“On the day I lost my father I became a member of an exclusive club, a club none of us wanted to join: a generation – my generation – born in 1960s Britain, brought up on both rice and peas and fish and chips, whose parents crossed thousands of miles, leaving the warm shores of the Caribbean to settle in Britain. If I was cast on to a desert island for the rest of my life and given the option of one dish to take with me, I would find it almost impossible to choose between rice and peas and fish and chips. Would selecting one over the other make me more or less British in the eyes of my peers and society in general?“
Pauline Campbell’s stunning part-memoir, part-commentary, Rice & Peas And Fish & Chips, is an exploration of race and racism, identity and belonging, against the historical, political and social climate of twentieth-century Britain to the present day.
Campbell shares this account of her life and the journey her generation has been on – a generation who at their birth had no idea that the subsequent political events that were taking place throughout their young and adult lives would lead to a tsunami of inequality.
Rice & Peas And Fish & Chips is a personal exploration of what it means to be British as a first-generation immigrant child of Caribbean parents, as well as an inquest unravelling the threads of racism in the UK and showing what enables it to flourish and continue to resist change.
Rice & Peas And Fish & Chips is out in the UK on the 7 October. Pre-order your copy now using the links below.