ABSTRACT
I was born on an island in the Indian Ocean and lived for the first four months of my life two hundred yards from the beach in a house at Biet el Ras in Zanzibar.
When my mother and I arrived in England on Christmas Eve, 1954, we flew into Blackpool Airport. One grandmother had waved good-bye with the sound of the warm sea around her; another welcomed me to her seaside home in the chilly north of England.
