‘All right. I was coming out of school one day and this woman, a bit older than me, short dreads, wax-backed skirt, like proper in touch with the heritage, like the sort of thing my mum would be ashamed of, she was standing there trying to hand out this magazine to the girls as we were leaving. The white girls were giving her the eye, like, brushing her off, but she looked straight at me and said, “There’s something in here for you, little sister.” An it was called that. SisterHood, it was called. The main photo was of this girl a bit older than me, hair wrap like woah and some really awesome lipstick. I’d never seen a magazine with a black woman on the cover before. I was all suspicious, like, what, is it free then, and she just smiled at me. She was like, “We had extra on the print run. I wanted to get it to people who need to read it. No charge for you, little one.” And then she turned it over, pulled up the back page and pointed to an address, in tiny print. She told me if I liked what I read, they was just round the corner, and that I could drop in any time. Then she said, “We could do with smart young voices,” and that appealed to me, right, cos I was a cocky-as-fuck teenager, but no one ever wanted to listen to my smart young voice, huh? So maybe I was already predisposed to like it, I dunno. That was Constance. She became more like a mum to me than my real mum. Anyway, I took the magazine, didn’t I. And it was like nothing I’d read before. I mean, it was mad. It had, like, hair tips and articles on feminism and racism and interviews with a feminist rapper and, like, some really shitty poetry about wombs. But it was speaking to me, you know, like nobody really does. Nobody really speaks to little black girls as themselves. The school, when they talk to you, they talk to you like you’re an old rich white guy. The telly, when it talks to you, and the teenie magazines, they’re saying you should be white and blonde and skinny. So I spent the whole night reading this magazine, like, three times, even the crazy poems – I could probably still recite them for you, yeah! The ink rubbing off on my thumbs; couldn’t get my hands proper clean the next day. And then after school, I found myself knocking on their door. Fourteen years old, still in my uniform and clutching my copy of SisterHood under my arm, all, like, hellooo – and it was like a world I’d never been to before. Five women in this big sunny upstairs room, and a couple of them looked well cool, like, cool hoops and trainers. Natural hair, no weaves. Lot of wraps. It was basically my mum’s nightmare – she was well into us trying to look as white as possible, and she always turned her face away from anyone who looked like that if she saw them in the street. Muslims and loo-na-tics, she’d call ’em. We’re Jamaican, she’d say; we’re Jamaican and we’re Christian and we’re British. But I was into it. If this was where they made SisterHood, then this was where I wanted to be. Sorry, mate. God, I’m running right off at the mouth, ain’t I?’