History
Second World War
Participants
Caribbean
Their own stories:
Connie Mark (née Macdonald)
Connie Mark, BEM, was brought up in Kingston, Jamaica. Her white grandfather had been a Macdonald from Scotland, her black grandmother a descendant of slaves. She joined up in 1943, and worked in hospitals as a member of the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service).
"I was given a decent Methodist upbringing. We were British! England was our mother country. We were brought up to respect the Royal Family. I used to collect pictures of Margaret and Elizabeth, you know? I adored them. It was the British influence. We didn't grow up with any Jamaican thing – we grew up as British."
"[During the war] there was a mood of fear in Jamaica – they put the fear of God in us. We were definitely positively told that the Germans wanted us because we were a stepping stone to the coast of America. So we were on our tenterhooks all the time."
"Like England, Jamaica is an island. We depended on boats bringing things in. So if you are short of oil because the boat coming in was torpedoed, then the whole island has no oil. Many country parts of Jamaica in those days didn't have electricity. So you had a bottle, you filled it up with paraffin and you put the cork in. You turned the bottle over, the paraffin soaked the cork, you lit the cork, and that was your light for eating, for doing homework or anything. I can tell you, a lot of people got their eyebrows singed! Oh, yes!"
"Down in Kingston town, at a place they call Parade, they had two lists put up – a list of men reported missing and a list of men reported dead. And that list would go on and on – sometimes you'd go and you'd see the name of your cousin; you'd go back a few days later and see your friend's brother reported dead."
"So we damn well knew there was a war on. And that's why I joined up in the ATS and went into the British Military Hospital at Kingston."
