‘Cha, that is not a rose,’ someone else says. ‘Every flower is rose to you.’

‘That is a rose.’

‘It is not a rose.’

This argument is going on as we walk on past the post office and shop. The display in the window, piled up high with tins and boxes, still manages to proclaim that there is a lot of nothing to buy inside. Hubert is trying to persuade James, a strict Presbyterian and teetotal, to come into the pub. ‘You think one little beer gonna keep you outta heaven?’

It was I who first noticed. Leaning urgently into our group I whispered, ‘Man, everyone looking at us.’

The entire village had come out to play dog with gecko. Staring out from dusty windows, gawping from shop doors, gaping at the edge of the pavement, craning at gates and peering round corners. The villagers kept their distance but held that gaze of curious trepidation firmly on weWest Indian RAF volunteers. Under this scrutiny we darkies moved with the awkwardness of thieves caught in a sunbeam.

‘Gilbert, ask them what the problem,’ Hubert told me.

From every point of the compass eyes were on us. ‘You have a megaphone for me, man?’ I said. When I scratched my head the whole village knew. If any one of those people had a stick long enough, I swear they would have poked us with it.

It was some while before the more daring among them took cautious steps toward us, the unfamiliar. A young woman – curling brunette hair, dark eyes, pretty and plump at the hips – finally stood within an arm’s distance to ask, ‘Are you lot American?’ She had her mind on feeling some nylon stockings on her graceful leg. Which, as she stood pert and feminine before us, every one of us boys had our mind on too.

‘No, we are from Jamaica,’ I told her.

‘The West Indies,’ the Trinidadian among us corrected.

Like a chink in a dam, a trickle of villagers approached us. Most merely nodded as they passed. An old man with a face as cracked as a dry riverbed shook us all hearty by the hand in turn saying, ‘We’re all in this together, lad. We’re glad to have you here – glad to have ya.’

An elderly couple tapping on James’s shoulder asked, ‘Would you mind, duck – would you mind saying something? Only my husband here says it’s not English you’re speaking.’

When James replied, ‘Certainly, madam, but please tell me what you require me to say,’ her husband shouted, ‘Bloody hell, Norma, you’re right.’

As Norma concluded: ‘There, I told you. They speak it just like us, only funnier. Ta, ducks, sorry to bother ya.’

A middle-aged man, not in uniform, kept his hands resolutely in his pockets before addressing me. Eyeing intently the young woman, who was by now getting on very nicely with a lucky Fulton – consorting with him as we had been assured no white woman would – this man, not looking on my face as he spoke, asked me, ‘Why would you leave a nice sunny place to come here if you didn’t have to?’

When I said, ‘To fight for my country, sir,’ his eyebrows jumped like two caterpillars in a polka.

‘Humph. Your country?’ he asked without need of an answer. He then took the young woman’s arm, guiding her, reluctant as she was, away from Fulton and our group.

Let me ask you to imagine this. Living far from you is a beloved relation whom you have never met. Yet this relation is so dear a kin she is known as Mother. Your own mummy talks of Mother all the time. ‘Oh, Mother is a beautiful woman – refined, mannerly and cultured.’ Your daddy tells you, ‘Mother thinks of you as her children; like the Lord above she takes care of you from afar.’ There are many valorous stories told of her, which enthral grown men as well as children. Her photographs are cherished, pinned in your own family album to be admired over and over. Your finest, your best, everything you have that is worthy is sent to Mother as gifts. And on her birthday you sing-song and party.

Then one day you hear Mother calling – she is troubled, she need your help. Your mummy, your daddy say go. Leave home, leave familiar, leave love. Travel seas with waves that swell about you as substantial as concrete buildings. Shiver, tire, hunger – for no sacrifice is too much to see you at Mother’s needy side. This surely is adventure. After all you have heard, can you imagine, can you believe, soon, soon you will meet Mother?

The filthy tramp that eventually greets you is she. Ragged, old and dusty as the long dead. Mother has a blackened eye, bad breath and one lone tooth that waves in her head when she speaks. Can this be that fabled relation you heard so much of? This twisted-crooked weary woman. This stinking cantankerous hag. She offers you no comfort after your journey. No smile. No welcome. Yet she looks down at you through lordly eyes and says, ‘Who the bloody hell are you?’

‘Okay, Gilbert, you have gone too far,’ I can hear you say. You know I am talking of England – you know I am speaking of the Mother Country. But Britain was at war, you might want to tell me, of course she would not be at her best.

Some of the boys shook their heads, sucking their teeth with their first long look at England. Not disappointment – it was the squalid shambles that made them frown so. There was a pained gasp at every broken-down scene they encountered. The wreckage of this bombed and ruined place stumbled along streets like a devil’s windfall. Other boys looking to the gloomy, sunless sky, their teeth chattering uncontrolled, gooseflesh rising on their naked arms, questioned if this was the only warmth to be felt from an English summer. Small islanders gaped like simpletons at white women who worked hard on the railway swinging their hammers and picks like the strongest man. Women who sent as much cheek back to those whistling boys as they received themselves. While even smaller islanders – boys unused to polite association with white people – lowered their eyes, bit their lips and looked round them for confirmation when first confronted with a white woman serving them. ‘What can I get you, young man?’ Yes, serving them with a cup of tea and a bun. A college-educated Lenval wanted to know how so many white people come to speak so bad – low class and coarse as cane cutters. While Hubert perusing the countryside with a gentle smile said, ‘But look, man, it just like home,’ to boys who yearned to see the comparison – green hills that might resemble the verdant Cockpit country, flowers that might delight as much as a dainty crowd of pink hibiscus, rivers that could fall with the same astounding spectacle of Dunn’s river. And let me not forget James, perplexed as a newborn, standing with military bearing surrounded by English children – white urchin faces blackened with dirt, dryed snot flaking on their mouths – who yelled up at him, ‘Oi, darkie, show us yer tail.’

But for me I had just one question – let me ask the Mother Country just this one simple question: how come England did not know me?

On our first day in England, as our train puffed and grunted us through countryside and city, we played a game, us colony troops. Look to a hoarding and be the first to tell everyone where in England the product is made. Apart from a little argument over whether Ford made their cars at Oxford or Dagenham, we knew.

See me now – a small boy, dressed in a uniform of navy blue, a white shirt, a tie, short trousers and long white socks. I am standing up in my classroom; the bright sunlight through the shutters draws lines across the room. My classmates, my teacher all look to me, waiting. My chest is puffed like a major on parade, chin high, arms low. Hear me now – a loud clear voice that pronounces every p and q and all the letters in between. I begin to recite the canals of England: the Bridgewater canal, the Manchester-to-Liverpool canal, the Grand Trunk canal used by the china firms of Stoke-on-Trent. I could have been telling you of the railways, the roadways, the ports or the docks. I might have been exclaiming on the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster – her two chambers, the Commons and the Lords. If I was given a date I could stand even taller to tell you some of the greatest laws that were debated and passed there. And not just me. Ask any of us West Indian RAF volunteers – ask any of us colony troops where in Britain are ships built, where is cotton woven, steel forged, cars made, jam boiled, cups shaped, lace knotted, glass blown, tin mined, whisky distilled? Ask. Then sit back and learn your lesson.