Earlier in 1958, things had come to a head in Notting Hill. Unemployment, disillusionment, boredom and the summer heat proved to be all the trigger it needed for a trifling incident at a pub to turn into a riot of "nigger hunting", vandalising and burning homes. The clashes between the mostly West Indian population and a working class White population were dismissed as delinquent adolescent behaviour by the media, but the seeds of hate were liberally sprinkled on fertile soil. They left an indelible mark on British politics where the race card played well and played often got results. In 1964, Conservative MP Peter Griffiths campaigned in Smethwick for the general election with the slogan: "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour." He won.

Dr Edward Raymond D'Sa who first came to the UK from Kenya as a student shares an honest moment with me. He suspects Goans muddled through, not wanting to be seen complaining. They pretended that racism happened to Indians and not Goans. They found consolation in church attendance and endless dances. When discrimination was not overt it existed in its subtler shades. One Goan remembers being called for an interview because of his European sounding name but when he got to the offices, there was a visible look of disappointment on the face of the interviewer to discover he was Asian.

Amidst a sense of fear and threat to the British national identity, there emerged the British sense of justice and fair play and found its voice in the liberal press and Labour party politics. Then Labour Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, in a 1966 speech, radically altered the commonly held notions of assimilation, urging that integration need not be "a flattening process of assimilation but equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance."

Goans found a different type of segregation in the United Kingdom; that of class. White British saw Asians as replacements for working class British. Asians found themselves pigeon-holed, their expectations and aspirations for their children as future accountants and doctors, laughed at as being ridiculous and unrealistic. Asians for their part, had visions of their children going to school in propah blazers and ties, becoming members of country clubs, living in chocolate-box cottages with rose gardens, but in reality they lived cheek by jowl in run-down, crowded city centres, with working class British; a wide chasm persisting between expectation and reality. Getting job references to start a career was difficult. Their qualifications were either worthless or discredited altogether.

Eventually, what greatly aided Goans was Britain's much touted welfare system in housing and health-care. Some even managed to arrange for housing through the welfare system before they arrived in the UK. They were confusing times, turbulent times setting the stage for what it meant to be British in the 20th century and through it all, the newly arrived East African Goans were struggling to find their own feet, let alone their own voice.