UK.

Beneath, with full permission from Wasafiri, is an extract from Black Man on The Run:

“Nobody had been to England before. At first, we talked and talked. As the journey went on, Breads was spending most of his time throwing up and the rest of it gulping rum, saying it was like his ancestors were punishing him for going back to the people who brought them here in the first place. He feared if he got any worse, they would throw him overboard. The novelty of the English food and large ship wore off as the days multiplied. People wrapped their heads up like Bedouins; there was a growing stench of vomit and urine. While Breads was sleeping off rum, I drank with the oldest skivvy on the ship. We sat there, watching the inky waves, and the first thing he said to me after I took a swig from his bottle was to turn around and take the next ship back to Trinidad. He was Jamaican, with watery eyes, a face so weathered he looked a hundred years old, his white hair in locks, his beard down to his chest. He was on the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948. From the time he got off the Windrush, he said it was lash after lash. Landlords had signs, No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish until he got a room let by a slumlord— many landlords exploited our desperation for digs —which he shared with four other men.

But it was the Teddy Boys, he said, with bicycle chains and razor blades, who wore drainpipe trousers and long coats and threw Molotov cocktails and bricks that made the lives of black people absolute hell. He was verbally abused—Blackie, N****r Moonshine—told to go back to his country; they forget black people were brought to the West in chains over 400 years ago. The old man got emotional as he spoke, drying his eyes with arthritic fingers. He said, ‘They would stand in groups and chant black beast. I saw blood on the ground pouring from a man’s head, attacked for being black. There were so many attacks on us they all jumbled in my head like one big terrible time. I’d piss myself around them.’ I felt my blood boil and wished the boat could turn around and take me home. He turned around, lifted his T-shirt. There was a crevice on his back the shape of a halfmoon: ‘I got stabbed. They came at us, real hard, throwing petrol bombs, setting a house on fire, screaming kill the n*****s, lynch them, burn them.’ I got angry at the old man, shouting, ‘So what happened to you, eh, you had no balls, all of you had no balls, to take that shit nonstop? No f****** self-respect.’ The old man spat tobacco from his mouth, ‘Hello, we got them in the end with iron bars, machetes, hand grenades, and guns, and gave the Teddy Boys such a whipping they never came back. From then on, Jamaicans were feared. Things changed but beware, now they kill you with politeness.’ It was a bright, chilly day in April 1970. If we passed the white cliffs of Dover before arriving at Tilbury Docks, I didn’t notice. All I saw was rain enmeshed with smog. Still, on that grey day, we walked off the ship with hope in our hearts and no idea of where to go; we followed some Jamaicans and took the tube to Brixton, where a man let Breads and me have a room in Notting Hill, so small that one of us had to stand outside while the other was changing. There was no heating, and the toilet was outside.”

This is an extract by Ira Mathur titled Black Man On The Run from a story published in ‘Windrush: Writing the Scandal’, a special issue of Wasafiri. You can read the full story in the magazine, available for July 2023