“Why is your sister brown?” a neighbor boy asked. “She fell in a bucket of paint,” was my kid brother’s innocent reply. The question was understandable. I was the sister, the only dark-skinned child among seven other kids in our family, who lived in a country town in England’s East Midlands, where cloud cover prevented even a hint of a tan. For a time, people of color were a rarity in the British Isles in other than the major port cities. That changed in 1948 when the Empire Windrush, loaded with smiling dark-skinned men, sailed into London’s Tilbury Dock. Invited by the British Government, they filled a chronic labor shortage following devastating losses of young men in World War II. People knew so little about Britain’s racial history that this large influx from the Caribbean was generally credited with the largest growth of a post-war Black British population. To fill the void of the country’s racial history, British academics Dr. Chamion Caballero, who’s mixed race, and Peter J. Aspinall undertook a research project on people of color in 20th-century Britain. Their research became the foundation for the critically acclaimed BBC2 series in 2011: “Mixed Britannia.” This series inspired Dr. Lucy Bland, Professor of Social and Cultural History at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, to delve into the history of children born during and after World War II, whose fathers were Black American GIs and whose mothers were white British women who offered the soldiers a bit more than tea and crumpets. Professor Bland exposed a little-known and often-painful part of Britain’s past. She discovered there were more than 2,000 wartime mixed-race children in Britain before the Windrush sailed into London, mostly unknown or unacknowledged. Professor Bland interviewed more than 40 of these children, now in their 70s, and her resulting research cumulated in a book: “Britain’s ‘Brown Babies.’ ” The African American press coined the term “brown babies” in its human-interest stories, describing the plight of these war babies. Citing segregation laws in the U.S., the American military banned Black soldiers from marrying their British sweethearts. The British Government was wary of interracial relationships and did nothing to challenge that order. Nearly half of those interviewed by Professor Bland described ostracism and prejudice in England so severe that their mothers, unable to cope, abandoned them to children’s homes. I was fortunate. My Irish mother kept me. Fiercely private, for reasons I discover as an adult, she shared a rare story. I had double pneumonia as an infant, she said. She lay with me by the coal fire, the only heat source in our tiny house. Mother tucked me into a make-shift bassinet – a dresser drawer – a tiny corner of a newspaper placed over my mouth so she could see my breath rise and fall. If you think being mixed-race in a predominantly white community was confusing, add being half Irish in England. Young Irishmen, curly-haired and pale, fresh off the boat in Liverpool, often lodged in our small house. I’d lay awake upstairs listening as they’d bang away on our old piano and blow a tune on a penny whistle. Their mournful lament, “If you ever go across the sea to Ireland” – words from “Galway Bay” – sung along with my Irish stepfather, their voices lubricated by an earlier trip to the pub, would filter up the stairs. My mixed-race identity and my Irishness brought me into contact with Dr. Chamion Caballero and Peter J. Aspinall, who took the archival history they painstakingly accumulated and developed a permanent digital museum and archive that shares the history of racial mixing in Britain from 1900 to 2021, now known as the Mixed Museum. In July 2019, the Mixed Museum partnered with the Association of Mixed Race Irish (AMRI) on an exhibition designed “… to shine a light on an often obscured dimension of the Irish diaspora.” Who knew mixed-race Irish have been living in Britain since the 1700s? Through the wonders of Zoom, Dr. Caballero, the Mixed Museum director, held a virtual launch from London in September, of a second digital exhibition: “Britain’s Brown Babies,” taking its title and content from Dr. Bland’s book. Dr. Caballero was joined by Dr. Bland and others, including SuAndi, a distinguished poet and educator; Phil Mullen, a PhD candidate and researcher at Trinity College in Dublin; as well as “brown babies” David, Arlene, Terry and me. I’m immensely grateful to Dr. Caballero, Dr. Bland and their associates for preserving this history. Growing up in a white family, in a predominantly white country, I felt both conspicuous and invisible. I’ve embraced the conspicuous part, and thanks to these dedicated British academics, I, and other mixed-race people, are no longer invisible. For more information, visit: https://www.mixedmuseum.org.uk. Clips from the virtual launch are included in the museum’s responses section: https://mixedmuseum.org.uk/brown-babies/responses/.

