Many interviewees talked about being homesick and missing their families and friends when they first arrived. But despite the strangeness many of the new arrivals were very excited to be in Britain.

Lynette Richards-Murray remembered: “For the first month I didn’t hear from my parents and I was inconsolable. Everyday I looked out for this letter and thinking, ‘well, what’s going on?’ I really thought they’d died! I missed my parents, especially my father because he was my guiding light. He used to advise me to do things. I missed his voice telling me things.”

Dr Victor Eastmond “missed playing football. I missed the sport and the camaraderie that I had growing up with those persons whom I had left behind. My group was put up in a very small apartment in Kensington, which was actually owned by a Barbadian. We shared facilities with lots of Barbadians who were also immigrants. I remember when I left the airport my initial impression on that November morning was that England was a very dirty and miserable place. The weather was very overcast, dark and gloomy. The cars were dirty and unwashed and a lot of mess on the roads. I was not happy with what I saw. Then when I got down to where I was going to reside, I left the home to explore the area. While walking

Nurses celebrating Christmas on a ward at Bethnal Green Hospital, 1960s (Royal London Hospital Archives: BG/P/14)

the streets I stepped into some dog mess and that again did not give me a very good impression of the mother country. This was something I wasn’t used to in my own smaller ‘Little England’, Barbados.”

Nola Ishmael was “keen to see the types of people that were around, the busy-ness of London and the whole ambience engaged me. I was quite interested in what was going

on and I did a lot of staring. I daresay I was learning as I stared. Let me tell you this was the swinging sixties and I swung with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. This was the era of Cilla Black. As the sixties rolled on, we were very much part of the new phenomenon of music and we used to go the cinema. So, homesick, no! I was too busy absorbing and feeling excited.”