Alford Dalrymple Gardner, an amateur guitarist and wicket keeper, was among the Windrush passengers. Along with his youthful fellow travellers (the average age on the ship was 24), he traded the certainty of devastating Caribbean hurricanes and unemployment for the chance of a better life in bombed-out Britain. His zestful style, undiminished by his 97 years and the challenges faced in his bigoted adoptive country, is commemorated in Finding Home , a memoir co-authored with his son, Howard. The book chronicles Caribbean pioneers' pitfalls and triumphs in a country that often seemed to despise them. "I'll never understand," writes Gardner early on, "how the colour of my skin can make these people so mad." Critics scoffed that the sun-kissed West Indians "wouldn't last one bad winter" in Britain. Finding Home illuminates the antipathy towards the pioneers (prime minister Clement Attlee received a letter from angry MPs warning it was a mistake to admit the migrants), showing that a hostile environment was in place long before the then home secretary Theresa May's 2012 policy ensnared some of the Windrush generation in a bureaucratic conundrum to prove, decades on from their arrival, that they had a right to live here.