I moved to the UK aged four years old, with my mother and two older siblings. This was the first time my mother had left her village, let alone the country. We came to live with my dad who had already been in the UK since the early 1970s. Growing up as a minority in Stoke-on-Trent, as one of the couple-of-hundred South Asian families you were a part of a tight-knit community. Our first home was living in the flat above our family restaurant alongside other staff members.

As soon as I had mastered the basic English language, I was promoted to being a translator for my parents, from answering the phone, going to GP/hospital appointments with my mother, reading and translating letters, and filling in forms.

Stoke was not a friendly and safe place for migrants, racist attacks were common, and the black and ethnic community were a minority in the city. Living in a very tight knit community, you live through the hardship of being a foreigner in an unknown land, but as a child, it then becomes the norm of seeing the divide of race. You grow up surrounded by a distrust of officials, of outsiders because you overhear whispered words of deportation, of uncles ‘hiding’, of families being separated.