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1949. Perrie Edwards, daughter of the influential General Edwards, lives in affluence and abundance among parties attended by the rich and noble and is betrothed to Sergeant Christopher Taylor.
On the other side of London lives Jade Thir...
When the war started I was very young, seven years old. I lived with my family in a big mansion somewhere outside London, my father was an important general at the time, we had a big house with a huge farm next to it. I knew about the war because the Nazis started bombing big cities, like London, in 1940.
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A/N Perrie's home
The bad times were many, we lived in constant fear. Every night was a terror because they were constantly bombarding cities, I remember the rubble and the corpses in the streets. My mother was crying and my father was more and more a memory. He was unrecognisable, I think he lost himself during that war and never really returned.
I remember one night in particular, it was terrible: my mother, out of fear and to avoid screaming, bit the pillow, she clenched it tightly between her teeth and a lot of blood came out. Another day, while I was in the bathroom washing, an aeroplane flew past my window and shot a man on a wagon... I was so terrified that I didn't speak to anyone for a month.
At the end of the World War II, my country, although among the victors, was a nation on its knees economically and socially speaking.
We needed workforce, especially foreign labour, to the extent that we could offer a million jobs: so, between the late 1940s and early 1950s, about 345,000 people arrived from the old continent, mostly male, looking for work.
1948 was the year that saw the birth of multi-ethnicity in Britain, also due to two facts, the passing of the Nationality Act, which gave all subjects of the Empire the right to enter the United Kingdom freely, and the landing in London on 22 June of a shipload of men from Jamaica, who were attempting the adventure of emigration thanks also to the launch price of tickets, which were sold in 3 days.
Although the first black people made their appearance in England already in the early 1900s, the first racist demonstrations began in the 1940s with the banning of black people from pubs and shops, as well as the incidents in Liverpool in 1948, where between 31 July and 2 August the city experienced three nights of racial violence on a scale not seen since the end of the First World War, and in Deptford in 1949, when a mob tried to attack the Carrington House hostel, where around 50 black men lived.
In short, it was not a good time. The memory of the war was too close, uncertainties still underpinned every individual. We celebrated, sure, but we weren't really happy.
It would only be in the 1950s that we would really see that future we had been promised and which seemed so far away.
My father betrothed me to a soldier he had met while stationed in London. His name was Christopher Taylor, son of a wealthy English family and with an enviable heritage.
