My own Windrush story begins with my dad, who came to this country aged just four-years-old.
He made the journey along with thousands of others, leaving his home in a small rural town in Jamaica, for England, following his father.
On the boat over, he told me how he held on to his mum’s hand and went wherever she went, before being terrified by the sight of the White Cliffs of Dover, his first taste of the country he would come to call home.
When he came he, and our family, came to promises of work, a new home, a chance for a new life and to help rebuild a country.
But almost immediately that promise made by the British government was being resented, and over the coming decades it was slowly teased away, withdrawn, obscured, hidden and outright stolen from so many of the Windrush generation.
As HMT Empire Windrush arrived, the then Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones reassured his colleagues, saying "there's nothing to worry about, they won't last one winter in England."
Needless to say, we did last more than one winter.
But efforts to prove the contrary didn't end there, empowered by legislative manoeuvres in the 60s, 70s and 80s, successive governments implemented increasingly complex and conditional bills to block non-white migration from the Commonwealth.
And it is still going on today with a Tory government obsessed with small boats and hostile environments - and not with helping the people whose lives its policies are wrecking.
When the Windrush scandal was uncovered, so many people who looked like my father and late grandfather were the ones targeted, detained and deported.
This shocked a nation that had long convinced itself of its fairness and equity. For me, clumsily navigating toward and through my first year of university, it was terrifying.
Fear for family
It shattered illusions I had as to the security of my Britishness, and that of my family, and left me scared of what might happen.
I had gone to the 2012 Olympics, watched my country celebrate me and my family’s story, and naively thought us embedded into this country, firmly, unshakably a part of it.
I was vaguely, flimsily, assured in the knowledge that my dad did have a British passport, but I didn’t know about his brother and sisters.
The fear clung on as I watched more revelations unfold, and more people who looked, spoke and smiled like my family, revealed the horrors they had faced.
It was a particular type of powerlessness, of having your identity stripped away and threatened by the country that's supposed to be your own.
At the time, I didn't know whether to ring round my family, checking they had the necessary documents, or just hope the worst would never come to pass.
Mercifully, it never manifested but for many others, this fear was lived reality and what I felt was a window into their lives.
Whilst my family remained in the country they had made into their home, so many others were uprooted, torn up and thrown out.
This year, on the 75th anniversary of when HMT Empire Windrush first docked, I cannot help but acutely remember that fear.
I spoke to a number of people, covering the anniversary, about their own stories.
Some broke down in tears, worn down by years of fruitless battles that have gotten them and loved ones nowhere.
Others burst into their native language and slang, in joy that they could share their story with someone who understood fundamentally the double and half life that was to live in this country which may try and turf you out at every moment.
But everyone shared the same defiance, the refusal to give up the grip on a life that was promised to them, given to them before those in power tried to snatch it away.
And the Windrush Day 75th anniversary must be a recognition of that.
Of the fear and tears, the joy we share with ourselves in those moments we can, and the defiance we show against those in power whose actions will always speak louder than their words.
