German | Indian

My Mum’s family are South Indian Catholic, she spent her teenage years in Singapore and came to the UK in her early twenties. As a young Indian woman, she retained a sense of pride in who she was, despite the challenges, whilst assimilating to the local culture. She instilled a confidence in my sister & I to believe we were as good as anyone else, what mattered was our moral code and values, i.e. how we treated people, not what colour skin we have. My Dad’s family were German Jewish and came to the UK as refugees in the 1930s. Dad was born in London in 1940. I don’t feel any connection with the German or Jewish sides, because the family had to leave Germany with the rise of Nazism and moved to the UK before my Dad was born. He doesn’t speak German and doesn’t keep any of the religious or cultural Jewish practices.

We grew up in a very White suburb of North London. I went to a Catholic girls’ school which was mainly White but fairly-mixed culturally (Italian, Irish, Polish). I was not particularly aware of being ‘different’ at secondary school although I did get teased in primary school, e.g. someone wrote in my leaving book, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, I was born pink – what happened to you?’. That took me by surprise because I wasn’t really aware of looking different. I think because my parents had always given us a strong sense of our worth. Mum was (and is) fiercely confident about her value in any society, as a woman and especially as a woman of Indian origin, and she passed that onto us.

I don’t feel I have an identifiable culture and have always felt that I don’t ‘belong’ in any cultural group. The only place I feel I truly belong is in London, my home town, and where I don't stand out because so many people are also mixed-race. English culture feels alien to me. I find it telling that I chose to marry someone who is also a mixed-race Londoner (Afro-Caribbean/Scottish). I felt an immediate sense of comfort. He has also helped me acknowledge who I am and become fiercely proud of my origins.

Sign up to Patreon or Subscribe to our website to read more stories