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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.