I often despair at England – but here I got a second chance ...Middle East

For the American-British poet T.S. Eliot, April was the “cruellest month”. For me, an African-Asian Brit, April has often brought sweetness and light. Things happened that that changed my life, brought me joy and wisdom.

Slowly and with superhuman patience, Mr Brown put me back together again and formed a bond with my boy, still strong to this day. We got married in 1990. I thought I was too old to have another child. After two miscarriages, in April 1993, on Easter Sunday, a healthy daughter was born. Later this year, she marries a lovely guy from up north. His family is Catholic. They have embraced her fully.

English literature is the bedrock of my writing. I studied it in Uganda and in Oxford. I performed Shakespeare from the age of 13, memorised the Lake Poets, read all of Charles Dickens, George Elliot, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray, and so on and on. Those books are still on my shelves. Recently, when feeling low-spirited and hopeless about the world we’re in, I began to reread Middlemarch. It’s helping.

They gave me a brilliant writer/director to work with, speech and movement training, much encouragement. I performed the show in Stratford-upon-Avon and at various venues, including the Edinburgh and Bath festivals. Many reviewers were enthralled; a show dramatising a young Ugandan Asian girl’s obsession with the Bard surprised them. I was invited to march through the streets with the great and the good in Stratford and deliver a speech for Shakespeare’s birthday in April.

square SIMON KELNER

Boomers can't be trusted with group chats

I took the show abroad too. Stopped after the 100th performance. I can hardly believe all this happened. It did. In England. But then, as I wrote in my book Exotic England, that nation has been open, curious and adventurous for over four centuries.

Diversity is in England’s DNA and my family is now part of that. As George Orwell wrote in his essay England, Your England: “Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.”

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