One day in 1954 Mr. Obadiah Jones looked around him at his small farm on the hillsides of Portland, on which he grew yam, corn and bananas and raised a few chickens and goats. Each week Mr. Jones reaped what crops were ready and took them on the back of his donkey up and down eight miles of hillside to the market in Port Antonio. Mr. Jones was tired of the hard life he lived. He had five children and a wife, and he was ashamed that no matter how hard he worked, his future would always be one of hard work, a constant search for money to pay for necessities like soap, kerosene oil for the lamp and clothes for the children to go to the Government school nearby.

He had heard, as he talked with his friends in the rum shop at night, that many Jamaicans were selling their land and using the money to pay for a passage to England. England, his friends told him, was a place where all men had equal opportunity to work hard and get a good wage, a place where people were housed and fed and clothed and educated.

So Mr. Jones sold his land, sent his wife and children to live with her sister in Manchioneal, and took his money to a travel agent in Kingston, who assured him that he could secure the correct travel documents to enable him to go to England.

Mr. Jones sailed to England in a cabin which he shared with five others like himself. The food on the ship was not very tasty, so he and his friends dug into the packages they had brought with them and ate the bananas, mackerel, honey and drank the rum to keep them warm as the nights grew colder.

His first glimpse of England was a profound shock to him. Nowhere were the opulent buildings he had seen in photographs. Instead, he saw dirty streets, ugly houses with scabby faces, dirty children shouting at each other in a language he did not understand, and over everything, the thick grayness of fog and rain that was the English climate.

Everywhere, everyone around him was white. He had never seen so many white people at one time before in his life. In fact, he had only seen white people on the occasions when he went into Kingston on business, and even then, only one or two at a time. He stopped the first black man he saw and shyly asked him where he could find somewhere to stay for the night, until he found a place to live. The man directed him to an address in Notting Hill Gate.

It was a large house, three stories high. There was no landlord, but one man who lived there and seemed to be in charge told Mr. Jones that he was welcome to stay there, if he was prepared to share a bed. Sharing a bed, Mr. Jones discovered, meant two men sleeping in the bed. Mr. Jones would sleep while the other man worked through the night shift. In the morning when the man returned, Mr. Jones would have to vacate the bed.

Mr. Jones did not mind too much. He was more concerned with the cold. The paraffin fire in his room was turned down at night by the other lodger, who said that paraffin cost more than wearing all your clothes to bed. Mr. Jones thought he would never be warm again.

Each day he got dressed and went out looking for work. The other lodger had told him that work could be found if he inquired at the Labour Exchange, so each day Mr. Jones went to the Labour Exchange and sat on the benches, patiently waiting his turn to sit before the clerk and go through the list of jobs available. The clerk had a thick index file of jobs, but it seemed that these jobs were not available to Mr. Jones. He had no qualifications, the clerk told him. These jobs required a skill of some sort. There were some unskilled jobs in factories or offices, but the clerk would tell Mr. Jones that employers were only willing to hire white workers, since the other employees, or the factory boss, or the factory’s neighbours, did not want to have coloured workers alongside them.

One day, his money running desperately low, Mr. Jones found a job sweeping up shavings in a furniture factory. It wasn’t hard work, but Mr. Jones did not like it. He hated the shame of being the lowest worker. He hated the scorn with which the white workers regarded him. He hated the insults they spat at him: “Gollywog!”, “Coon!”, “Nig Nog”. “Hey, Sambo! Over here needs sweeping!”

But he could do no better. He needed the work and the money.

When he walked home through the streets at night, he hung his head and hoped that by hunching up his shoulders and scuffling unobtrusively along the pavement, his colour, his shabbiness and his shame would not be too noticeable.

At night in his room he composed letters to his family telling them that he was doing well, working in a factory, taking home a regular pay check -- some of which he was enclosing in the form of a Postal Order. Then he would eat the fish and chips he had bought on the way home, turn down the paraffin heater and set his alarm for 5 the next morning, so he could get up, get ready and get out before the night shift worker needed the bed..

On Saturdays and Sundays Mr. Jones would try to find a place to live. He looked at the advertisements in the papers and in the windows of the newspaper shops and would write down the more promising addresses. But after a few weeks of doing that, Mr. Jones grew discouraged with hearing the same excuses every time. The flat had just been let ... the landlord had changed his mind about letting it... they preferred a married couple. One day a woman came right out and said that yes, the flat was for rent, but not to niggers.

Eventually Mr. Jones found a room, quite by accident, in the house of a middle-aged Welsh woman, Mrs. Davies. Mrs. Davies had no prejudices and loved to cook. She had two grown children, a boy and a girl, who on their occasional visits would ignore Mr. Jones. He learned to be out whenever the children came to visit.

