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Reading Zone interview with Patrice Lawrence with linked Windrush resources

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Reading Zone interview with Patrice Lawrence with linked Windrush resources

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Award-winning author Patrice Lawrence introduces her first picture book, Granny Came Here on the Empire Windrush.

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Granny Came here on the Empire Windrush: picture book

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Granny Came here on the Empire Windrush: picture book

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This heart-warming and heartfelt debut picture book from multi-award-winning author, Patrice Lawrence, will help ensure that the struggles and achievements of the Windrush generation are never forgotten.

One day, Ava is asked to dress as an inspirational figure for assembly at school, but who should she choose? Granny suggests famous familiar figures such as Winifred Atwell, Mary Seacole and Rosa Parks, and tells Ava all about their fascinating histories, but Ava's classmates have got there first - and she must choose someone else. But who?

And then Ava finds a mysterious old suitcase - Granny's "grip" - and Granny begins to share her own history, and how she came to England on the Empire Windrush many years ago. She tells her story through the precious items that accompanied her on the original voyage, each one evoking a memory of home, and as Ava listens to how Granny built a life for herself in England, determined to stay against the odds and despite overwhelming homesickness, she realises that there is a hero very close to home that she wants to celebrate more than anyone - her very own brave and beloved granny.

" This book is a heart-warming intergenerational account of the Windrush experience, told with love and attention to detail by Patrice Lawrence and stunningly brought to life with Camilla Sucre's beautiful artwork. An absolute must-have for any collection." - Dapo Adeola

Every Nosy Crow paperback picture book comes with a free 'Stories Aloud' audio recording - just scan the QR code and listen along!

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This heart-warming and heartfelt debut picture book from multi-award-winning author, Patrice Lawrence, will help ensure that the struggles and achievements of the Windrush generation are never forgotten.One day, Ava is asked to dress as an inspirational figure for assembly at school, but who should she choose?

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Highly symbolic tale of children fleeing without a parent to cross a border wall to safety

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Author-illustrator Erika Meza delivers a stunning and emotionally rich book from the viewpoint of those most impacted by border walls: young refugee children. This powerfully told tale highlights the spirit and strength of those embarking on a dangerous trek, and what awaits them on the other side.

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"All migration is an act of imagination" Shaun Tan - children's book illustrators postcards for an exhibition

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See inside. Read a review. Discover who made this book!

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Voices of the Windrush generation Hampshire Archives project

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Voices of the Windrush generation Hampshire Archives project

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The Weight of Water: novel by Sarah Crossan

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The Weight of Water: novel by Sarah Crossan

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Boy Overboard: novel by Morris Gleitzman

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Boy Overboard: novel by Morris Gleitzman

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Coming to England: autobiography by Floella Benjamin

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Coming to England: autobiography by Floella Benjamin

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Amnesty International: seeking safety resources for schools

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Amnesty International: seeking safety resources for schools

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The pack is designed to approach the issue of asylum in a way that is accessible, and appropriate to primary school children. It encourages students t

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Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

This poem is in the public domain.

About Emma Lazarus

"The New Colossus" was first published in 1903 in The New York Times.

Read translations of "The New Colossus" here.

Posthumously famous for her sonnet, "The New Colossus," which is engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus is considered America's first important Jewish poet

About Emma Lazarus

Wake, Israel, wake! Recall to-day
The glorious Maccabean rage,
The sire heroic, hoary-gray,
His five-fold lion-lineage:
The Wise, the Elect, the Help-of-God,
The Burst-of-Spring, the Avenging Rod.

From Mizpeh's mountain-ridge they saw
Jerusalem's empty streets, her shrine
Laid waste where Greeks profaned the Law
With idol and with pagan sign.
Mourners in tattered black were there,
With ashes sprinkled on their hair.

Then from the stony peak there rang

1. Vast oceanic movements, the flux and reflux of immeasurable tides, oversweep our continent.

2. From the far Caucasian steppes, from the squalid Ghettos of Europe,

3. From Odessa and Bucharest, from Kief and Ekaterinoslav,

4. Hark to the cry of the exiles of Babylon, the voice of Rachel mourning for her children, of Israel lamenting for Zion.

