83: I remember the first time I saw racism in action…

I remember the first time I saw racism in action - I was barely 7. We had a substitute teacher for our class, a very working class bunch. My then best friend was mixed race, but this had never been something we’d talked about as a class. We just knew that his skin was different to ours and that was okay. But this substitute teacher spent the day calling my friend awful names that he thought he could get away with because we were so young - he kept referring to my friend’s table as the monkeys even though our tables were named after colours. He called him half-caste and said to us girls that our grandparents would be upset if we ever took the boy home. I remember proudly saying that my grandmother liked him, but the teacher laughed and said that she was clearly with “one of them” in the war.