Marti came to the UK in 1964 because she was interested in left-wing politics.  She went to Leeds University and in 1965 married and then stayed in the UK.  She has written two books “Be Careful What You Wish For” and “The Rising Cost of Staying Alive”.

Marti began by talking about her early life in South Carolina near the Blue Ridge Mountains, her father’s communism and his political confusion.

Marti became aware of McCarthyism and the danger facing her family when her father was dismissed from the army for being a communist, although subsequently he was allowed to join the merchant navy.  When in 1939 Hitler and Stalin concluded a non-aggression pact her father renounced his membership of the communist party and became a reporter for the Daily Worker although his politics always remained at variance with the society in which he lived and this shaped Marti’s life.

Marti was eleven months old when her mother took her to live in South Carolina where she had a much-loved black nanny, Lily.  At that time the people in South Carolina were following in the footsteps of the English (her mother was a debutante) but then came The Great Depression, followed by the war, and many families had a much-reduced standard of living.  Much of the country was too swampy for traditional English agriculture and Marti‘s description of the freshwater Salamanders and South Carolina marshlands where there were alligators, snakes, racoons, Snowy Egrets and Jaybirds roosting in the trees on the inlets of the marshlands was wonderfully evocative.

Marti went on to discuss segregation which had it’s roots in the slave trade when British ships took slaves from the Caribbean to the American colonies, including South Carolina.  Thousands of slaves were brought in to work on the plantations growing cotton, rice and sugar cane crops and it was during this time that they developed their own language, Gullah, which gave them some degree of privacy.

The slave trade was abolished in England in 1833 and in America in 1865 and the subsequent reduction in the supply of slaves may have reduced the worst treatment for some.  But vagrancy laws, which were introduced in 1866 and continued until the 1940s, could force anyone who appeared to be unemployed or homeless to work on the plantations.   However, although some slaves were able to grow fruit and vegetables, both for themselves and to sell, only a tiny minority were able to buy their freedom through trading in the market.