Customer Reviews

Coming to England

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Trinidadians, like the Irish and the Poles, have often had to leave their country in order to succeed. Chirpy TV presenter Floella Benjamin, along with newsreader and journalist Trevor McDonald, writer V S Naipaul and footballer Dwight Yorke (from Tobago) are all familiar Trinibagonian celebrities in the UK today.
In Coming to England Floella Benjamin describes an idyllic childhood (of course) in a sunny land of butterflies and hummingbirds, Calypso and Carnival and happy, smiling families. But first her father, and then her mother, depart for the cold, grey climes of England, leaving her and her brothers and sisters in the care of relatives where they are treated like servants. Eventually, the children join their parents in London and we read of the familiar frosty - and sometimes hostile - reception afforded to `coloured people' in post-war Britain. Floella was probably right when she told her abusive classmates that she knew more about British culture and history than they did but she is disingenuous when she says that in Trinidad different races live together in harmony. That is not true. Even the political parties are divided along racial lines.
Overall, despite the enchanting watercolour illustrations, Coming to England is too brief and anodyne an account even for children and becomes just another hackneyed tale of the immigrant experience in 1950s/60s Britain. Anyway, when I look at Trinidad today (from where I am writing this), the inhabited half of the country a polluted industrial wasteland sinking into a quagmire of political corruption, gangland murders and kidnapping, I can't help feeling that she isn't missing anything.

I believe that historically this is a very important book- since it descibes the author's experiences in leaving her beloved Trinidad as a young child and resettling in England. I will not forget the prejudice and malice the girl suffered in the country she had been brought up to believe was the 'Motherland'. The description of life through a child's eyes in Trinidad is very beautiful and evocative. The account is told very fluently