5. And lo, like a turbid stream, the long-pent flood bursts the dykes of oppression and rushes hitherward.

6. Unto her ample breast, the generous mother of nations welcomes them.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

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The New Colossus - Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame

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Grace Nichols is a poet whose work has been central to our understanding of the important cultural Caribbean-British connection for nearly 3 decades. From her first collection, I Is a Long Memoried Woman (1983), to her more recent work such…

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Childhood Tracks

Eating crisp fried fish with plain bread.
Eating sheared ice made into 'snowball'
with syrup in a glass.
Eating young jelly-coconut, mixed
with village-made wet sugar.
Drinking cool water from a calabash gourd
on worked land in the hills.

Smelling a patch of fermenting pineapples
in stillness of hot sunlight.
Smelling mixed whiffs of fish, mango, coffee,
mint, hanging in a market.
Smelling sweaty padding lifted off a donkey's back.

Hearing a nightingale in song
in moonlight and sea-sound.
Hearing dawn-crowing of cocks, in answer
to others around the village.
Hearing the laughter
of barefeet children carrying water.
Hearing a distant braying of a donkey
in a silent hot afternoon.
Hearing palmtrees' leaves rattle
on and on at Christmas time.

Seeing a woman walking in loose floral frock.
Seeing a village workman with bag and machete
under a tree, resting, sweat-washed.
Seeing a tangled land-piece of banana trees
with goats in shades cud-chewing.
Seeing a coil of plaited tobacco
like rope, sold, going in bits.
Seeing children playing in schoolyard
between palm and almond trees.
Seeing children toy-making in a yard
while slants of evening sunlight slowly disappear.
Seeing an evening's dusky hour lit up
by dotted lamplight.
Seeing fishing nets repaired between canoes.

Copyright: from Only One of Me (Macmillan, 2004), copyright © James Berry 2004, used by permission of the author.

Collection

A collection of poems around the themes of identity, growing up, history and remembering.

Interview

Distinguished poet, James Berry, often returns to his Jamaican childhood for the sound ...

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The Poetry Archive is a not-for-profit organisation with charitable status.

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Childhood Tracks - Children's Poetry Archive

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Eating crisp fried fish with plain bread. Eating sheared ice made into 'snowball' with syrup in a glass. Eating young jelly-coconut, mixed with village-made wet sugar. Drinking cool water from a calabash gourd on worked land in the hills. Smelling a patch of fermenting pineapples in stillness of hot sunlight.

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Hurricane Hits England: poem by Grace Nichols

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Hurricane Hits England: poem by Grace Nichols

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It took a hurricane, to bring her closer
To the landscape
Half the night she lay awake,
The howling ship of the wind,
Its gathering rage,
Like some dark ancestral spectre,
Fearful and reassuring:

Talk to me Huracan
Talk to me Oya
Talk to me Shango
And Hattie
My sweeping, back-home cousin.

Tell me why you visit
An English coast?
What is the meaning
Of old tongues
Reaping havoc
In new places?

The blinding illumination,
Even as you short-
Circuit us
Into further darkness?

What is the meaning of trees
Falling heavy as whales
Their crusted roots
Their cratered graves?

O why is my heart unchained?
Tropical Oya of the Weather,
I am aligning myself to you,
I am following the movement of your winds,
I am riding the mystery of your storm.

Ah, sweet mystery,
Come to break the frozen lake in me,
Shaking the foundations of the very trees
within me,
Come to let me know
That the earth is the earth is the earth.

Copyright: from I Have Crossed an Ocean (Bloodaxe, 2009), © Grace Nichols 1996, used by permission of the author c/o Curtis Brown literary agency.

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Hurricane Hits England | Children's Poetry Archive

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It took a hurricane, to bring her closer To the landscape Half the night she lay awake, The howling ship of the wind, Its gathering rage, Like some dark ancestral spectre, Fearful and reassuring: Talk to me Huracan Talk to me Oya Talk to me Shango And Hattie My sweeping, back-home cousin.

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Search for my Tongue: poem by Sujata Bhatt

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Search for my Tongue: poem by Sujata Bhatt

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Sujata Bhatt (b. 1956) grew up in Pune but emigrated with her family to the United States in 1968. She studied in the States receiving an MFA from the University of Iowa and went on to be writer-in-residence at the University of Victoria, Canada. More recently she was visiting fellow at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania. She currently lives with her husband and daughter in Bremen, Germany. Her first collection, Brunizem, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award. Subsequent collections have been awarded a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and in 1991 she received a Cholmondeley Award.

