Heart and Soul - The Emotional Autobiography of Melissa Bell, Alexandra Burke's Mother. Melissa Bell

was always to be found in the annex, working. He was passionate about the way he turned out the clothes and justly proud of the way he presented them back to their owners. I still think of him whenever I pass a dry cleaner’s and catch the familiar scent of the chemicals and solvents they use. He always smelled like that when he came back from work, as if he had been personally cleaned and pressed.

      Being surrounded by older relatives and listening to them talk and reminisce about the past, I began to learn more about my family history. Dad’s mother had come to Jamaica from India when she was young. I guess they must have been a trading family, or maybe they came as indentured servants after slavery was abolished. Dad always told us that his mother was stunningly beautiful and that all the local men wanted to marry her.

      ‘There were a lot of people who were jealous of your grandfather when she chose him from among all her suitors,’ he would tell me. ‘Some jealous person decided that if they couldn’t have her no one would. So they put poison in her food and she died. After that my father left Jamaica and went to live in Cuba.’

      To a young girl’s ears, it seemed a sad but romantic story. My grandmother was only 33 years old when she died, but she had already had three children. My father, his brother and his sister were then brought up by their maternal grandparents on the Indian side of the family when their father left for Cuba. It wasn’t unusual in the Caribbean for the grandparents to play a major role in bringing up children while the parents went off to be the breadwinners for the whole family. Maybe it was memories of what his grandparents had done for him that was part of the reason why Dad was so supportive of me when I was later left on my own with my four kids.

      I remember meeting his Indian grandmother, who didn’t die until she was 105 and seemed to me to be the oldest person in the world. A lot of the members of Dad’s family lived to fabulously great ages. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why some people are chosen to live two or even three times as long as others.