Mum and Dad had chosen the house we were in because it stood directly opposite the school that they wanted me to go to, but I was still never allowed to walk across the road on my own: I had to be escorted back and forth by an adult at all times. It didn’t bother me and I loved everything about school, always wanting to work hard and please the teachers. I must have impressed them because when the Queen came on an official visit there was a film crew there and I was asked to skip around the corridors and represent the school for their cameras. Our whole family was fantastically keen on the royal family and everything British, so I felt it was a huge honour to be chosen. For a long time after the film was shown on television, people would recognise me as the chubby little girl they had seen on their screens that night and I liked that attention – my first little moment in the spotlight. At that stage in my life, I would never have had the nerve to stand up in front of an audience and perform in public, but I was already developing a taste for winning the approval of audiences.
Although no one in the family gave it a second thought, the school doctors were becoming increasingly concerned about my weight and they actually went as far as placing me under medical supervision. That made no difference to my eating habits at all because Dad still said it was all right for me to eat two burgers at a sitting, followed by a bag of sweets. As long as he was offering, I was happy to accept whatever was dangled in front of me, and I hated the doctors for talking to Mum and me like we were idiots when we went to see them. Looking back now, I guess they thought my parents were ignorant and didn’t understand the importance of nutrition, and I suppose they were right, because no one paid as much attention to their diet as they do now.
I noticed that in many ways our house seemed to be quite different from other West Indian homes that we visited. I actually think that sometimes Mum believed she was white, because she never gave me any idea that I was black or that our family was any different from any other British family. We ate very English meals most of the time and it came as quite a surprise to me when I finally realised that I was from an ethnic minority. It wasn’t just me who was surprised either. All my white school friends, when they reached the age where they started to notice people’s different skin tones, told me that they always thought of me as being ‘just like them’. It’s such a shame we can’t all be as non-judgemental as children all our lives.
Every Saturday night, however, Mum and Dad would throw huge West Indian-style parties, with their Blaupunkt stereo blaring out and the house full of happy, laughing, drinking, dancing people, most of them Jamaican families who had arrived like them on the Windrush or the Begona. I would be desperate to stay downstairs for as long as possible, in the heart of the action, soaking up the music, but eventually I would be sent up to bed. There I would lie, listening to the joyous sounds bubbling up from below and wishing I could go back downstairs and join in again, but eventually I would fall asleep despite the thumping beats and raucous laughter. So much of the music of that period must have infiltrated my dreams on those Saturday nights, becoming part of my very soul as I slept.
I never had a room of my own in that house – there just wasn’t enough space – so I would always be sharing a bed with my mother or my sister or my grandmother. I didn’t care because I was used to it. I thought all families were like that, and it was a surprise to me when I eventually started to visit my friends’ houses and discovered that they had their own bedrooms and their own beds. It looked incredibly luxurious to me for anyone to have so much space and privacy, let alone children.
So many of the people who used to come to those Saturday parties are still our family friends today, as well as their children and grandchildren. I remember Mr Buchanan, who used to work for Coca-Cola and brought some sample cans of Tango and Seven-Up to the house for me to taste before they were even launched on the market. I was so excited when the advertisements came out a few months later, knowing that I had tried them before anyone else, boasting about it to everyone at school for days afterwards. Mr Buchanan’s daughter, Verna, became like another sister to me. She had come to England with him but her mum had stayed in Jamaica and so my mum took over the maternal role in England, something she was always very comfortable doing for the children of friends.
My grandmother used to give classical piano lessons in the house. By the time I was four, I could play pretty fluently and music filled every corner of my life even before I realised it. But once I’d discovered pop music all I wanted to do was listen to the radio and sing along to the hits of the day. I started running my own radio station out of the upstairs windows of the house. I would sit by an open window, waiting impatiently until someone came past and then I would shout out to them, begging them to stop and listen while I played them songs, doing introductions just like the disc jockeys I loved so much. Some of them would just laugh and walk on but others would stop and listen for a minute or two, indulging a little girl in her fantasies. I varied my broadcasts between the front window, which overlooked the street, and the back one, which looked out on to a factory where the workers would be coming or going at certain times of the day. I don’t think Mum and Dad ever knew what was going on above their heads.
The seeds of my obsession with music had been sown and were already beginning to sprout, although I didn’t yet have any idea in what direction it would take me. These days, I dare say, even four- and five-year-olds know about The X Factor and other talent shows, and dream of being discovered by Simon Cowell or Louis Walsh, or being mentored by Cheryl Cole or Dannii Minogue, but those were less knowing times for a child to be growing up in. Were we ignorant, or just more innocent? Maybe a bit of both.
COLD, DARK MORNINGS IN ST PANCRAS
The clinic I go to is beside the railway lines, just behind St Pancras Station, one of the great historical sites of London and the location for films as varied as the Harry Potter films and the Spice Girls’ first music video, for their hit ‘Wannabe’. Each day, hundreds of workmen arrive there to continue the task of restoring the station to its former Victorian glories now that it has become the home of London’s high-speed rail service to Europe. Their labours fill the air with dust and line the roadsides with screens and hoardings, masking the scale of the project as the rest of the city’s life goes on all around them.
If the morning is cold and dark when I arrive at the clinic, I will invite the other patients to wait with me in my car until the staff open the doors and let us into the welcome warmth of the ward. As we sit there chatting, some of them tell me they’re surprised to find that I drive myself to the clinic. Hardly any of the other patients drive any more, but, even if it is a struggle, I prefer to live a normal life whenever the exhaustion isn’t too overwhelming. Besides, if I didn’t have the car, I would find it very hard to get to all the places I want to get to in the few hours I have left each day. To me it seems that some people give up on life very easily.
A lot of us regulars in the ward are from Caribbean or Asian backgrounds. I don’t know why that is – maybe it has something to do with our diets, or maybe it’s a secret buried in our DNA, a ticking time bomb of chemicals waiting to go off and derail our lives from the moment we are born. But, of course, whatever their ethnic background, for wives, daughters, mothers and grandmothers, there is never a good time to be struck down like this.
It may be a bit of a generalisation, but I have found that people from the West Indies have a lot of funny habits and beliefs, some of which we carry with us wherever we go in the world. For a start, we don’t like going to see the doctor to get things checked out, even when we are feeling terrible and could obviously do with some help. Maybe it’s