I often criticise this nation and sometimes despair of it. That causes unreasonable fury among those who want Britons of colour to be grateful and silent. Not going to do that. But here, today, I pay heartfelt tribute to London and to England where I have lived for half a century.
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.
On the 15 April, 1988, my very English Mr Brown, gave me back my life. I was broken after my first husband, a fellow Ugandan Asian, had walked out on me and my young son. I was 39.
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.
My youngest grandson was also born in April. He’s a lot like my daughter in temperament – funny, kind, alert and determined. He and his older siblings are half English. England is now in my bloodline and in my heart. I could never have predicted that back in the 70s when I landed on these shores.
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.
My love of Shakespeare led me to one of the most unforgettable periods of my life. It came out of the blue. In 2004, Dominic Cooke, the then deputy artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, invited me to write and perform a one-woman show.
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
Read MoreI 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.
St Paul’s Cathedral was an example of “Indo-Saracenic style refined by Christians”, according to the son of its architect Sir Christopher Wren; Brookwood Cemetery, in Woking, where I want to be buried, has graves of Muslim soldiers, Turkish airmen and others, including upper-class Victorian converts to Islam. English Theatre, clothes, food, art have always been international. Imperial, post-imperial and modern England has long been drawn to “foreign” cultures and peoples.
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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