The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
This story has always been in me
In the 1950s, my mother came to Britain. What happened next, as seen in my new drama, is not black people’s history – it’s all of ours
Iwas born in Dudley, in the West Midlands, in 1958. My mother, Winnie, had arrived in England at Tilbury Docks from Jamaica almost a year before as the result of a note from my Uncle Clifton. “Dear Winnie,” he wrote, “you must come to England. There is plenty of work here and you can earn up to 30 shillings a week. Please come soon. Signed, your loving brother, Clifton. PS Bring me a wife.”
This brief missive was the catalyst for a lifetime of change. I never asked my mother, who died in 1998, what it had taken for her to leave Jamaica in the mid1950s and travel to this cold and foreign land. I think if I had asked her directly, she might have told me: “Mind you own business. This is Big People tings.” Because back then, growing up as part of a Caribbean family, my elders and betters’ conversations seemed to float continually above my head.
As I got older, I started to realise that they weren’t just discussing “Big People tings” – it was everybody’s things: who was having whose baby, or who’d just dropped down dead in the butcher’s shop, or who never got met at the airport last week… Nowadays I reckon they shouldn’t have kept these things secret from us. It might have helped us to grow up wiser and better prepared for being Big People.
I have long wanted to write and produce my own drama series, but a few years ago I sat down with my friend and mentor, a certain Mr Russell T Davies (who wrote a little show called Doctor Who, among many others). When he said: “What do you want to write about?” I thought about it for all of three seconds and then said: “I want to write stories about the post-Windrush arrivals.” And now I have.
My first TV drama series, Three Little Birds, starts this month – but I have been thinking about it forever. As long ago as 1986, I made a 30-minute black and white comedy called What a Country! (written by Stan Hey and Andrew Nickolds and directed by Geoff Posner) about a young Jamaican accountant who comes to Dudley in the 1950s and finds life difficult, to say the least. In the years since, I’ve often talked in my shows about the themes that run through Three Little Birds: parenting, partying, eating, drinking, religion, joy, laughter… It’s a story that has always been in me, but I’ve never really had the opportunity to say, “Pull up a chair and let’s talk about our collective history. Because that’s what it is – it’s not just black people’s history.”
We rightly hear a lot about the pioneers who came to Great Britain on the Windrush in 1948, but what about those who arrived 10 years later, like my mum, all dressed up and moisturised to the hilt in her church clothes during the dawn of sex and swing and rock’n’roll? It was a time of Teddy Boys, aspirational Hollywood starlets and a fanfare of fabulous post-war fashion, where people looked as though they’d just stepped out of a Moss Bros catalogue.
Because I am my mother’s son, I am particularly interested in celebrating the women who came here and often faced even more difficulty than their male counterparts. I realised that I didn’t just want to tell my mother’s story, though. This narrative had to contain the stories of all the people who came here in the 1950s to strive and strain to make a new life, including those who depended on rent parties and pardner schemes (where people all contributed a little money each month for one person to draw down at the end).
Though Three Little Birds begins in the same way as my mum’s voyage to the UK did, the narrative becomes entirely fictional as our heroines Leah, Chantrelle and Hosanna (played by Rochelle Neil,
Saffron Coomber and Yazmin Belo) embark on a journey of struggle, tragedy, love and laughter.
In researching Three Little Birds, I found myself talking to my siblings about Mum and Dad, and to my friends – pleading with them to tell me their migration stories. I solicited tales from people I didn’t know, about what their parents did or didn’t do when they first arrived. What was it like working several jobs simultaneously, earning just enough to live and raise their children – sometimes singlehandedly? The answers were varied, shocking and sometimes unbelievable. As well as many positive tales about white allies helping new arrivals to overcome adversity, there were also accounts of bigotry and physical and racial abuse.
The year my mother arrived in Britain was the year our prime minister, Harold Macmillan, told the British public they’d “never had it so good” yet, across the pond, the Ku Klux Klan had raised their hooded heads in 1956 and 1957 – and you didn’t need to go half as far to discover racism was just as alive in the UK. Seven years later, just down the road from where I lived, the Smethwick local election took place with its infamous Conservative MP’s slogan: “If you want a n----- for a neighbour, vote Labour.”
Those were different and difficult times, but citizens from the greater diaspora came here anyway. There was simply not enough work back home in the Caribbean and elsewhere; and, besides, Britain needed an injection of labour from across the Commonwealth. People travelled to the UK mainly to fill roles where there was a lack of staff: transport, healthcare and industry. They were housed in cheaper areas, some of them in appalling conditions – there were signs in windows that proclaimed: “No Blacks, No Irish, No dogs.” Many didn’t want to work with black people in their factories or have black people driving their buses. There were some hospital patients who refused the care of black nurses.
When my mum arrived, she was surprised to find herself followed down the street by kids asking, “Where’s your tail, lady?”, “Does the black come off?” or “What part of Africa you from?” Today, it seems mind-boggling, but it is important to tell these stories without sugar-coating them. Drama is conflict and if you just tell all the “happy-go-lucky, people call me plucky” type stories, then you might as well be writing a soppy fairytale where only good things happen to good people.
That being said, there is immense joy and a huge serving of love in Three Little Birds. True to real life, there are friendships made, romances created and all kinds of good things going on. I think the British have always understood about helping people who are less fortunate than themselves; you can see that in movements such as Comic Relief and I hope you can see it here.
When my mum arrived from Jamaica, kids on the street here would ask her, ‘Where’s your tail, lady?’
From the minute we started making it, we knew we wanted the series to be as diverse behind the camera as it was in front. Of our three brilliant directors (Yero Timi Biu, Darcia Martin and Charles McDougall), two are young, capable, creative black women who, along with our producer Stella Nwimo, provided an open dialogue across the set which was like a hug for the cast – but it goes much further than that. The first day I walked on set, I went into makeup and there were people having their hair done by barbers of colour. They were black make-up artists and costume assistants. The catering team made every attempt to cook food from the Caribbean, the African continent and the North of England. It’s probably the most inclusive set I’ve ever worked on – and quite frankly, it should be the norm.
And then there is the music, alongside a score by composer Benjamin Kwasi Burrell. I contributed as much as I could to the musical underpinning of the show. All the way through the creative process I made playlists: of Blue Beat, Mento, Calypso; Lord Kitchener singing “London is the place for me.” I immersed myself in early rock’n’roll – Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Elvis, a whole heap of Little Richard. I played these tunes repeatedly and I hope the soul and vibrancy of that soundtrack brings the show and our characters and this period to life for viewers.
When people say we have failed at multiculturalism in this country, I don’t agree. I would love Three Little Birds to provide examples of how we grew as a nation, and how we became close to each other. I believe the subject matter will resonate loudly with anyone who has ever moved from one place to another to make a better life for themselves, or with anyone who has ever travelled here and felt othered. I hope people sit and watch with their families and say, “Yeah, that was what it was like.” After all, this isn’t just a TV show for five Jamaicans in Dudley. It’s for everyone.
As I worked on the scripts with my colleagues, I imagined I could hear my mum’s voice in my head, steering me through the entire process. It felt like she was saying: “Go on Len, make us legendary and mythical and funny and sexy and sad as well as dramatic. You can do it.”
I would certainly want to make her proud. Not just Mum but the rest of my family and everyone who came to Britain, back when streets were cold, seeking a better life. I salute you all.
Oh, and Uncle Clifton did get a wife in the end – but that’s another story…
Three Little Birds starts on ITV1 at 8pm on Oct 22. Lenny Henry: One of a Kind is on ITV1 at 9pm on Oct 26