I was eleven, a new boy in a class of hostile, suspicious pupils. I wanted to have a black friend because I only knew white kids, but the only black boy in the entire school was a geek called Jeremy who longed to be a Young Conservative. English children of the period knew no one other than those like themselves. It would have been exciting to make friends with kids from different cultures, just to vary the stultifying predictability of daily suburban life, but in Greenwich there was as much chance of sighting a Martian. From what we learned in books and films, dark-skinned races seemed less emotionally guarded than we were, less arrogantly convinced that they were born to govern the world, plus they ate exotic food, dishes that came seasoned with spices instead of being smothered in rubbery gravy. Mrs Harper, the woman in the fish shop, said she knew a Caribbean lady, but this friendship was so jealously guarded that no one ever got to meet her. We finally decided that Mrs Harper had invented her to sound more interesting.