One night, feeling the need for female company, Mr. Jones went to a club. The only black women there, Mr. Jones could see from the way they behaved and dressed, were prostitutes. He could not bring himself to speak to them. There were some white women in the club, although there were no white men. One of them came over and sat beside Mr. Jones. She wasn’t pretty, but she talked with him about Jamaica, which she had heard about from her last boyfriend -- a Jamaican who she said used to beat her, and left her pregnant. Mr. Jones invited her to come back and have some coffee with him.

On the way home, walking through the dark, dank streets, four white men stepped out from behind a wall, beat up Mr. Jones and took the little cash he had in his pocket. They told him that niggers should stick to their own kind, instead of soiling white women, and that if they ever saw him again with a white women, they would kill him. Mr. Jones believed them.

The time had come, Mr. Jones realized, to send for his woman. It took longer than he had thought, because Mr. Jones was not married to his woman, and in England people did not understand about common-law wives. But two years later, Mr. Jones’ woman arrived. The first thing they did was to get married.

Mrs. Davies was happy to have another woman in the house. Mr. Jones was happy too. He had worked his way up in the factory to the assembly line and, by doing overtime at nights and on Sundays, he could almost double his pay packet. The money, he saved to send for his youngest child, who was glad to escape the brutality of grand-motherly care in Jamaica. Meanwhile, Mrs. Jones had two more children. After the first one, she vowed she wouldn’t have any more, because while in the hospital the nurses and other patients abused her, saying that all black women did was breed. But by the time she was pregnant with the second child, she too had grown used to insulting remarks.

In between children, Mrs. Jones worked as a conductress on the No.7 bus route, which ran from Notting Hill through the West End of London to the tough-war-scarred East End. Mrs. Jones reckoned that she heard more insults and abuse daily, than her husband.

Just before the birth of the second child, Mrs. Davies told the Joneses that the Council had placed a demolition order on her house. Mr. Jones had noticed that many of the houses in the street had been vacated and boarded up, but he had just thought that was because the houses had finally rotted down, which they looked like they were going to when he first moved in. After all, Mrs. Davies’ house had only a kitchen sink for washing in, and an outside lavatory behind the house in the yard.

Mrs. Davies explained to them that the area was scheduled for re-development. That meant that the local Council would be pulling down all the houses and re-building a brand new housing estate which would be ready in about five years time. Because she had lived there for eleven years, Mrs. Davies would be immediately re-housed in another Council estate in the suburbs of London. Mrs. Davies was pleased.

Mr. Jones wasn’t, because he knew that this meant that he and his family would have to look for somewhere else to live. It took him almost a year to find a place and when he did, it wasn’t in the green open suburbs near his factory, as he wished, but just two streets away. He was still in Notting Hill.

This house wasn’t like Mrs. Davies’. On the floor below lived a white prostitute and her black man. At night Mr. and Mrs. Jones were kept awake by the noises of footsteps on the stairs, doors being slammed, drunks shouting, music playing and, occasionally, the sound of the woman being beaten up by her man.

Above them lived an old white woman, a relative of the landlord, who banged her stick on the floor whenever the children cried or made the usual noises of children growing up. They dared not answer her back, because they knew that she would complain to the landlord, who would give them notice to leave. So they suffered in silence, beating the children to keep them quiet.

When Mr. Jones had saved up enough money to send for the youngest child, the boy was seven and could not read or write. Mrs. Jones was glad when her son arrived, because now she would have someone to look after the babies each day, instead of having to take them to the baby-minder. She had never liked sending them to the baby minder, who lived in a large, damp basement into which she herded twenty children each day, changing their diapers and wiping their noses whenever she could spare a minute from her job of cooking chicken and rice-and-peas lunch for the neighbourhood Jamaican labourers.

With a third child to house. Mr and Mrs Jones moved their bed into the living room, giving the children the single bed and a cot to sleep on in the bedroom. It didn’t matter that they slept in the living room, since they had no visitors. One night, in the cold winter of 1962 when the pipes froze solid and the cold came through the walls in the form of water, Mrs. Jones left the paraffin stove burning in the children’s room.

Luckily, Mrs. Jones woke up and smelled smoke, or else the children would have burned up just like the old stuffed chair beside the stove had gone up in flames.

The landlord was very angry, but fortunately the prostitute’s boyfriend who was out of jail at the time, spoke to the landlord on their behalf. He spoke to the landlord very loudly, and Mr. Jones thought he heard the boyfriend threatening the landlord, but he couldn’t be sure. After that, Mr. Jones did not care what business the boyfriend was in, he was so grateful to have found one person in the whole of England who cared about him and his family.

* * *

The Story of Mr. Jones continues throughout the book GROWING OUT.....

Chapter 5

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