For Bhatt, language is synonymous with the tongue, the physical act of speaking. She has described Gujarati and the Indian childhood it connects her to as "the deepest layer of my identity". However, English has become the language she speaks every day and which she, largely, chooses to write in. The repercussions of this divided heritage are explored in her work, most explicitly in 'Search for My Tongue' which alternates between the two languages. The complex status of English - its beauties and colonial implications - are also conveyed in the moving ironies of 'A Different History' and 'Nanabhai Bhatt in Prison' about her grandfather who read Tennyson to comfort himself during his incarceration by the British authorities. Such division finds geographical expression in poems which explore ideas of home ('The One Who Goes Away') and question our mental mapping of the world ('How Far East is it Still East?'). It's present too in her voice, with its musical melding of Indian and American inflections.

However, it's in the non-verbal world of animals and plants that Bhatt finds a source of unity denied to humans except for the very young, as in her poem 'The Stare' in which the 'monkey child' and the 'human child' experience a moment of tender connection. Perhaps it is this longing for unity which makes Bhatt's writing so sensual; her poems are rich with the smell of garlic, the touch of bodies, the vibrant plumage of parrots. An intense colourist like the women artists who inspire some of these poems, Bhatt acknowledges that language splits us from experience but through the physical intensity of her writing brings us closer to it so that "the word/is the thing itself".

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Sujata Bhatt (b. 1956) grew up in Pune but emigrated with her family to the United States in 1968. She studied in the States receiving an MFA from the University of Iowa and went on to be writer-in-residence at the...

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KS1

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UKS2-3: We open with one of the painful realities of our time: refugees floating in the ocean in and flimsy inflatable dinghy. Flashbacks gradually reveal how two young brothers came to be on the boat - and begin to reveal what may become of them. Powerful. Painful. Necessary.

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KS2 Story of migration from Italy to U.S. told by grandfather to his grandchild through the objects he brought with him in a matchbox: great for developing symbolic significance of objects and their true value

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KS2-KS3 transition: Written with the usual comic first person bounce of Cottrell-Boyce, and the same coming-of-age transformation of a somewhat unreliable 11 year old narrator who takes two boys from Mongolia under her wing at school.

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KS2-3 An information text with a guiding narrative voice as well as case studies and vignettes from the famous and influential

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Last of England: painting by Ford Madox Brown

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Last of England: painting by Ford Madox Brown

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KS1-3 Any learner can be supported to make meaning from this dramatic, narrative painting based on mid-19th century passage to the Australian colony. How does each character feel about leaving their homeland? Do they feel differently? what has made them leave? What will their journey be like?

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This is the watercolour replica for Brown's famous image of emigrants leaving England (1855, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery). The theme was inspired by the emigration of the Thomas Woolner, a fellow Pre-Raphaelite , who left for the goldfields of Australia in July 1852. In the same year, 369,000 emigrants left Britain to seek their fortune overseas.

Brown himself, hardly able to make a living from his art, was contemplating emigrating to India when he began work on The Last of England. As the main focus of the picture he chose a middle-class couple, 'high enough, through education and refinement, to appreciate all they are now giving up, and yet depressed enough in means to have to put up with the discomforts and humiliations incident to a vessel "all one class".'(Catalogue of Mr Brown's Exhibition, 191 Piccadilly, 1865, quoted in Lambourne 1999, p.356). Beneath her shawl the woman cradles a small baby, whose tiny hand (modelled on that of Brown's own child) is just visible, grasping its mother's hand. The models for the figures were the artist himself and his second wife, Emma. The father's brooding expression betrays his anxiety and apprehension at the voyage ahead, while the mother's serene features convey her trust and sense of resignation. Following the Pre-Raphaelite prerequisite of truth to nature, Brown painted the bulk of the picture out of doors and asked his wife to sit in all weathers, even when there was snow on the ground. His intention, as he himself explained in 1865, was to achieve 'the peculiar look of light all round which objects have'(ibid., quoted in Newman and Watkinson 1991, p.89).

