BOOKS-JAMAICA: Bright Child On West Indian History

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Howard Campbell

KINGSTON, May 19 1998 (IPS) - When Gloria Compton went to an English boarding school as a teenager in the late 1930’s she was one of the first West Indians to come across the infamous British class system and racial snobbery of that era.

After obtaining her law degree from cambridge University she returned home to Jamaica but went back to britain 10 years later to find the same social barriers still in place.

Now , her years in London are retraced in “One Bright Child,” written by her daughter, Pat Cumper, a journalist based in England.

“The book is more about somebody who decides to do something they were told they couldn’t do, and the journey taken in getting there; it’s more of a quest story,” says the author of the bio- type novel which recently had its launch in Kingston, where Compton was born in 1922.

“One Bright Child” is the 44-year-old Cumper’s first publication, and has been a minor sensation in Britain where the Kingston-born author has lived for the past five years.

It is an intimate description of how Compton, Jamaica’s first female barrister, fared in England before World War II – and post- war – and her struggles to succeed in a country yet to come to grips with an influx of people of colour.

The book had a successful run as a radio series before it was transformed to print, and like Cumper, marks the first publication for the London-based BlackAmber Books which is owned by Rosemarie Hudson, a British woman of Jamaican parentage.

But Cumper’s goal was not solely to project her mother’s accomplishments, but to show that there was a West Indian presence in Britain long before the big wave of immigrants following World War II.

“There is a tendency in England right now to lump all West Indians together as those who flocked to Britain in the early 1950’s looking for jobs,” said Cumper. “A lot of people need to realise that the connection goes way back and we didn’t go there as beggars.

“I had the option to make this book completely fictional but I based it on a true story for people to know that this is not a black person’s fantasy, these things actually happened.”

Cumper pointed out that she wanted to give readers a “feel of the times” in her book, something she achieved after months of research into the difficulties West Indians like her mother faced in England in the late ‘303 – including racism and sub-standard living conditions.

Though Cumper admits that much of the book is fictional, a great chunk of it is factual, the most noted being her mother’s burning ambition to be a barrister – unheard of for a woman in those days let alone a Jamaican – and the increased prejudice she faced after she married an Englishman.

Gloria Compton, who graduated from Cambridge in the late 1940s, set the pace for other Caribbean women with similar goals. Compton had an even greater impact in Jamaica in the 1970s when she initiated the establishment of the Family Court and was behild legislation that led to the Bastardy Act which gave illegitimate children a number of rights. She died in 1993.

Not surprisingly, “One Bright Child” has been a hit with the immigrant community in Britain and has been extensively featyured in BBC radio broadcasts. The book has gained such popularity that there is a possibility of it being adapted for television.

The response to BlackAmber’s debut project comes at an appropriate time. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the SS Windrush, the ship that brought the first wave of Caribbeam immigrants to Great Britain.

According to Hudson, there has been a wave of nostalgia regarding the Windrush, hence “One Bright Child’s” popularity in the West Indian community.

“Books dealing with early West Indian immigration are quite popular and not only among the black population,” said Hudson. “We are trying to give the reader, especially the foreign reader, a much wider perspective of black people in England.”

Cumper has taken the relative success of her first published effort in her stride. “You never think that what you do is good enough, you are looking to the next one but it’s doing its job.”

As for how her mother would react to the book? “She’d probably be a little embarassed, she was extremely private, but she would have encouraged me,” Cumper said