ABSTRACT
Migration and place influence the ways in which the elders talk about the past. While clearly their experiences of dislocation and relocation affect what they remember and what they tell, their material conditions - where they physically are - affect the way they tell it. The institutional setting of the day centre may also have affected the nature of the interviews. Perhaps because he was unmarried and many of the elders lived with their unmarried daughters, unlike myself Mutmahim was not invited to people’s homes. The interviews that Mutmahim and the author carried out involved questions concerning people’s experience of migration, their memories of Bangladesh and Britain and their employment histories, as well as their experience of health care, of growing old, and their family situations. The narratives and quotations that the subsequent chapters are centred around are therefore the result of specific research methods.
