'I'm going to tell it like it is. I hope you can take it as it is.'

Malcolm X

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

My first experience of racism is etched in my mind. Every now and then I get a flashback to that event. Not to how I was feeling but to the look of humiliation and powerlessness on my mother's face.

I was about five years of age, and we were living in Morecambe, Lancashire and it was the late 1970s. My mother had taken me to a fete of some kind. I did notice that we seemed to be the only Black people there.

It started out as a nice day, but as I've come to learn over the years of living in Britain, rain and racism appear out of nowhere and happen frequently. Suddenly it began to pour with rain. People started to take cover in the many tents. As my mum took me to various tents, they all said the same thing: 'There's no room,' even though there clearly was in some of them. Then some of the tents began to close their flaps.

The final tent we went to had one white male occupant. My mum asked for shelter. She was met with hostility, aggression and a clear refusal of entry. The tent flap closed. So we stepped out of the tent and there we were, stood in the middle of the fete getting soaking wet: all tents closed to us and some of the occupants staring at us in silence. As we stood alone getting soaked through, I looked at my mum's face. I'll never forget it. It was one of pain, humiliation and helplessness. I knew what had happened to us had happened because we were Black. That was my first experience of racism before I even knew the word and what it meant.

What I didn't know was that I would continue to experience it throughout my life, and what I realise now, at the age of fifty, is that even if I live another fifty years, I will probably die knowing it hasn't been eradicated.

Now for those of you who are white and have just read that story, I'm sure that some of you are thinking: 'Maybe all the tents were full,' or 'maybe it was another reason'. Perhaps some of you are even thinking: 'I'm sure it wasn't racism, maybe it was something else.' Undoubtedly some of you simply don't believe the experience related to race at all and think I'm imagining it. Some of you may even be feeling a bit triggered by the story.

Your reaction - if that was what you were thinking - is not a surprise to me at all. Part of the problem of living and dealing with racism in this country, and perhaps in the Western world, is that our experiences as people of colour are very often not believed. It adds insult to injury and it also perpetuates the issue of racism, because if you don't believe it is happening, you won't address it.

Life continued after that day and so did the racism. Despite all of the racism I have faced and endured, I went on to become a barrister educated to master's level as well as a screenwriter. So, despite incidences of racism I went on to succeed, but it has been a marring experience.

At primary school I took the eleven plus and apparently passed with flying colours. The result of passing the eleven plus is that you are supposed to be offered a place at grammar school. I wasn't offered this. The education authorities acknowledged I had done well, passed even, but they refused to give me the grammar school option. My mum kept me out of secondary school because she wasn't going to give in, but the authorities then threatened her with prosecution for not sending me to school. That is the power of racism at play; you can engage in it and use the power of the state and its institutions to support you.

At most of the schools I attended there was racial abuse, harassment and racial jokes. I remember at a school in Blackpool when I was about fourteen years of age, the history teacher was absent for some reason. A number of students began making racist jokes. The whole class appeared to be entertained at my expense. The flurry of racist jokes kept coming until I was in tears. It was painful and humiliating and there was no escape.

Students in the education system were not the only problem. Certain teachers did not believe I was intelligent and one insinuated I had cheated (I hadn't) without any evidence, because they couldn't accept that I had scored that highly in an exam.

Initially I didn't do very well at school as I'd given up on making an effort and preferred to party, so I spent my teenage years and early twenties doing low-paid jobs such as waitressing, shop work, bar work and cleaning. The casual and overt racism from staff, managers and customers was - in certain employs - frequent.

While working as a waitress at a hotel in Blackpool, one manager said to a hotel guest in my presence: 'If you go on any more holidays, you'll come back looking like a bloody ni**er.' At which they both laughed. At the same hotel, a chef shouted at me, 'The best ni**er I ever saw was a dead one.' At twenty years old, this was the climate I worked in. Thankfully I was able to take them to a tribunal and win. It was evident that I was also held to a different standard. At the employment tribunal my former manager complained that I was 'unreliable', lamenting my absences. This appeared to stump the tribunal because I'd only been absent two days in two years.

'Why are you telling me this?' I hear you ask. Well, I understand you want to write scripts. The chances are you may even have a Black character. Are you aware of the Black experience? I mean really aware? I'm telling you this because it is my experience as a Black woman in the not so United Kingdom and because, undoubtedly in one form or another, my experience has been replicated across the country. I say from the outset that it is obvious that I cannot speak for every Black person. We have had different experiences and we will obviously have different views as to how to deal with our experiences of racism. I'm putting forward my experiences as a Black woman in Britain and to some extent in the United States. I'm also going to be referring to data and asking you, the reader, questions.

I'm telling you this because it is the background as to how this book came about and I'm telling you this so you can get a flavour of the Black experience so what you write will hopefully have some authenticity.

So, having done low-paid, thankless jobs for a few years I became sick and tired of it and decided to change my life. I decided to join Her Majesty's Armed Forces, as you do! In order to determine your corps you have to take the military entrance test. The higher you score, the more corps options you have. I scored fairly highly which seemed surprising to some. This meant that I had a decent pick of the corps I wanted to join. However, my height excluded me from some and not being third generation British, I was excluded from Army Intelligence.

In any event I ended up as a gunner in the Royal Artillery. I won't relive my whole time in the army, but needless to say there was plenty of racism. A substantial amount of the racism was blatant. There were also death threats and threats of physical violence. There was name-calling while on parade, which was not challenged by the senior ranks. In one barracks where I stayed overnight, there were swastikas on the lockers, along with daubs and scrawls of: 'There ain't no Black in the Union Jack'. That was my reality of life in the army. I'm grateful that it wasn't an everyday experience and I was not subjected to racial violence, but I know that for other Black soldiers their experience was much worse.

I will say that there were some very decent men and women in the army who would not tolerate that behaviour, but in my experience they were in the minority. I'm not saying that every soldier I came across was a racist; what I am saying is that there were a significant number who were. There were also those who would react with hostility when the issue of racism was raised.

That leads me to my script and how this book came about. I wrote a television pilot about a Black woman in the army. There is a scene where the protagonist suffers racist abuse on a number of occasions. On one occasion everyone stands around either ignoring it or laughing. Later on she is seriously assaulted. I'd sent the script to a script editor, and he wrote the following note:

'Everyone sees what Morgan does to her prior to the attack yet no one really bats an eyelid beyond the bombardier.'

I sat with that script note for days. It irked me and it perturbed me and I decided I couldn't let the comment slide because it seemed to me that he was disbelieving my lived experience, and, in a nutshell, he was saying don't make white people feel uncomfortable. If you do, the entertainment gates will be closed to you. And herein lies the problem: many of the guardians of the entertainment gates are not willing to honestly and accurately reflect the minority experience.

I discussed this issue...