I grew up on the outskirts of East London, meaning that I was pretty much the only person of colour in my primary school when I started. Children were okay and there were no issues at first. In the playground we had a typical sand and water play pit thing. In my first week my mother had to come and pick me up early – the other children in my class had put me in the water pit to try and ‘clean me’. Most had been told by their parents not to play with anything ‘dirty’ – you can see where this is going.

After much discussion with children and some confused parents it transpired that they all really liked me and desperately wanted to be friends but didn’t want to get in trouble because they thought I was dirty. They had never seen anyone my colour before and assumed that’s what it was. This happened in 1999, which isn’t that long ago – it didn’t even happen in a small town! It happened about 15 minutes away from Stratford, London!

Looking back, the school handled the incident well and introduced a travel bear called ‘Journey’ that went on holidays with everyone, they also gave us an instant camera too. When we got back from holiday we were encouraged to tell everyone what ‘Journey’ had seen, talk about the people, the food and languages. Most of us went to the same secondary school and would often get into arguments with people from other primary schools who were ignorant because we just couldn’t understand it.