‘My first misery / Is when I embark at Piccadilly …” So runs The Underground Train, released by the “king of calypso”, Lord Kitchener, two years after arriving from Trinidad and Tobago at Tilbury docks on the Empire Windrush in 1948. It is as neat a fusion of cultures as you could hope to hear. If it could be piped into all tube stations until the rail strike is over, it might help keep us sane.
Lenny Henry’s mum would have been pleased with Lord Kitchener’s efforts. Her son’s new documentary, Lenny Henry’s Caribbean Britain (BBC Two) – a companion piece to 2018’s The Commonwealth Kid, in which he travelled to Jamaica to examine his roots – opens with his memory of her urging all her children to integrate. Henry’s mother was the kind you sought to obey at all times, so he did. The wider question he poses in this two-parter is how much those coming from other countries lose or gain by trying to “fit in”.
