And in terms of … when my nan came over she was a, first sort of black family on the street, or coloured family as they, they would have said then. And it’s really interesting to see how the area’s changed over time, she, she’s probably one of the, still one of the few black families, but instead of it being predominantly white it’s, predominantly sort of Asian heritage families living there. But what I really sort like about that community is the way they sort of took my nan in and my mum’s family in, ob, erm, obviously at that sort of time when people came over from the Caribbean there was a few raised eyebrows and people weren’t sure about their neighbours and people had heard stories and rumours, and one of the things my mum said was we [5:29] other children used to think that black people at them! [Laughs] And my mum b, kids being kids she played up and says, ‘Yeah, we’ve got a big cooking pot out in at the back,’ [Laughs] not realising that the other children would be that gullible and believe it, and erm, er, er, they’d say or tell, the, the, the English children would say sill things like when it was snowing the sky was falling down because no one from the Caribbean had ever seen snow. So it was just silly little stories like that that I remember.
But what s, er, s, what struck me is looking at the newspaper articles, they were the first black family on the street and it was, the rest were, were all white. Now I think there’s maybe a handful of, white families on the street. Er, I know my nan sort of Caribbean heritage, her next-door neighbour, who’s a real … he’s my next-door neighbour, we call him ‘uncle’ Harold … but it’s like, it’s like, he’s not, he’s, he’s not a blood relative but he’s like family to me. When my … granddad died he sort of stepped up and he looked after the family. He sort of gave my mum away at her wedding. When, eh, whenever, n, my mum used to tell me stories about all these terrible cars she used to buy in, a, b, in the old days and you, this thing called bump starting, I don’t know what bump starting is, but apparently [Laughs] he’d help her bump start her car and he’d come and pick her up from anywhere when the car broke down. And, er, still now he’s, he’s well into his eighties but he still helps. He w, he runs the local erm church hall, sort of when it’s hired out to people if they’re locking up at one o’clock, two o’clock on the morning there’s an eighty-eight-year-old man. If neighbours have got a problem he’s there up his ladders fixing windows, fi, er, clearning guttering and, even at his age, it’s remuch, remarkable really. He’ll moan about it. I mean you, you never hear the end of it. He’ll be moaning at, chuntering away, complaining about everybody. He’s pretty cantankerous, but [Laughs] he’s got a heart of gold really [Laughs]. He’s just … and I think again it goes back to what that community is, people just wanna help each other.