The circular format is reminiscent of a Renaissance tondo, but also serves to emphasise the couple's unity. Accompanying them in the boat are 'an honest family of the green-grocer kind' and, behind them, 'a reprobate', who 'shakes his fist with curses at the land of his birth, as though that were answerable for his want of success' (ibid., quoted in Lambourne 1999, p.356). The rather comical-looking cabbages arranged around the boat are intended to indicate a lengthy voyage. In the distance, the White Cliffs of Dover are just visible, while at the back of the boat a cabin boy is selecting vegetables for dinner from a small lifeboat, which bears the ironic name of the ship, Eldorado.

The watercolour replica was painted for George Rae of Birkenhead, an important patron of the Pre-Raphaelites. Some of the preliminary work for the copy is said to have been done by Brown's daughter Catherine.

Further reading:
Lionel Lambourne, Victorian Painting, London 1999, pp.355-9, oil version reproduced p.357, in colour.
Teresa Newman and Ray Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle, London 1991, pp.72-3; 88-93, oil version reproduced pl.1, in colour.

Frances Fowle
October 2000

Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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'The Last of England', Ford Madox Brown, 1864-6 | Tate

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Artwork page for 'The Last of England', Ford Madox Brown, 1864-6 Brown's picture shows a boat of emigrants as they pass the most westerly cliffs of southern England. This highly topical scene is given an added poignancy by the fact that it was stimulated by the emigration of Thomas Woolner, a fellow Pre-Raphaelite, who left for Australia in July 1852.

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No Man is an Island: classic poem by John Donne

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No Man is an Island: classic poem by John Donne

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KS2-3 Is it a poem, or a sermon? Donne was a poet and minister, living at a time of colonialism and discovery. Explore the text's powerful extended metaphor and let your learners' decide.

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Comments & analysis: No man is an island, / Entire of itself; / Every man is a piece of the continent, / A par

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What you need to be warm: poem and animated film by Neil Gaiman

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What you need to be warm: poem and animated film by Neil Gaiman

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KS2-3 Rich and thought provoking collaborative writing project that could be mirrored in a school community and lead to further positive action to support refugees

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Neil Gaiman wants you to #DrawForRefugees this winter

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Thank you to everybody who contributed artwork to #DrawForRefugees. We were truly overwhelmed by the number and quality of submissions. It was not possible to include every submission in the animated film but we do plan to showcase all illustrations over the course of the next few months in support of our Winter Appeal, so please stay tuned for updates.

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A Story Like the Wind: illustrated story

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A Story Like the Wind: illustrated story

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KS2-3 a small group of refugees float, powerless on a raft in the ocean. Young Rami's only possession is his violin and the story of love and freedom that led to its creation. incorporates themes of the power of story and music to sustain the soul.

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KS2 From the perspective of a child, fleeing with their mother after the loss of their father. Access to an otherwise harrowing tale is supported by stylised, symbolic illustrations that grow empathy, understanding and hope.

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KS1-2 The voice of a child who deserves to be more than a label, as he travels with his mother: hopefully to a safer life. Asks questions of the reader to engage and invite empathy.

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The Suitcase: picture book by Chris Naylor-Ballesteros

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The Suitcase: picture book by Chris Naylor-Ballesteros

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KS1-2 Who or what is the strange creature who arrives with the suitcase? Should the other animals believe what he says he has inside? and should they trust him at all...?

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When a strange-looking animal arrives pulling a big suitcase, the other animals are curious. What on earth could be inside that suitcase? A teacup? Maybe. A table and chair? Perhaps. A whole home and hillside with trees? This stranger must be fibbing! But when the animals break into the suitcase and discover a very special photograph, they begin to understand what the strange creature has been through, and together they create a very special welcome present . . .

"Beautifully illustrated, The Suitcase explores themes of displacement and difference in a way young audiences can easily engage with."

- Laura Padoan, spokesperson for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency

"A powerful and deceptively simple picture book about kindness and friendship, especially towards strangers."

See more reviews

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When a strange-looking animal arrives pulling a big suitcase, the other animals are curious. What on earth could be inside that suitcase? A teacup? Maybe. A table and chair? Perhaps. A whole home and hillside with trees? This stranger must be fibbing! But when the animals break into the suitcase and discover a very special [...]

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KS2 A young boy being cared for in a children's home chooses a yellow umbrella over a new toy. What does this reveal about him and his past life?

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UMBRELLA | Oscar® Qualified and Multi-Award Winning Animated Short Film