My parents came to Britain in the 50s to build a better life for themselves and their children. It was a risk that paid off, and an achievement that reaches down through two very different generations

My father, who came to Britain from Jamaica in 1953, has always been an undemonstrative man, but on 15 October 1987, the night of the great storm, he made a statement. That was the day, much anticipated, that he and my mother retired, back whence they had come.

My dad carried a couple of bags, one of them white plastic, which I hadn’t even noticed until they reached departures, where loved ones disappear behind the screens, entering a portal to another world. We hugged, but not for long, and I waited for the sadness to tie a knot in my stomach. But it didn’t. I was sad, but more than that I was happy for them. Not just the fact of retirement in the sun, but the fact that quiet, undemonstrative William Edward Muir and funny, feisty Cleadine Marona – my mother – had completed their joint project.

They came to build a life a level above that they would have had in the Caribbean, to give their children – of which there were two, later four – lives and opportunities they would never have had without that leap of faith. And, with that achieved, they were going home – fulfilling the last clauses of the contract they created and signed at the outset of their Windrush journey. I was happy to see that project achieved.

So was he. He waved and smiled and then, almost as an afterthought, reached into the bag and pulled from it a trilby. That was weird. I had never seen him in a trilby. He put it on, they waved and were gone. The next time we spoke on the phone, I asked: “Where did the hat come from?” He was surprised that I was surprised. “I arrived in a hat and I left in a hat,” he said with a flourish. He had bookmarked his British Caribbean adventure with a trilby; a demonstrative act by an undemonstrative man. I knew at that moment he wasn’t coming back.

He’s 98 and in a wheelchair now. With quiet efficiency, dementia is setting in. Thus it was as he intended; the trilby really was his symbolic final goodbye to life in Britain.

He is far away now in so many ways and, staring from the veranda into the Jamaican countryside, doesn’t know much about the prevailing Windrush scandal, but if he did he would be outraged. And there is a very real link. For to truly understand the ferocity of the anger occasioned by the schemings of Theresa May and Amber Rudd – and their willingness to rip apart the settled lives of so many Britons of Caribbean origin – you have to think for a while about what he and my mother and so many thousands of others did in the years after the second world war. You have to understand how much we respect those pioneers, how much we know of the sacrifices they made, the hurdles they jumped, the insults they bore, the slaps they took – and for what? To build a platform for us, their children, to have settled and hopefully successful lives here.

Then it makes sense. For what May and Rudd did was not just a shameful, calculated attack on the second generation, those who arrived as children; it was also an unconscionable act that sought to completely dismantle the principal achievement of those who brought them. A shocking vandalism in this, the 70th anniversary year of the arrival of the first Windrush pioneers on that bright day at Tilbury dock. Some blows glance. This one struck deep.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Muirs early in their time in Britain. Photograph: Courtesy of Hugh Muir

But thanks to extraordinary revelations and an unprecedented public and political pushback, the attack has failed. As those affected start to try and rebuild their lives, I hope there will also be time to reflect on the legacy of those pioneers. Their project lives on now through us, their descendants. But how much do they still influence it?

That’s a question I have been pondering while making a documentary on the most obvious legacy of those Windrush pioneers – their children and their grandchildren. It has prompted me to think about my own place in the project. How much did I take from my parents as they sought to equip me for life in Britain? And how much of what I learned from them have I tried to pass on to my children, their grandchildren? We have called the programme Caribritish. But that makes it sound easy. It has never been easy. How much Carib and how much British?

My father and late mother – who arrived in Britain with my eldest siblings in 1956 – found their own answer. Steeped in the black Pentecostal church, they had a cast list of friends and fellow worshippers with accents from all islands of the Caribbean: other Jamaicans, Barbadians, Antiguans, Grenadans, Trinidadians. But home was a racially and culturally mixed suburb of east London, with English, Italian, Indian and Korean neighbours. We watched as our parents made cultural and practical adaptations, even on a hallowed Sunday. The church they frequented had a sizeable black congre​gation, a white pastor from Essex and, the cultural pièce de résistance, a piano-playing veteran of London pubs, who ​played the hymns in the style of an East End knees-up. As an exemplar of cultural navigation, Sundays were hard to beat.

