Description:My name is Bethsaida Brown and I was born in the Parish of St Catherine in Jamaica. I am the third of seven children and can remember that I was very sad at leaving my mother for the first time when I came over to England in August 1958. I came to live in Handsworth, England for a better life. When I came in August it was cold and I remember the coach driver saying to us “we are in Birmingham...,” and I looked out and thought to myself, “what a lot of factories.” They were in fact houses that had smoke coming out at the top, which was all very strange!
The house I came to was where my partner was living, in his uncle’s house in a small room. When I looked around the yard there were no trees and it looked different because in Jamaica we had beautiful fruit trees around the yard. It began to get cold, so we had a little paraffin lamp in the room. I could not get warm so I sat around the lamp and afterwards got a burn on my leg! The fire place in the dinner hall was black and dirty. It was unusual to me but I was shown how to put the coal in and how to light it.
When I walked along the road that I lived on, I saw bread being left on the doorstep unwrapped and a dog came to smell the bread. I said to myself that as soon as I get work, I will save up some money and go back home because I did not like the country. So I gave myself five years to stay and work but it was not to be. I remember one day I was job hunting in the Jewel centre in Hockley, and I saw a vacancy in the window so I went in. I saw a big black cat on the stairs and as the cat saw me it started to growl at me like a dog. I was so frightened that I ran back out through the door.
I went to work for a polishing factory through the job centre. I worked for a week and never got paid as I was told that the work came from another factory and no wages were sent. I reported this to the job centre which contacted him, but I still never got paid. As a migrant black worker, I suffered a lot of verbal abuse and discrimination to which I feel ashamed to even repeat. I went into nursing and worked at Summerfield Hospital as an auxiliary nurse for 26 years. I enjoyed my work and found it rewarding because I am a peoples person.
Photograph courtesy of Bethsaida Brown