How not to be an alien

Someone asked me about the rather sultry lady in our lounge, the end of her cigarette dangling over a deck of playing cards and a beer. 1945? Susan Hayward? Jane Greer? My mother, actually. Cyprus, 1947. Her government made her stateless whilst she was in Alexandria in October 1939, and she came to the UK in 1950. She was Hungarian, or as they used to say in those days, a bloody foreigner. Actually, Hungarians underwent a curious metamorphosis in the 50's. Before 1956 they were exotic, unpredictable, and profoundly suspect. Then came the Hungarian uprising and suddenly Hungarians became plucky little freedom fighters against the Red Menace. People began to press small coins into my mother's hand or give her their old clothes, instead of cheating her in the shops as heretofore. She and her sister would sooner have done without either extreme reaction, but there you are. On the whole life was sweet, and it all worked out well.

Reasonably well, anyway. Forty years later, from the depths of dementia, one of the last phrases my mother could frame, seared deep into her consciousness from the past, was ‘I am not from this country.’ Was this an excuse? Something to preface enquiries to strangers in a country where, as George Mikes used to say, every town was ‘a vast conspiracy to mislead foreigners’? I don't know.

The 50's were a funny old time. I remember asking my aunt, with whom we lived, about a sign in a window saying ‘No coloureds’. It conjured up a house of translucent people, like jellyfish, and I didn't like it one bit. ‘But aunty, we're all coloured, aren’t we?’
Some people think of the 1950's as the glory days of the Church of England. I'm not so sure when I consider what we did to Caribbean settlers of the Windrush generation. Almost all of them were weekly churchgoing Anglicans when they arrived, and thought we were, until they experienced the small mindedness, snobbery, materialism and racism of the mother country. Even allowing for some idiotic Fleet Street Xenophobia, Britain is a far less small-minded place now than it was 50 years ago, far more compassionate and imaginative.

God has made of one blood all nations upon the earth. God, whose design sense creates a world teeming with variety and refined particularity, knows what he is doing. We have to seek out, proactively, ways to reflect His intentions in the inner space of our Church communities in ever more positive and creative ways, so as to become, increasingly, what he wants us to be - salt and light in the world.

TheRt Revd Alan Wilson is the Bishop of Buckingham