'I didn't know what racism was until I came here' A Windrush migrant reflects on life after arriving in England
I landed at Heathrow, in the middle of the night. You look down, it's dark, there's all these lights and you think 'oh that's lovely', and you get down and it's freezing.I thought we owned all the street and I expected to go into the door, and it goes left and right. It was a terraced house. But it was just two walls, and the stairs and the seven of us in Talbot Road in Willesden [north-west London].
I would hear the parents say to the kids 'don't not sit next to him in class'. Remember those old desks where you could lift up the lid? They used to... I can't even go through it now, but it was bad. The teacher would not understand why I was cross. I used to get sent to the headmaster. He didn't do much. You're here, so put up with it.
You'd stick with white kids, if they'd have you, because it was protection. If you were a group of black kids the police would pull you up, no matter what. I was going to school once on the famous double-decker bus and I looked out of the window and there's my dad being dragged over the bonnet over a police car, given a beating.Image caption,I started doing lots of sports, I was doing a lot of athletics, I represented Brent, I represented Middlesex. When I went training, my dad said 'be home at 10'. If I was in at 5 past 10, I got a hiding. He'd obviously been pacing, up and down, thinking somethings happened to me.
What it has done to me is made me a stronger person, but emotionally dead. You had to switch off anything that affected you emotionally, and affection - out of the window.
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