Notting Hill Girl

My life started on 3rd January 1968 at 7 am. I was born in Princess Louise's Hospital, in a part of London called Ladbroke Grove. My proud parents were called Patricia and Cornelius.
It was one of the worst winters on record. Ironically the weather conditions actually saved my life as we left the nursing home. My mum was a pill head on prescription drugs, uppers, black bombers and valium. Coming out the hospital worse for wear on drugs, she dropped me. Thank God the snow was nearly three feet high and at 12 days old I had a soft landing. My dad often told me the story, years later, when he was drunk.
'My snow baby,' he would laugh.
Well, to start writing this book I suspect I'll have to go back a bit, to before I was even born. To tell the truth, I don't really know everything about my mum and dad as they were then, but I'll tell you what I've been told. It starts like this: It was in the 60's. My dad was a young black man who had been at sea for about ten years since he had left Jamaica. He was born there 4th April 1936, and his mother died giving birth to him. The only son of a family of six, he lived with his five sisters, and was raised mainly by the two older girls. When he was about ten he started to misbehave real bad. His sisters were unable to cope with him, so he got sent to a reform school called, 'Alpha Boys School', in Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. There, nuns brought him up.
At around sixteen he joined the navy and spent about ten years at sea, sailing all around the world. That's how Dad ended up in England, in 1956.
He finished up in London, in Ladbroke Grove, where a large immigrant population had already settled. Dad got a room in a house just off the Grove, in Bassett Road. This is the house where he met my mum, who at the time was also a lodger in another room.
My mum, well that's a book in itself; she was a young white girl, from a good big Irish family. She had seven sisters and four brothers. I suppose in them days they would have said she had gone wild going with black men, but I would say, far from it, she was just unlucky in love. Anyway, for some strange reason she had also ended up living alone in a room in that house in Bassett Road. Probably they lived together in that house because in those days in many areas there were signs saying, 'To let. No blacks, no Irish and no dogs'.
At that time, my mum had a boyfriend, and as the story goes, this boyfriend was not a very nice guy. He used to beat my mum when things weren't going his way. After each fight when he went out, my dad would hear my mum crying and go to her room to console her.

Maybe it was inevitable that my dad and mum would eventually get involved with each other. But at first my mum still stayed with this boyfriend and became pregnant. This didn't stop her boyfriend from beating her, until one day, my dad hearing my mother getting hit through the walls, decided he had had enough and put an end to it. Dad beat the boyfriend up bad real bad and threw him out the front door into the street. It must have been a vicious beating because nobody ever saw this man again. He just vanished off the face of the earth.
At this stage my mum was about seven months pregnant, but it was my dad now who took care of her and the baby Alexandra, who was born on the 21st August 1966.
My father now became, to all intents and purposes, Alexandra's father and although my half sister now knows otherwise, she still calls him dad to this very day. By the time I was born, my mum, dad and Alexandra, then aged three, were an established family.