"Are you interested in a writers’ group?” The words were scrawled on a sheet of paper circulating at a local community college writing class. I took a quick breath and signed my name. That reluctant act introduced me to six lovers of the written word. Our informal group began in 2006 and continues to this day. ​ None of us considered ourselves writers. But we were enthusiastic, and after seven years of sharing our stories, we combined a selection into an anthology, printed for personal use, entitled “Coffee, Tea and Sake.” ​ The title paid homage to the three cultures of our group: four Americans (Bill, Barbara, Donna and Dick), two English (another Bill and me) and one Japanese member (Miyoko). On the back cover of the anthology is a group photograph taken on my deck. Sadly, the lovely lady on my left is no longer with us. Donna, the wife of English Bill, died this year. ​ Donna was a beautiful spirit who grew up in Hagerstown, Indiana, a place she describes that at the time of her youth was “a small town of 1,400 conservative, skeptical people.” I’ve been re-reading our anthology and teared up when I came to one of Donna’s stories: “Flying High.” Donna writes that as a young girl of 10, her father, who fulfilled his dream of learning how to fly, surprises her with an airplane ride. She’s both excited and scared as she sits in the passenger seat while her father hand-cranks the propeller. ​ Donna is certain the plane will take off without him. Sadly, this occurred later when her mother was the passenger. The plane dragged her father down the airstrip until her mother could put on the brake. That wasn’t the end of her father, but it was the end of his enthusiasm for flying. But, Donna writes, her father left her with a respect for a man “who honored his dreams … made those dreams come true … and taught me about flying high with my dreams.” Donna’s husband, Bill, grew up in an English village three miles from Windsor Castle. Villagers could see the Royal Family passing through on their way to Buckingham Palace. “Where the Buses Always Ran On Time” is one of my favorite Bill stories.

You can decide to be happy. I read that. I decided to try it. I awoke one morning. Sat up. Decided to be happy. I smelled coffee. A good start. Jim was up. I tied my robe belt, slipped on my backless slippers, stepped carefully down the two front steps and shuffled the 100 feet up the driveway to the gate to pick up the morning newspaper. I looked right, left, and right again. ​ I shuffled back to the house. Jim was pouring coffee into his Grand Canyon mug with the beautiful bald eagle illustration on one side. I live in fear that I’m going to accidentally break it one day. ​ “No paper,” I said. He looked as if I’d said, “The dog died.” “I’ll call,” I said, and riffled through the drawer for the delivery woman’s number she’d thoughtfully provided. “Penelope,” I said (not her real name). “We don’t have a paper.” ​ “I delivered one,” she said. I could barely hear above the sound of her car engine. “Take another look,” she said. “When I tossed the paper, a gust of wind came up and it traveled a ways.” I relayed the story to Jim. “I doubt it,” he said (Jim doubts everything). “There was no wind.” “I believe her,” I said (Pauline believes everything). ​ I stepped out of the front door and looked around and up. Halfway up the hill facing the house, I saw something white. I called Jim for a second opinion. “Looks like the paper,” he said, “but I can’t climb anymore.” The paper was 30 feet up, caught on the branch of a manzanita bush. I knew I couldn’t manage the climb up, but I could climb down from the upper road. I swapped my slippers for snow boots and tightened my robe belt. ​ I strode to the front gate, turned left and began walking the upper road. Coming toward me, socially distancing the other side of the road, was a man I’d seen around the neighborhood. He nodded a greeting. To his credit, he showed no surprise at seeing a woman of a certain age (beyond that really), hair in disarray, clad in a burgundy chenille robe and snow boots (it’s July and it’s California). ​ I spotted the newspaper and surveyed the situation. The hillside was covered with enough brush to help with my descent. I hesitated. Did I really want to risk life and limb for a newspaper? I did. There are few pleasures more precious to me than a newspaper and coffee in the morning. ​ Slowly, I inched my way down, clutching every twig within reach. I grabbed the newspaper. I could see Jim below standing on the front steps drinking from his Grand Canyon mug. The hill was too steep for me to continue down to where he stood. I turned, carefully. The way up looked more difficult than the way down. I shoved the paper into my robe pocket and grabbed the nearest branch. I climbed a few feet, then stopped. I froze. It froze. I was face to face with a furry grey creature.

