Blue Eyes

As an olive-skinned girl growing up in a solidly white world, I hated my dark brown eyes. I wanted blue ones like my purely English cousins and the neighbourhood kids. One of my early memories is of my Mum telling me how much she hated taking me for my check-ups as a baby. Apparently, the other babes were plump, pale and rosy-cheeked, happy little cherubs. In contrast, I was prematurely scrawny, dark and had a shock of black hair, Mohican style. I also screamed. A lot.

My Mum was my world for the first five years of my life. I don't remember having a great deal of interaction with my much older brothers and sister and my Dad worked long hours so was rarely home. I explored our little corner of the world, accompanying Mum to her cleaning jobs in some of the grand homes that never really seemed to need much cleaning. I would wander around imagining what it would be like to live in such places, like a princess in a castle. Sometimes I would take something insignificant as a souvenir, a silver spoon, a pepper pot, nothing that would really be missed.

My favourite job was at the country house and dining club run by two delightfully eccentric and regularly drunk actors, retired from a long engagement on a popular radio soap opera. Mum prepared vegetables in the farmhouse kitchen while I roamed the gardens, accompanied by their gentle black labrador. The gardener was infinitely patient, listening to and answering my incessant barrage of questions. I should really be much more proficient at growing vegetables but that skill continues to elude me.

We would walk home across the fields that have long been replaced with 'modern' housing. I lost a necklace on one of these journeys, just a piece of costume jewellery I was obsessed with. We went back to search for it but never found it and I cried. Mum sat on the ground next to me and told me it had probably been found by a mother rabbit who would use it to decorate a Christmas tree for her rabbit babies. I was four so of course I believed her. Even now, I'd like to think it was true.

The year I started school, Mum had saved her wages and took me shopping to a posh store where I got to choose some very pretty dresses and cardigans. I thought they would make me blend in with the blonde, blue-eyed kids who

crowded the playground on my first day. I hadn't realised there were so many other children in the world. Instead of blending in, I stood out with my fancy clothes, dark braids and brown eyes. At first I hated being stared at, but then, when I found out they thought I was some kind of exotic creature from another country, I started to revel in it. That is how my first character was created as I discovered I could hide my perceived differences by actually embracing them and becoming what other people saw. I channelled my mediterranean and Balkan ancestors, and the desire for a pair of blue eyes diminished.