But there was only so much parents could do to help their children. It was for us, without their history and certainties, to fill in the details. What should be our friendship group? Should it be within our British Caribbean bubble, relatives, sons and daughters of other West Indians in the church, or the white English peers who had a freedom, a swagger and insouciance we were never allowed? I juggled both, a foot in each camp. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds. How to make the transition seamless? How to explain curried goat and ackee and saltfish without inviting ridicule from schoolmates who only ever ate English basics? And, lordy, how to explain the singing, chanting and wailing they might hear from the lounge every Wednesday night: the sound of Mum’s weekly Pentecostal prayer meeting?

We all had to adapt the practices and idiosyncrasies of a Windrush life to the realities of what confronted us in Britain. That was easier for some of us than others. My eldest sister embraced English recipes and Motown and became a teacher. My middle brother found his way to grammar school, university, reggae sound systems in the Midlands and a career in retail. My eldest brother, meanwhile, faced with a Britain that had yet to come to terms with its changing face, set his own calibration of British Caribbean-ness and became a Rastafarian. It gave him what we all were seeking, equilibrium, but it came at a cost. Harassment by the police, discrimination in the search for work. When my mother suffered a fatal stroke, we both flew out to Jamaica. After the funeral, I flew back to London. He stayed and cares for my father. When next I saw him there, I thought it was the first time I had seen him breathing freely.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hugh Muir (right) and his brother Rhaines. Photograph: Courtesy of Hugh Muir

We played the hands we were dealt the best we could. Supported England at football and cricket, particularly those sides bolstered with familiar black Britons, but also the West Indies. I listened to David Rodigan playing reggae on the radio – an Englishman blaring the sound of Kingston, Jamaica. But with the other ear, I would hear Soul Spectrum on Capital and Robbie Vincent’s soul show on Radio London. Even then, more navigation. If reggae was the Caribbean sound of resistance and struggle, was it a dereliction to listen to upbeat American soul?

And what of trips to the Caribbean itself; how did my British Caribbean-ness play out there? Uneasily on that first trip to Jamaica. But, eventually, as I walked around the cane fields of rural Jamaica, it seemed easier to feel an umbilical link than it ever did touring a Tudor palace.

I think I’m typical of a generation that, betwixt and between, devised our own equation. My friends, many of them old schoolfriends, reflect many cultures. My immediate family connects Jamaica with east London with – via marriage – a very English rural town in Shropshire. But what of our children, the Windrush grandchildren? My children, young women now, of mixed heritage, don’t face the choices and dilemmas I did, much less those that confronted my older siblings and our parents. Britain is a different place. And yet they, too, have had to find their own calibrations of British Caribbean-ness. Recently, one described her foreboding inviting a schoolfriend back to dinner to find we were having a West Indian Saturday soup, with yams, dumplings, potatoes and all the broiled chicken bits you never see in supermarket packets. She need not have worried. Her white English friends have the cultural calibrations of another generation. Saturday soup went down a treat. As does curried goat and saltfish patties, as does the 21st century’s symbolic dish of British Caribbean-ness, jerk chicken.

My children will always carry the legacy of Windrush, but they and their peers are already redefining what that means in a new century. They aren’t so much chameleons, changing coats to suit the surroundings, as creatures whose coats of many hues allow those confident enough to do so to move around with greater ease than we could. Their grandparents brought Caribbean religiosity; over time that has been diluted. The Windrushers came with staunchly conservative attitudes, with inflexible ideas about sex, gender and sexuality. And some of that endures, through the teachings of the still powerful black Pentecostal church. But their grandchildren have grown through an era of social liberalism and bear its imprint. Sexual liberation, gay liberation, gender politics, matriarchy, patriarchy; none of it presents as it might have to their grandparents. Windrush is a cloak they wear as they choose, not the straitjacket it could be for my generation.

My father’s memories come in dribs and drabs these days, but a few years ago, when I sat on the veranda and talked to him about his life, he said he had a good time in Britain. He laughed about seeing snow for the first time, labouring as a carpenter in Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire; repairing old houses in postwar south-east London; being sacked by a racist foreman who spotted he drove a nicer car. All the colour of a life. He and my mother took a risk. He felt it paid off.

Every time I see him now, I think it will be the last, but when it is ... well, through the grief I will know that he completed his project and made his statement. It’s for us, the children and grandchildren of Windrush, to make ours.

Caribritish: Children of Windrush starts on Friday 8 June at 11am on BBC Radio 4.