1 “There soon may not be any West Indian left who made the passage to England”: Caryl Phillips and the Windrush Years Josiane Ranguin Introduction Caryl Phillips, a Black British writer currently Professor of English at Yale University, was born in St Kitts and Nevis in 1958 and migrated to the United Kingdom with his parents at “a portable age” (Phillips 1987, 2). Phillips returned to the Windrush period in his first three plays: Strange Fruit (1981), Where there is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1984); his novels Higher Ground (1989), The Final Passage (1985), In the Falling Snow (2009); his essays A New World Order (2001) and The Atlantic Sound (2015); and one radio play: The Wasted Years (1984). One of Caryl Phillips's favourite and often quoted expressions, “a portable age,” is meant to underline a lack act of volition on the writer’s part. It also associates Phillips with the post-war waves of migration from the British Caribbean to Britain. The recurring figure of the Caribbean migrant and the many echoes of the Windrush era in his work have to be linked to the particular significance of the departure from the Caribbean: a moment that is invariably traumatic in his writing and described in his first novel as “a flight from beauty” (Phillips [1985] 2004, 42). Far from the carnivalesque gusto with which Sam Selvon 1 , for example, describes the discovery of London by the Caribbean newcomers, Phillips’s description of life in Britain is often tinged with misgivings and nostalgia but never fails to foreground the courage and determination of the post-war pioneers. Filming the Windrush To explore what the Windrush years mean to Caryl Phillips, I will first turn to The Final Passage, a novel written in 1985, and a TV film broadcast on Channel 4 in 1996. It is the story of how Leila, a young Caribbean islander, decides to leave for England with her young but already dysfunctional family in the hope of a new start. She is partly lured to England by a recruitment campaign – one of the many that were set up in the Caribbean when Britain required labour in her post-war reconstruction effort. As Bénédicte Ledent underlines in her 2002 essay on Caryl Phillips, the islanders knew they had been called to the Motherland to take part in its reconstruction as British subjects and citizens; but such was not the case of the British population. Most Britons were unprepared for what should have been considered as internal migration. It was thus with bemusement that English islanders saw the boatloads of neatly