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Dr Hannah Lowe is a poet and life-writer, whose first collection Chick won the Michael Murphy Prize for best First Collection. She writes about Windrush and migration across critical and creative work.

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Explore more Discovering Literature articles

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Explore more Discovering Literature articles

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Held by the British Library. Shelfmark: Add MS 89353/12/1 © James Berry: The Estate of James Berry. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Please credit the copyright holder when reusing this work. 

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Photograph of James Berry in London, mid-1950s, from his family photo album

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Photograph of James Berry in London, mid-1950s, from his family photo album

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Black and white full-length photograph depicting James Berry and his friend Barry Johnson posing casually in a field. Both are in suits, stood up. Berry has a pipe in his mouth and his hands in his pockets. Johnson is smiling and is leaning with his arm on Berry's shoulder.

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Held by the British Library. Shelfmark: Add MS 89353/12/1 © James Berry: The Estate of James Berry. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Please credit the copyright holder when reusing this work.

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Postcard of the SS Orbita from James Berry's family photo album (reverse)

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Postcard of the SS Orbita from James Berry's family photo album (reverse)

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Reverse of a postcard with the inscription: "The S.S. “Orbitta” [sic] on which I embarked on the 18th Sept. 1948 for England. Disembarking on the 3rd Oct. at Liverpool."

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Held by the British Library. Shelfmark: Add MS 89353/12/1. © James Berry: The Estate of James Berry. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Please credit the copyright holder when reusing this work.

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Postcard of the SS Orbita from James Berry's family photo album

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Postcard of the SS Orbita from James Berry's family photo album

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A black and white photograph of a large steamboat. The photograph bears the caption 'The Pacific Steam Navigation Co' and 'S.S "Orbita".'

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Held by the British Library. Shelfmark: Add MS 89353/12/13 © James Berry: The Estate of James Berry. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Please credit the copyright holder when reusing this work.

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Photograph of James Berry, 5 August 1950

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Photograph of James Berry, 5 August 1950

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A professional portrait photograph of a young James Berry, in black and white. He wears a suit. The date '1950, 5 August'  is handwritten in the top left corner.

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Held by the British Library. Shelfmark: Add MS 89353/6/5. © James Berry: The Estate of James Berry. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Please credit the copyright holder when reusing this work.

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‘Prizewinning day’: James Berry’s 1981 diary entry

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‘Prizewinning day’: James Berry’s 1981 diary entry

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A handwritten diary entry, titled 'Tuesday: Prizewinning Day. 1981'.

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Audio held by the British Library. Shelfmark: C233/17; recorded at 'Rum and scotch: An evening of Caribbean and Scottish music', 1986. Poem and reading © the Estate of James Berry. Recording © British Library. Photo ©Ekko von Schwichow, Berlin. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Please credit the copyright holder when reusing this work.

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James Berry reads his poem 'On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955'

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James Berry reads his poem 'On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955'

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Memory and history in James Berry’s poetry

Our reading of the poem can also be illuminated by Berry’s wider poetic career. Berry’s poetry is deeply rooted in memory and personal history, drawing vivid portraits of Jamaican community life, the landscapes of his youth and his life in Britain. While his verse often resonates with nostalgia, it is sharpened by a fierce critique of colonialism, slavery’s enduring legacy, and the persistent injustices of racism. His early awareness of racial prejudice – first observed in colonial Jamaica with the divide between the black villagers and the white elite in the ‘big house’ – was later intensified by his experiences of segregation in the U.S. and later still, discrimination in Britain. His father, appearing in several poems, becomes a haunting emblem of the psychological scars borne by slavery’s descendants.

Migration, for Berry, was both a doorway and a dislocation. It offered an alternative to the constrained life his father lived, yet also brought rupture and sorrow. The promise of England was entangled with exclusion, from slammed doors in boarding houses to the menace of police stop-and-search (widely known as the ‘sus law’ during the 1960s-80s). These injustices appear throughout his work, most notably in Chain of Days, where they are met with bitter humour and human tenderness.

Yet Berry is also championed for the joy and celebration that imbue his writing. His poetry embraces not only hardship but also the sense of adventure and resilience found in the journey from colonial outpost to metropolitan centre.¹ He sees beyond individual stories, positioning migration as a timeless and universal aspect of the human condition.

A social and literary activist, Berry long championed multiculturalism and Black British writing. His engagement included educational initiatives, community outreach and artistic promotion, including his involvement with the Caribbean Artists’ Movement, educational establishments and the British Library. At the heart of his ethos is a belief in the positive meeting of cultures and a dialogue founded in mutual respect for both difference and cohesion, and ‘On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955’ exemplifies something of both.

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Formally, ‘On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955’ is arranged in five stanzas and is marked by the simplicity of the exchange, using the straightforward dialogue tags ‘she said’, ‘I said.’ Although this poem was largely written in standard English, Berry was one of the first writers to use Jamaican Patois (also called Creole or Nation Language) in his poetry, declaring that ‘one of the cruellest things West Indians have suffered is the disqualification and put-down of our language’.

