My Family’s Windrush Story Left Me With Questions About My Black British Identity

My grandma would refer to her dad using a racialised slang term often used in the Caribbean to describe those of Chinese and East Asian descent. While used in jest back then, she knew she was being politically incorrect, and would laugh it off in her melodic Trinidadian accent. With a Black Caribbean mother and Asian father, she grew up as one of many children, fathered by different men. As a teenager, she ended up in an orphanage with her sister for some years. For a person who was always smiling, as a child, I could recognise from her countenance that this was a period of her life she didn’t like talking about. 

In her 30s, she moved to London to start a new life all on her own. She landed a job as a receptionist at St George’s Hospital; there’s an old newspaper clipping of my mum as a toddler, sitting at my grandma’s typewriter with her soft strands arranged on top of her head in a bow. When people ask me what my mum looks like, I often say “She looks like Cher”. With a pale complexion that she’s stubbornly tried to tan darker over the years and long, thick hair with a slight wave to it, my mum is a white-passing mixed-race woman. 

Over the years, strangers have forcibly told me she’s white. Although I know this is an aspect of my mum’s racial background, and as a result, my own, I have grown up feeling removed from this fact. Mainly because my mum never met her father. My sister said that my grandma once showed her a picture of a man she called Brian. Tall, handsome and dressed in a shirt and tie, this black-and-white photograph was nowhere to be found after my grandma passed away. 

One afternoon, I wandered into my mum’s room to borrow a hairband. She has this ornate dressing table covered in receipts, trinkets and our childhood drawings. There’s always been a photo of my stepdad and a picture of my brother wedged into the base of the mirror. But this time around, I noticed an additional one. It was another black-and-white photo. The image looked sunny, a beach scene with a cliff face in the background: somewhere along the British coastline, if I had to guess. In the foreground, a man is sitting on a rock. Only his profile is visible; I looked at it for a few minutes, wondering why this stranger’s features looked so familiar. I realised this white, blonde man with high cheekbones and a mathematically straight nose resembled my mother. 

My grandma got pregnant with my mum in 1966. There’s a photo of her at the time with a small bump, sitting among her friends from work. A proudly glamorous woman who would sit under her standing hair dryer every weekend to get her curls just right –– she beams in the picture as if she’s still alive smiling somewhere, just beyond the paper. Although she looks happy, I’ve always wondered if she knew then that she’d be raising my mother alone. A Black woman with a child that looks white, in a country that’s thousands of miles away from her home. A country where, just two years after my mother was born, Conservative MP Enoch Powell made his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech –– condemning mass immigration from the Commonwealth in particular. 

After the Second World War, people from the Caribbean were encouraged to move to Britain to help rebuild the UK’s infrastructure. The first ship that arrived with workers from Jamaica was called HMT Empire Windrush, so all subsequent immigrants from that era are collectively referred to as the Windrush generation. On my dad’s side, both grandparents moved from Guyana in 1960 and settled in the same part of South London as my grandma. My living grandmother talks about how she would see my grandma bike to work, again, always smiling despite the weather. My father’s family has a book dedicated to our family tree, tracing our lineage back to a revered overseer affectionately nicknamed Lady Clarke. 

As someone who was raised with a strong sense of his ancestry, my dad always encouraged my mum to find out who her dad was. Understandably, she’d been reluctant to do so, up until my grandma died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2009. Then began the mammoth task of picking through her belongings –– and that’s when my mum found the photo that sits on her dressing table. One of my grandma’s oldest friends, Stanley, offered to help my mum in her efforts with what little memory he had left. I remember them having cyclical conversations on the phone about places and people that have since ceased to exist. I recall watching my mum poring over old issues of the Yellow Pages, thumbing through for a name that was likely incorrect. We’d watch episodes of Long Lost Family, where presenter Davina McCall sought to connect people with relatives they’d lost touch with or never met. I’d watch my mum’s face to see if the stoicism she’d affected would slip. 

Over the years, the search became increasingly difficult. Most of the information about who Brian is or was had been buried with my grandmother. I even called the hospital where my mum was born to see if I could launch my own investigation, only to be told it had closed a decade prior. My mum’s longing inevitably became mine. I have brown skin, brown eyes and have grown up to wear my curly 4C hair proudly with a hairband at the front to keep the curls away from my face. I identify as a Black British woman but from a racial standpoint, I know there’s a missing link that has led me to feel disconnected from who I truly am. 

Growing up in London as a Black person, fortunately, being a minority is the majority. At school, we would take day trips to mosques and synagogues. Celebrating Diwali was an essential part of the curriculum and on birthdays, children would bring in national treats from home. Multiculturalism is a privilege I have always had access to but, ironically, I’ve felt locked out of Britishness for not being white. I’ve had strangers ask “Where are you really from?” and I was spat at and called a “Black b*tch” while out shopping with friends as a university student in Leeds. Some people look at me, see my skin and make their own assumptions about who I am as a person. In those moments, I thought about my grandad and the fact that I directly descend from a white British man but somehow, I’m still unworthy of claiming a culture because my outward ethnicity signals otherwise.

As a result of Brexit, people of colour who have grown up in Britain or immigrated to the country have had to grapple with the idea that we’re not welcome in the UK. Nationwide research conducted in 2019 showed that 71% of people from ethnic minorities reported facing racial discrimination, up from 58% in January 2016, after the Brexit referendum. Former Prime Minister Theresa May undoubtedly compounded this issue after her “hostile environment” immigration policy led to the Windrush Scandal which saw the children of Commonwealth citizens unlawfully detained and threatened with deportation. Sarah O’Connor had moved to the UK aged six and had been mistakenly classified as residing in the country illegally. “They made me feel like I’m not British,” she told The Guardian. She was unable to work, denied benefits and died at age 57. What does it take to be “British” if your cultural identity can be stripped away from you so easily?

I currently live in Copenhagen, Denmark, where being British is now what leads me to feel like an outsider. I was raised on a diet of Heinz Baked Beanz and Only Fools & Horses, far removed from the “hygge” of Scandinavian life. Moving to a foreign country has allowed me more right to claim England as my home than the UK ever has. Here, my cultural background is never questioned. In Denmark, I don’t feel the need for my grandad to exist as some spirit beyond the veil with the otherworldly power to verify that I am indeed English by blood. 

Earlier this year, the Conservative government came under fire for announcing the Illegal Immigration Bill. Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced that there would be stricter measures implemented against those attempting to enter Britain by boat to seek asylum –– the Bill is reportedly 50% incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. Again, there’s this incentive to limit who has access to Britishness. I think of my non-white ancestors who travelled to the UK by water, either by force or through the promise of a better life. Generations go by but to the powers that be, it seems we’re allowed to masquerade as Brits but will never escape the threat of ‘Go back to your own country’. 

I still look for my grandad. The internet is an infinite resource, so I Google Search his name from time to time in hopes that a new piece of information will present itself. But in a sense, I see him every day. He exists in the freckles beneath my eyes and the blonde hairs that sprout along my hairline. I have accepted that I may never get to meet him, or any other relatives from his side of my family, but that won’t stop me from knowing myself. What it constitutes to be British isn’t a decision that can be made by a loved one, a stranger or a governing body, it’s an intangible feeling that surfaces when I’m debating with my friends whether PG Tips or Yorkshire Tea is best. I imagine, if I ever do find my grandad, it’ll quell some anxiety in me. It’s hard to feel rejected by a man you’ve never known –– but that won’t prevent me from accepting the entirety of my being, Black Britishness and all, in his absence.