‘My family immigrated to London and I was chased, spat at, and told to go home ‘

Darryl Telles barely made it to the airport to leave Nairobi.

At age four, his parents were in such a hurry to get there that they accidentally left the back door of their car ajar.

It burst open as they rounded a roundabout and Darryl shot out onto the road. The driver of a mini managed to screech his brakes just in time to avoid hitting him.

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"I still remember it, I almost died," he says almost 55 years later. "I remember the look on the driver's face when he got out of his car. It's funny fate, isn't it? If things had been different, I would never have made it to England."

As it was, Darryl's family were part of a wave of Kenyan immigrants who came to England in 1968.

Tough laws restricting Asians in the country meant that some 100,000 Asian Kenyans obtained British passports in the late 1960s and flocked to the capital.

They were part of an exodus of immigrants who arrived in England at an unpleasant time when Conservative politician Enoch Powell delivered his "Rivers of Blood" speech in which he criticized mass immigration and quoted a line from a Roman poet: "As I look ahead, they fill me with forebodings; like the Roman, I seem to see 'the river Tiber foaming with much blood'".

It caused a massive backlash against ethnic minorities living in Britain.

Darryl, now 57, had to start school while his family lived in a room on Muswell Hill before moving to finchley.

His father, who had received a large pay cut, faced racism early on.

Darryl remembers one of his neighbors walking past cutting the hedge and saying, "How can people like you afford a house like this?"

Darryl's father found it so difficult that he suffered a mental breakdown and was confined for three months.

"I remember people stopping and looking at us on the street. And on the subway, people would get up and walk away. We got hate mail and a lot of abuse. I remember dad just couldn't deal with all of that," she says. , Unfortunately.

Darryl remembers being chased and spat on outside the school.

But at school he found a refuge that helped him survive.

Even then, as his parents were Catholic and from Goa, he used to pretend he was Portuguese, and when he did a school project on his own country, he did it on Portugal instead of Kenya.

One of the most shocking experiences the family had to go through was when they went to Bournemouth in 1972.

They returned to their room after a day out only to find that the walls had been papered with letters from newspaper clippings that read "f***** go home".

"It was very, very sad for the family. My older brother was very, very angry and never came on vacation with us again," says Darryl.

He says that when old-fashioned programs with racist language appeared on television, he could tell the difference.

"It wasn't just about being politically correct. The kids didn't get the niceties. You'd get teased on the playground the next day," says Darryl.

In 2011, she returned to her old school, St Theresa's, and met the teachers, now on trial, Dawn Snodgrass and Irene Tyrell. The meeting was filmed as part of a BBC documentary about his life.

"I really just wanted to thank them. They were wonderful teachers and they weren't racist at all," he says.

"I became very proficient in English and that really helped me adjust.

"School was a haven from my father's mental health issues that we kept very much in the family and I was really looking forward to it.

"Dad never really recovered and if he didn't take his medication he would get really sick."

Then, to make life even more challenging, Darryl, from a strict Catholic upbringing, came out as gay when he arrived at the University of Warwick.

It was the 1980s and, almost unbelievably, the Conservative government put in place a Section 28 law which said that promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality was wrong.

Then also came the AIDS crisis, which only made things worse, and of course the gay age of consent was still 21.

"I remember running as a gay candidate in a student election and wearing a big pink sweater that showed I was out of the closet," says Darryl.

"There were a lot of homophobic chants against me.

"Also section 28 meant that there was effectively a tax on gay students and venues."

Around this time, Darryl says he remembers going on a radio show and being told by the host that he would have to take a commercial break because he couldn't talk about gay and lesbian issues.

Darryl was too scared to come out openly in his first job after university working for a county council, but later, when he moved to Lambeth Council in 1987, he did.

He became an equality officer working for a number of local authorities advocating for fairness and inclusion.

He has been involved in many important works since then, including campaigns to fight injustice after the 1999 bombings when the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, a well-known gay hangout, was attacked by an extreme homophobe and racist. Three people died and dozens were injured.

A dedicated soccer fan, Darryl has also fought racism and homophobia in soccer in the stands.

He was a Spurs season ticket holder for 30 years and has played a major role in helping football become more accepting of the gay community, joining support groups for LGBTQ+ fans and helping to establish the Proud Lilywhite fan group in the Spurs.

"London had started to change and Londoners were coming from other cities across the UK because they could be open and open about it," says Darryl.

"I had friends in high places in the Conservative Party who came out, and then MPs started coming out, which was very important because they became role models for others.

"Now almost everyone has a friend or relative who they know is gay, but it wasn't like that before. That has really helped everything."

"In terms of racism, we still have a way to go.

“There is still racism, sometimes from immigrants who settled here and we have to work on that. There has been a great change, but we have setbacks.

"When people go back to the 1950s, it was repressive. A lot of people were committing suicide because they were gay and repressed and, in terms of race, it was a very monocultural and boring country."

These days, Darryl is back on trial, but he still goes to schools to talk to kids, saying he's full of hope for the future and how kids are so aware of issues like race and gender. gender conformity.

One thing he says that makes him laugh is the fact that when he got a DNA test it showed that one side of his family had William the Conqueror as his 29th great-grandfather.

"I always think that's one to say to racists," he says. "That despite all the hate, we're all basically the same."

darryl's book "We're Queer and We Should Be Here" tells the story of his journey as a gay football fan and is available from a wide variety of booksellers.

Do you have an amazing story to tell about your life in London? Email martin.elvery@reachplc.com