Migrants are among the bravest people on the planet. I saw this up close on the faces of the Jamaicans and other Caribbeans, the so-called Windrush Generation, growing up in 1970s Luton. I have always wanted to write about migrants. Perhaps it’s because of the audacity of hope of my parents’ peers – men like Summer Wear who came to wintry Britain in the early 1960s only wearing a tropical suit – that I consider them heroic. Pioneers like Summer Wear feature throughout my forthcoming book What We Leave We Carry, an oral history of migration to Britain inspired by the work of the late Chicago radio broadcaster and oral historian Studs Terkel and the Belarusian Nobel laureate, journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich.

The title of What We Leave We Carry comes from a line in John La Rose’s poem, Not From Here. It poses a question that resonates with all migrants: what do you leave behind when you depart your home to travel, perhaps thousands of miles, to start a new life on foreign soil, and what do you carry with you both physically and emotionally wherever you land? 

My uncle, Viv Adams, arrived on a BOAC flight from Jamaica in 1961 as a 13-year-old, and he still cherishes his first experience of walking through the terminal at Gatwick airport. Viv remembers being stopped by the BOAC pilot, who held out his hand to the Jamaican teenager and said, "Welcome to Britain".

It’s unlikely that Viv would receive such a warm welcome today. But before we surrender to the cinnamon-scented nostalgia of the past, I should point out that Britain was a hostile environment for migrants in the 1960s. Seven years after my uncle’s arrival, the Conservative politician Enoch Powell stoked racial unrest with the assertion that soon "the black man will have the whip hand over the white man", and that migrants (even if they were British citizens), should be encouraged to go "back home". That nativist strain, at large in the country, has never really disappeared. 

What’s missing from the skewed and febrile debate about migration in this country is nuance and compassion.

How far has Britain come from the calculated bigotry of Margaret Thatcher in 1978, complaining about the country being "swamped" by the wrong kind of migrants? I never thought I’d miss the faux outrage of Norman Tebbit as he agonised about the loyalty of British-south Asians who, when the English cricket team went out to bat against Pakistan, were less likely to shout "Rule Britannia" than "Pakistan Zindabad", but Thatcher’s pitbull terrier in human form seems like a pussy cat today compared to Reform’s bellicose Nigel Farage and his apologists and enablers in the media.

What’s missing from the skewed and febrile debate about migration in this country is nuance and compassion. Key insights could come from the voices of migrants themselves but they’re drowned out by the kind of right-wing hatred and hysteria that is even now being repackaged and parroted by sections of the governing Labour Party.

The importance of offering a counter narrative informs Talismans of migration, the latest edition of WritersMosaic Quarterly. Published as an insert in The Bookseller on 20th March, it features a series of essays drawn from the Royal Literary Fund’s WritersMosaic Magazine. Previous issues of WritersMosaic Quarterly have celebrated the centenaries of James Baldwin and Malcolm X, and new writing by Iranian women. In this fourth edition, writers reflect on the power and poignancy of objects of migration. The authors of these pieces are migrants or descendants of migrants who, like me, travelled Britain for What We Leave We Carry and listened to stories of migration – foundational tales of arrival, of love and of loss. 

Everyone we spoke with recalled the heightened emotions of their departure, leaving behind relatives and friends whom they might never see again. Something that helped the soon-to-be migrants on their journeys and for the first daunting moments of their arrival – in what seemed for many like a perennial fog – were parting words of comfort, gifts and treasured objects. These objects include the Persian rug that takes pride of place in the Iranian taxi driver Mehrdad’s home in Shropshire; the battered guitar that the British-Guyanese poet Maggie Harris has clung to since her father’s death more than 50 years ago, which caused her to weep for joy when it was renovated on BBC One’s The Repair Shop; and the psychiatrist’s letter that 19-year-old Suzanne Harrington was obliged to carry from Cork in 1987, informing any NHS medical practitioner who read it that Suzanne was allegedly mentally disturbed and "totally lacked direction". 

These often comforting but sometimes vexing talismans of migration – whether they inspire resistance, resilience or joy – continue to stir remembrance, even today. They are a quiet corrective both to the baying crowds who have, in recent years, assembled to protest outside the hostels housing migrants, and to the coarsening, anti-migrant rhetoric of public discourse. 

I see my Jamaican mother in every migrant and in every migrant I see my mother. And in both What We Leave We Carry and Talismans of migration, if you listen carefully to their voices, you will hear a truer, more hopeful and commendable sound of Britain.

What We Leave We Carry by Colin Grant is published by Jonathan Cape on 4th June.