The poem could easily have been a short story, but instead is distinguished by its arrangement in short poetic lines, and by what it doesn’t say, as much as what it does. Many of the implied ideas – the things the speaker may think, but doesn’t express – exist in the white space around the text, reminding us that poems use both words themselves, and the space created by line and stanza breaks, to communicate ideas.

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Berry was one of the first black writers in Britain to achieve wide recognition, winning the National Poetry Competition in 1981 with the poem ‘Fantasy of An African Boy’. Chain of Days was his third poetry collection. He went on to publish three further poetry collections, as well as short stories and children’s poetry and fiction, and to edit two key anthologies of West Indian-British poetry. His final collection, Windrush Songs (2007), narrates the conditions surrounding his migration, the sea voyage itself and his early days in London, suggesting an increasingly introspective and historical lens. Alongside his own story, the collection also gives voice to other people who made the journey from the Caribbean to Britain.

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When we look at materials from Berry’s archive, there are two entries in his notebook that may have tangentially shaped this poem. They are diary entries about the same train journey – from Victoria to Purley – suggesting this was a route the poet took on repeated occasions. The journal entries, however, describe more difficult encounters. The first narrates sitting in a carriage opposite a woman who won’t meet Berry’s eyes. The second tells of a more severe incident of racial antagonism, in which Berry is racially abused by young men on the train. There is no account of his encounter with a Quaker woman, so we cannot know whether this incident was true or not, but its inclusion perhaps marks a rare moment of sincerity among other episodes.

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Berry was born in 1924 in Portland, Jamaica, and travelled to England in 1948 on the SS Orbita, the ship that followed the Empire Windrush. It is likely that by 1955, he had had many such encounters.

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The poem in a wider literary context

Chain of Days was published in 1985, 30 years after the date of this encounter, as suggested by its title. We cannot know when Berry wrote the poem, but by the time of its publication, Caribbean migrants had faced decades of populist and institutional racism. In the collection, this poem is placed in close proximity to ‘In-a Brixtan Markit’, a poem which narrates a far more hostile encounter between the speaker and the police.

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A close reading

The poem begins when the woman sits down and makes a self-important and over-familiar declaration:

I am a Quaker she said and Sunday

I was moved in silence

To speak a poem loudly

For racial brotherhood.

The woman’s Quaker affiliation is significant. Historically Quakers are advocates of equality and opponents of injustice, so the irony of the conversation that follows is notable. The statement ‘I was moved in silence’ refers to the Quaker custom at religious gatherings to sit in silence until someone is compelled to speak. By recounting this story to the speaker she expresses both good intention and an assumed intimacy.

The poem continues:

I was thoughtful, then said
what poem came on like that?
One the moment inspired she said.
I was again thoughtful.

The woman’s reluctance or inability to name the poem casts doubt on her story and therefore her expression of camaraderie. The speaker’s repeated thoughtfulness suggests his scepticism or the polite withholding of judgement.

This moment prompts the speaker into further thought, articulated in the next stanza when he imagines the ‘day’s first hours’ in the ‘empty city streets’ and then his ‘father’s big banana field’. The woman’s words have made him think of home, a place where encounters such as these would not happen, and where he would not necessarily feel singled-out for this woman’s attention. It is a moment of longing and nostalgia in the poem, where one image slips into another image, as one memory can slip into another.

In the final stanza, the woman asks the perennial question – ‘Where are you from?’ – now considered a painful cliché in the experience of colonial migrants in Britain, simultaneously alienating them from a mainstream version of white, monocultural Englishness, and demanding self-explanation. When he tells the woman he is from Jamaica, her reply – ‘What part of Africa is Jamaica?’ – evokes another customary trope of the postcolonial experience. Across the British Empire, its colonial subjects were taught British culture, history, literature and geography. Britain was presented as central to their lives as the ‘mother country’. Yet, in contrast, many ordinary people in Britain knew little of the Empire’s geographies of power; that Jamaica was part of the Caribbean; or even where the Caribbean was.

The speaker’s reply – ‘Where Ireland is near Lapland’ – is glib but not cruel. He has heard this type of ignorance before. The woman’s oblivion to the factors surrounding Caribbean migration to Britain continues when she comments, ‘Hard to see why you leave / such sunny country.’ And his reply – ‘Snow falls elsewhere’ – is allusive, hinting at the charms of snow in contrast with the sunnier landscape of his home. While his comments seem to pass over the woman’s head, the speaker is not defensive or derogatory, but gentle in his response, commenting in the final stanza, ‘So sincere she was beautiful.’

It is this feeling that the reader is left with. The final image, ‘as people sat down around us’ is perhaps evocative of snow forming and settling, and emphasises a common humanity.

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This poem, first published in James Berry’s 1985 collection Chain of Days, is one of many in which Berry explores different experiences of racism. The poem narrates an encounter between two train passengers. One is the speaker of the poem, a Jamaican man, and the other a white, presumably English woman, who declares to him her racial solidarity, while also expressing a casual, unintended bigotry.

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Article written by Hannah Lowe. First published 5 September 2025.

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Article written by Hannah Lowe. First published 5 September 2025.

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Hannah Lowe, a poet and professor in creative writing, provides a close analysis of ‘On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955’ and explores its wider literary context.