2/15/2024 0 Comments Colour me mine![]() And there, in my early 20s, I asked more stridently: “What in God’s name is a Black woman doing here? What am I to do with all this? Why me?” Back then, everything important seemed to be going on elsewhere. At 16, I pressed the living daylights out of my hair and learned to manage a discordant shame. At 10 years old, I hid my difference with style, a loud voice and a sense of fun, just about carrying it off. It was always an anomaly to me or, more accurately, I was an anomaly to it. A place that at one time had seemed to me, well, pointless. ![]() Rather, my hometown is that crystalised epitome of the Victorian seaside town, with its seasonal tide of visitors washing in and out, confuddling any sense of an identifiable culture. Not exactly the welcome-in the-hillside Wales, nor the poverty-stricken scar of industrial Wales not the Welsh-speaking Wales that Owain Glyndwr fought for, not even a place with the distinctive accent of the bustling southern urban centres. It’s a place where the seagulls and the thrum of the waves sing a fanciful reprieve before the serious mountains that rise up into wild Wales. This is a town that has ultimately morphed into the perfect retirement spot, a promenade full of white-haireds, sitting on the death benches that memorialise those who came before them. The town offered them, among many pleasures, N-word minstrels and other curiosities in en-plein-air concerts in Happy Valley and in its various indoor theatre halls. A town that once attracted the Victorian and Edwardian monied classes and, later, in droves, factory workers from the northern towns with their newfound leisure time, stepping off the steamers on to the longest pier in Wales. A pastel arc of holiday hotels hugs the shoreline in the bay between two slumbering headlands. ![]() I grew up in the 1960s in Llandudno in North Wales, a small seaside town that everyone from the northwest has either been to, or will come to, for a day out at least once. This may be a known story by now, the story of rural assimilation, mixed-race psychic angst and adaptation, but in fact the story was never about me, or my escape from being me. She provided me with a lot of comfort in my small girl days, an escape from an odd reality. Tessa was blonde and white and lovely, and she lived somewhere in my dreamscape. Suspended on a faultline of creative adaptation, I invented Tessa. I often felt just too big for my world, out of place. If only my hair was straight, if only my bum was flatter, if only our house was ordinary, if only mum didn’t speak Welsh, if only dad could settle in Wales, if only I lived somewhere else, anywhere, anywhere but here. Looking back, a good deal of my younger years seemed to be perched somewhere between if only and my fate.
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