Oral history interview with Carlton Peets, Windrush Cymru, Our Voices, Our Stories, Our History, 2019

Description

"An oral history interview with Carlton Peets in Cardiff, discussing his experience of growing up within a family which migrated from the Caribbean during the 1950s. “Everyone was saying England is paved with gold… and all that sort of nonsense.”
Carlton Peets was born in St Kitts. His parents were sugarcane workers. He was 20 years old when he settled in Cardiff.
“It was a tough decision to come to the UK for a start… two of my sisters were here, my older sister. I had a choice, she was going to send for me or I could get a job down the health centre as the sanitary inspector… unfortunately, or fortunately, the money came first, and then I came to my sister.”
At the age of twenty, Carlton Peets remembers flying from St Kitts to Antigua then on to Trinidad where he caught a boat set for Southampton, UK.
“They were more or less dressed in black as well, and when you see them speaking you see like steam coming out of their mouths. I was telling my friend ‘look at them, steam coming out of their mouths’ and he said, ‘you too!’. I said, ‘you too!’. It was winter, February, I came. I was wearing a cardigan that I brought from home, but that was only for a style really… so luckily, I walked with it. I think it was red, white and black.”
“I know that I was lucky in a sense, because we formed a cricket team. … a club named Combine… I joined… we get a few more Kittitians and the guys who formed it was more or less Kittitians… we called it Progressive and Progressive was a team from St Kitts. That’s why we give it that name.”
“The advice I would give my 20-year-old self, put it this way… I would have made sure I got a better education, educate myself a bit better and go into real house estate. That is the job I think I would have liked.”
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