native speakers: I need help....

Their long way home

With the riots focusing attention on Brixton - where West Indians first settled in London - Caryl Phillips talks to Maya Jaggi about the stuggle immigrants had to win acceptance, the subject of his new TV series.

When the first boatload of Caribbean migrants disembarked from the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks in 1948 - many of them Jamaican veterans of the second world war - the London Evening Standard ran the headline "Welcome Home"
It was a welcome that was hastily erased in the indecent scramble to slam the open door. But as descendants of those pioneers insist that this is home, there are moves to dust off a forgotten chapter of Britain´s history.
Caribbeans recruited as British citizens to help solve the post-war labour shortage in the "mother-country" were soon disabused of any sense of belonging. But their largely British-born children have assumed a steadily growing prominence - attaining what the braodcaster Darcus Howe has termed an "ease of presence"."Caribbean migration has had a phenomenal impact on this country," says the writer Caryl Phillips. The evidence of sea changes in British society is becoming overwhelming an undeniable

"There´s no major football team that doesn´t have a player who´s a descendant of those people who stepped off those boats. Yet people don´t know their origins."
Ten years ago, Phillips´s award-winning debut novel, The Final Passage, broke ground with its tribute to his parents´ generation of West Indians who journeyed to England in the fifties in search of a better break. His travel book, The European Tribe (1987), spoke for many of his generation who were black and British in articulating his problem: "How...to reconcile the contradiction of feeling British, while being constantly told in many subtle and unsubtle ways that I did not belong."

-From: The Guardian 16/12/1995

ClumsyCat wrote:Caribbeans recruited as British citizens to help solve the post-war labour shortage in the "mother-country" were soon disabused of any sense of belonging. But their largely British-born children have assumed a steadily growing prominence - attaining what the braodcaster Darcus Howe has termed an "ease of presence".