But when it came to plucking and scorching chickens, Mr Adebisi, who we loved, sometimes distracted us from the smell by giving us the raw chicken legs to pull. You pulled the strings and the claws moved. You could chase people around with them and scratch their eyes out. Even the nasty ones would run, it was really satisfying.

But there we were in the kitchen, doing the peeling and playing our stupid game – one by one as people came in, carving the shapes of their heads and showing each other, before cutting them in half and dropping them into the bucket.

We were used to Irish people being called Spud, so we changed it and did yams instead of potatoes for the Nigerians after we saw a woman come in with a great big tangle of yam roots on her head. They still had earth on as though you could have turned her upside down and planted her. Some of the women plaited their hair like that in loops and folds, with spikes that stood out to make them look beautiful or scary. But yams were bigger and tougher than potatoes, and that felt right for the people who trooped in to please our dad on the days we had our big parties.

They were all his townspeople, and in London he was the leader of his town. They had ceremonies and meetings and discussed things and took notes and turned it into a big bash that went on late into the night so we could stay up. And the feeling was this was going to be a really big one. So we just kept our heads down and watched.

People were arriving done up in their best clothes. The way they walked in changed – proud, almost dancing, instead of trying to be cramped and invisible alongside English people which they were never good at. The men were wearing agbadas, stiff, patterned robes with matching trousers and long loopy armholes that folded back over their shoulders. Most of them wore cloth hats, flattened over to one side, or stand-up berets with a bobble on top, though some of them, the modern ones, wore English suits with razor-sharp creases and had side partings in their hair. The women were all in high-waisted, wraparound skirts folded over blouses in different patterns, with hairdos or the gele headwraps tied up at all angles off their heads. It was instead of the normal blouses, cardigans and stockings they wore with dark skirts and thick glasses to blend in when we saw them outside.