I stood with my back to the garage door and watched our travel trailer slowly being driven down the driveway and out of the gate by a lovely couple from Marysville. We were the original owners of the 2005 camper with the menacing name of “Prowler” scrawled in large letters over the face of an amiable tiger. My husband, Jim, was more sorry to see the trailer go than I. He, like his late father, has difficulty letting go of things. I once told my mother-in-law she and I need never worry that our husbands would one day trade us in. Jim and his family have a long and loving relationship with camping trailers. Many summers they’d haul a tiny Aristocrat trailer up winding Highway 50 to an open field in Hope Valley. The men (my husband, his father and grandfather), would go fishing in the trout streams, and the women (my mother-in-law and I) would loll outside the trailer waiting for the men to return and for the fish fry to begin. Jim’s French Basque grandfather, lovingly called “Poppa” by all, emigrated from the Pyrenees at age 16. He introduced the family to the camping area having driven herds of sheep from Clements in the San Joaquin Valley to grazing land in the foothills. My early experience with travel trailers was different. My first home as a teenage mother and wife – in that order – was a caravan, the British word for travel trailers that didn’t travel. They were mostly inexpensive sea-side holiday lodging rented by young families. Or, as in my first home, parked in a lido in Wilby, a village a few miles from my mother’s house. Lidos, recreational areas with outdoor swimming pools, sprung up in the 1930s. In my schooldays, a visit to Wilby Lido was the closest I came to a holiday by the sea. I'd jump on the green double-decker bus, my hand-me-down swimsuit rolled up in a small towel, for the three-mile ride down Northampton Road to the village. My friends and I would spend all day jumping in and out of the pool – nobody knew how to swim – then sprawl on the grass sucking on an ice lolly, one of the few items from the concession stand we could afford to buy. My first husband and I stayed on the grounds of the former lido during a winter that was one of the most bitterly cold on record. It was dubbed “The Big Freeze.” The snow was so deep in parts of England that newspapers pictured milkmen delivering milk on snow skis. Our little caravan had no running water. In the freezing cold, I lugged buckets of water from a communal tap to heat on the tiny stove for bathing, cooking and washing cloth nappies for my 4-month-old baby. Sounds miserable. But I had a place of my own and was happy. When I said caravans didn’t travel, I overlooked those that were home to the Romani people. I’ve recently learned that “gypsy” – a term I grew up using – is an ethnic slur. I didn’t know back then. I know now. Romani people would appear in our street from time to time. The women wore their long brown hair in plaits, pinned on top of their heads. They carried baskets filled with clothes pegs, ribbons and other odds and ends. The men walked alongside a horse and cart and shouted out for donations of scrap metal. Their skin was almost as brown as mine. They lived in clusters on farmers’ fields and as such were “different,” subject to bigotry and stereotyping. I believed the ugly tales told about the Romani – that they were thieves, and when they weren’t stealing your stuff, they would steal your children. With eight squabbling children, I honestly didn’t think my mum would have cared if a couple of kids had gone missing. While I was sucking my ice lolly, neighbors who had more money headed to Butlin’s Holiday Camp, a resort in Lincolnshire. I wouldn’t have been so envious had I been able to time travel forward to 2015 and read the hilariously grouchy book, “The Road to Little Dribbling.” The author, Bill Bryson, an American living in England, describes Butlin’s Holiday Camp, the place I yearned to visit. Bryson writes: “It seemed extraordinary to me – barely within the limits of credibility – that people paid to go to them. Campers were awakened by a loudspeaker in their room, which they could neither turn off nor turn down, summoned to meals in communal dining halls, harried into taking part in humiliating beauty contests and other competitions, and ordered back to their chalets to be locked in for the night at 11 p.m. Butlin’s had invented the prisoner-of-war camp as holiday, and, this being Britain, people loved it.” I told you it was a grouchy book.

