Thought for the Week: Windrush exploration
Alison Leonard reflects on national self-worth
With great absorption and considerable shame, I’ve been reading stories of the Windrush generation: how they were called to serve the ‘mother country’, and how that turned out. Why ‘shame’? In 1965-66, I was a child care officer for the London Borough of Hackney, where many West Indians settled after coming over in the previous decade. I visited Afro-Caribbean families in their rough terraces and windblown high-rise flats, and, qualified by nine years in a girls’ boarding school and four years at university, I had the power to inspect their child care practices and, if necessary, take their children into care. The social work profession was in its infancy, and it took only my decision and that of one senior officer to embark on such drastic action. I’d had one day’s training in ‘West Indian culture’. I knew nothing of slavery and little about patterns of migration. I was terrified.
