All prose leads to home

Windrush passenger Alford Gardner pens his experiences

WRITTEN WITH the help of his son Howard, Alford Gardner, one of the few remaining passengers who took the journey on the Empire Windrush in 1948, shares his story from childhood to his adult life spanning 97 years, in his book.

The book, Finding Home, will be launched at the Bradford Literature Festival on June 23.

It looks at his time in the RAF, and after returning home to Jamaica, then coming back to the UK where he found a different country and attitudes to him and other after the war had ended.

In 1943, at the age of 18, Alford was called up to serve in the RAF after responding to an advertisement for volunteers to help with the war effort.

He arrived at Liverpool docks in June 1944 and was sent to a training camp in Yorkshire where he trained as a motor mechanic and was later posted to RAF

Moreton-in-Marsh and then to RAF Colerne after completing an engineering course.

After the war, he returned to Jamaica but was unable to find suitable employment and so returned with his older brother Gladstone on the MS Empire Windrush, which docked at Tilbury on June 22, 1948. On disembarking the Windrush, Alford, Gladstone and two other passengers went straight to Leeds.

The book highlights the problems in finding accommodation and employment, and how they overcame the numerous challenges that they faced.

Despite these challenges Al-