The recent brutal, callous killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, by a white police officer who swore to protect and serve, spurred me to examine my own perceptions of policing. I am biracial, live in California and grew up in England. I have a positive opinion of British policing, formed by television and personal experiences. Along with millions of other Brits, I was once glued to the telly on a Saturday night waiting for the familiar greeting, “Evening All,” from the country’s beloved police constable, George Dixon, star of the police drama Dixon of Dock Green. This London Bobby knew the area and the people where he patrolled and solved crimes with compassion and humor. I wandered the streets as a young child and often got lost. A Bobby on patrol could be relied on to take me by the hand and lead me home. The house he led me to was often in turmoil. During one frightening event, I was old enough to sprint across the street to the red phone box on the corner. I dialed 999 – Britain’s emergency number. A policeman arrived and calmly settled the disturbance. For my trouble, I got a clip round the ear from my mum. To my Irish mother, the police were not your friend. She was born just after the Irish War of Independence. The stories of police atrocities during the conflict had never left her. So, there we were, mother and I. She, fearful of the police based on her experiences. And I, viewing them as protectors based on mine. My positive opinion of police, however, did not stretch across the Atlantic. In my teens, scenes of civil unrest in America beamed across the pond – protesters fleeing in terror as police drew guns and lobbed tear gas. These violent confrontations have continued. Why hasn’t anything changed? Is anybody even trying? Then I remembered an article entitled: “U.S. law enforcement gets lessons from U.K.” by Al Baker, New York Times reporter. Baker’s article chronicled the visit of a contingent of American police officials who traveled to Tulliallan, Scotland, in 2015, to observe their policing methods. Regarding the use of deadly force, Al Baker wrote, the Scots “would shudder to see such words in their policies. Above all, a Scottish constable’s measure of success is whether everyone involved, not just the police officers, survives the confrontation.” British professional policing, founded in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel (hence the term Bobby), was established on the principle of “policing by consent.” Scottish police do not carry firearms. They defend themselves against machetes, swords and petrol bombs by focusing on de-escalation, and then, if they must, use batons, handcuffs and pepper spray. Wrote Blake, “For them, calming a situation through talk, rather than escalating it with weapons, is an essential policing tool … constables live where they work and embrace their role as ‘guardians of the community, not warriors from a policing subculture.’” There are obvious cultural differences between Scotland and the United States. Handguns are mostly banned in the U.K., and more than 300 million guns are in circulation in America. Growing up, the only guns I saw, besides my brothers’ BB guns, were a neighbor’s hunting rifle. Graham would roar down the street on his gold motorcycle, rifle case strapped across his back, on his way to poach something for dinner. “The kids wouldn’t recognize meat if it wasn’t a rabbit,” my mother used to say. Despite the cultural differences, American police officials thought they could learn some things. Among them was Mike Chitwood, then police chief in Daytona Beach, Florida, who understood that training is key. Chief Chitwood noted that officers should “take a step back and talk to people” instead of following the misguided notion, drilled into new officers, that it is “better to be judged by 12 than carried by six.” I wondered how Mike Chitwood was doing today. I sent him an email asking if he was able to incorporate any of the Scottish police methods. He’s now sheriff of Volusia County, Florida, and I expected a response from an assistant. Instead, I got a personal call from the sheriff. I couldn’t have been more surprised had the governor phoned. Sheriff Chitwood talked freely about his Scottish trip. He used terms like “critical decision making,” “de-escalation,” “sanctity of life” – of the need to bring in mental health professionals – working with advocacy groups. Sheriff Chitwood admitted that when he arrived in Volusia County, his relationship with the NAACP and local black clergy was contentious. They were able to work together and both groups enthusiastically endorsed him for sheriff. Anguished voices are calling for radical changes to policing in America. Al Baker’s column and Sheriff Chitwood show us how we begin to make this possible.