Mrs Pettigrew was once a well-to-do young woman in her native Jamaica, but today she sits alone in a room in someone else's house in South East London, examining the contours of her life in England, Jamaica, and the United States.
Tales from Windrush Britain
She has begun the process of serializing 40-years of journal keeping into selected online blog posts at The Daybook of Mrs Pettigrew, in which she paints an epic tale of life in England over more than half a century.

From arrival in Britain in the early 1950s along with some of the first West Indian immigrants to witnessing bloody riots in city centres across the country in the 1960s and 1980s. Living through the hard years of Thatcherism and public workers' strikes to the birth of multiracial Cool Britannia under a Blairite leadership. And now, the impact on British workers of new, large-scale immigration from Eastern Europe and the burden of an overinflated housing market. She covers it all and more.

Writing about interactions with her children, extended family, friends, colleagues, and the everyday people she meets, The Daybook of Mrs Pettigrew alludes to both her many years as a bookkeeper, as well as her abundant life as a diarist.

She has had occasion, finally, to fulfil a long-held dream of moving to the United States of America, and in Deerfield, Illinois, she wrote her Letters from America, detailing a lengthy response to the 'land of the free and the brave,' before being forcibly returned to England.

So all-consuming has been this passion for documenting her life's journey, which her ultimate ambition is to publish a book before she leaves this mortal world. She may be yet to achieve her goal, but you may read some of her often sad and very revealing stories online at She responds to your messages, so do leave her your thoughts in the comment section on single post pages. She'll be glad to hear from you.