ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the concept of 'home'. First, because as the two opening quotations suggest, 'home', as symbol of both place and belonging, features in the narratives, and in their transmission and plays a key role in the construction of British-Barbadian identities. Second, 'home' as a mechanism for social control, and a metaphor of imperial loyalty, featured in the ideology of Empire and it was this ideology which was one of the distinguishing features of the postwar migration from the Caribbean to Britain. The chapter discusses the consensus of silence, the collective, pervasive muteness that became one of the expressive modes of migration. It characterised the primary years of migration arrival of West Indians in Britain was perceived as a threat to the domestic order and stability of a society whose own identity and role was profoundly challenged by the dissolution of Empire, and the new world order. West Indians were not welcome, above all, not indoors.
