“I came to England in a plush first-class suite with a nurse for the children. I booked the best I could afford because I thought everybody lived like that in England. I thought people in England lived like they did in Jane Austen’s novels and that the typical Englishman was like Mr. Darcy, and the women like Mrs. Bennet and her daughters. So when, thirteen days later, the nurse came bubbling into my room and asked excitedly, ‘Have you seen it? Have you seen Liverpool? We’ve arrived in England’, I could be forgiven for dashing out on deck in a cotton housecoat. It was a grey, wet March morning. England gave me a cold welcome. As I said in Second Class Citizen, ‘If I had been Jesus, I would have passed England by and not dropped a single blessing.’ I felt like walking into the inside of a grave. I could see nothing but masses of grey, filth, and more grey, yet something was telling me that it was too late now. So I said quietly, ‘Pa, England is not the Kingdom of God you thought it was.’”
[For a while Buchi Emecheta worked in a youth club for black British youth called the Seventies mostly staffed by white British staff, including a women called Amanda.]
“Amanda was a very attractive and intelligent girl. A university girl who would do anything in the cause of ‘black.’ We read of such middle-class female products becoming victims of the very people they originally set out to help. Amanda really meant well, got herself attacked many a time, but was able to accept it longer than I. Maybe because she held the old ideas of the missionaries who came to Africa in the early days, hoping to bring Christianity to the savages, when in fact the black natives were benign prepared to meet their doom either at the hands of the slaver or the colonial officer. . . . Most of these young people at the Seventies had been brainwashed into thinking that England was their mother country, that England belonged to them. At the time when the myth of the ‘mother country’ was being perpetuated, it was beyond the imaginings of the white colonials that one day the blacks would turn around and say to them, ‘Fulfil your promise.’ . . . The colonial masters had not calculated on the possibility of such a system bringing out a large number of educated blacks, large enough to man their own local administration and to spill into London in search of middle-class jobs. History proved them wrong, just as they were proved wrong in the case of the Ugandan Asians. Those groups of Asian traders were not only promised the myth of the mother country, they were given British passports. When it came to fulfilling those promises, the poor Asians found themselves countryless. British diplomats found themselves running helter-skelter in search of homes for those with British passports. Many went to Canada, some were admitted into England and others remained in Uganda. But they were on the whole better off than most of the blacks in that at least they had some kind of wealth to start with. The black immigrants into England had nothing but their dreams.”