I knew I couldn’t go back. We’d moved to England when I was twelve, and I knew, because of the dustbin of rubbish true facts in the back of my head, that I could not live with Granny Adair. I’d have to earn my keep there by picking up stones in her tiny field of sugarcane, or herding her goats. At best, taking in washing, which in the Jamaica bush means scrubbing sheets in the river and walking six miles with a laundry basket on your head. Three years in London had ruined me for such a life. No, if I am honest, it was Mummy’s fault, with music lessons and library books and her pretty tailored suits. Even in our Jamaican bungalow we’d had a piano and a veranda and a little garden of English roses. And we left Kingston because Mummy was afraid of the workers’ strikes and the Caribbean riots. Daddy grew up in the bush, but he went to sea when he was fifteen.

At fifteen! My age in November 1940. You can do that if you’re a boy—even a West Indian boy can do that. The rules won’t let any kind of girl do that. And I was a West Indian girl.

What can a West Indian girl do at fifteen?

A girl whose parents are both killed by enemy action and who burns, burns to fight back? A schoolgirl with no skills who stands in the street watching the vapor trails of the fighter planes and wants to be up there with them so badly that it hurts?

Some of those children on the City of Benares were rescued from the sea. They were the ones who hung on, who fought to stay awake in the cold water and who wouldn’t let go of the wreckage that kept them afloat.

I am like those children. Not the ones who sank. The ones who fought.

Rules are made to be broken, Mummy always told me. She believed that you can get away with breaking rules if you are polite about it, and underneath her cultured British charm my mother was the boldest of rule-breakers, a white Englishwoman who married a black Jamaican. But she was carefully polite. That’s how she got around our landladies in London, with harp music and flute music and smart, stylish hats. Mummy had always been there to protect me from the rules. Now I was going to have to break them on my own.