ESTELLE LONGMORE October 1944
I have no regrets about marrying. All the way through life you make choices about what you are going to do and sometimes you regret those decisions or those choices, but not in this case. Interestingly, when we married, the local paper published our wedding photograph. A local couple, a white woman and a Jamaican man, saw it, invited us round one evening for a cup of tea and a chat. They had been married for a while and they had children, but she was warning me off which was a bit late by then as I was already married. She said, ‘Be careful of Jamaican women’, which I think was actually the only piece of advice that I thought was quite useful, because I have met some Jamaican woman who have found me a threat, but for most of them it wasn’t really a problem. But these two were telling us all the dreadful things about being in a mixed marriage. I think they were quite happy together, but the world didn’t like them. I got the impression that they weren’t very well educated, and they didn’t have the resources to deal with it. Whereas we were both strong enough to know that having chosen each other we would cope. I went to a fee-paying girl’s school in Acton West London. The local schools were not wonderful at the time and I certainly benefitted phenomenally from the education and I thank my parents for that. But I think they regretted paying my school fees because they regretted the money, but they didn’t regret my education. Mother, with my two elder sisters were war evacuees from London to Hereford where I was born. It was her home town and they stayed with her sister. We returned to London when I was three months.
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