Just 40 years ago, aged 18, I arrived in the UK. I disembarked at Southampton on a cold spring day with the old colonial British passport, free from the rigours of immigration. In those days, there were no national barriers between Trinidad and the UK. We were almost one colonial state. The Budget read out with such grace and pomposity in the Westminster parliament had catered for my schooling, books, book bag and all, and later for my civil service wage packet. In Trinidad, to all intents and purposes, I was British.

I remember the photographers waiting at Southampton. I soon learnt that their purpose was to add to the cacophony of protests which surrounded the arrival of yet another boatload of immigrants from the Caribbean. It was then as it is now.

I made my way to Forest Hill, south-east London, where I scoured the London Evening News for jobs and penned many an application. I had graduated from one of those fine colonial schools where I was a scholarship student with distinctions in French, Latin and Spanish. When I went for my first interview, for a clerical job in a private firm, I took my certificates with me. The interviewer looked at them, cast his eye over my Sammy Davis-styled suit, a blue mohair number with trousers slit and tiny lapels, and ordered me out "before I call the police - these documents are a fraud".

Race had macheted its way through my bright colonial expectations. The Post Office rescued me from despair. Being under 21, I was paid according to my age, the logic being that I would be living with my parents. I enjoyed no such reality. I got £7 15s 6d. With rent at £2.10 and fares to and from work, there was very little for physical sustenance. I was suitably proletarianised; limping around the city, a postbag on my shoulder, I slowly began to understand my place in society.

And so a rebel was born. Time and again, I found myself before the authorities with my shop steward. Trade unionism came easily to my anxious soul. I thought of returning. But then a letter came from home: my girlfriend had run off with a close friend. There was nothing to return to.

I ran into a band of au pair girls from the Continent, as Europe was then described. At the time, the debate about joining the Common Market was raging. I have never been a Eurosceptic - an au pair called Amanda Bacigalupo saw to that.

This completed my political baptism. Race, trade unionism and Europe were the three pillars, and I have never deviated to this day.

I returned home on holiday in 1963. My parents met me at the airport. I did not recognise them. West Indian children never looked their parents in the face; it was considered rude. In four years, they had changed. Such was the shock of non-recognition that I cried all the way home from the airport. They asked what was wrong and I did not reply. I kept returning years after and, every time I did, I sat squarely in front of them and stared, taking in every detail, every expression. My mother would ask why was I staring so intently at her. I never told her. It was a migrant condition, a migrant secret.

We all waited on that dreaded phone call: the news that Mum or the chief (Dad) was dead. Every immigrant carried that fear. My father fell ill. He knew it was the end. He asked my sister to call me. I must come right away, she said. I couldn't. I was in the middle of a Channel 4 series. I asked for a couple of weeks. He waited. I arrived on a Tuesday, told him that all my successes were largely due to him. He tossed his head to one side and replied: "Is that so?" He died the following day.

Two Christmases later, as I was leaving for Jamaica, Mum called my eldest daughter. "Is your father coming for Christmas?" She had never done that before. I called her and she said that not since my last brother was born had she felt so ill. I was casual. "You sound as though you have much gas left in the tank," I said. She sucked her teeth in contempt, and put the phone down. I called home from JFK airport on my way back. My wife told me my mother was dead. I returned to England in a haze.

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