The Place for Me: Stories About the Windrush Generation

Here are twelve short stories, written by ten black authors, which depict the lives of the Windrush generation, the men and women from the Caribbean who arrived in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, brought here by promises of work and a warm welcome in the ‘Mother Country’. The stories are interwoven with brief ‘fact files’ of the historical context and the lives of notable individuals and illustrated by photographs of the time. It is published in association with Black Cultural Archives, based in Brixton, which will receive 50p from each sale of the book. The stories are set in London for the most part, although there is a factual account of the Bristol bus boycott in 1963, and also acknowledgement that, despite the importance of the Windrush generation in the history of post-war Britain, its members were not the first black people to settle here and to make a contribution to British life. Some stories begin in the islands and we learn of the British army officers arriving in rural villages with ‘shiny leather shoes, and their big words and curly moustaches’ with promises of a better future. Once arrived in England, many of the stories cover much the same ground, which some younger readers may have explored in Floella Benjamin’s excellent autobiography Coming to England (she contributes a foreword here) and older ones discovered in Andrea Levy’s Small Island. The often frosty and sometimes violent reception that the newcomers received from their hosts has a prominent place. But equally important is the resilience of men and women who patiently built new lives for themselves and their families in the face of injustice and hardship, of which some, astonishingly, continue to be the victims. Written by the children and grandchildren of the Windrush generation, these are generous stories; generous not only to their elders but, without overlooking the worst aspects of life in the UK, to the country that is now their home. All of the authors contribute a few words to the end of the book. Katy Massey’s story is about how London’s docks and East End had been a meeting place for people of different backgrounds and ethnicities even before Windrush. She believes that London – ‘one of the world’s leading modern cities… shows how numerous nationalities and religions have managed to live together peacefully and in friendship’: and that really must be the promise of a better future, even if there is still much to do.