14 

The first time I saw snow I stood, layered in clothing, at the top of the steps of our caravan and surveyed my brilliant world. It was as though the clouds had tumbled out of the sky and covered the earth. I could see across the roofs of all the other caravans in the site at Nigg, across fields – only yesterday thick with heather, broom and gorse – to the rows of houses and blackened buildings of Aberdeen. The view of the city from Nigg was uninterrupted save by a single Norman church. To the right and behind me was yet more heath land; half a mile beyond that the North Sea. On a cloudy day, which this was not, it was hard to tell where the city ended and the sea began, so seamless was the transition from granite cityscape to flinty grey water.

I hadn't seen snow before, but perhaps it was the memory of my mother's retelling of Grimms’ fairy tales, bristling with forests and spired castles; or the pictures on cards sent to us in Sierra Leone at Christmas time: of snowmen, of fat-cheeked Dutch children with strange medieval features throwing snowballs and skating on the canal. I knew what to do. I set off down the five metal steps leading from the caravan.

A narrow path to a sloping driveway led sharply off to the right, down from the plinth of rock and stone upon which the caravan squatted. Overnight flurries of snow, glistening like salt pans, had levelled the land and the opaque expanse looked smooth and secure. From my position on the bottom step, without waiting for my mother and without hesitation, I ran straight out onto it where, for an instant, I pedalled rapidly before plunging through the layers of soft, cool crystals until finally the snow closed over my head. Startled, though unafraid, I opened my eyes. The sun was bright, penetrating the snow; I looked into miles of radiant, white wonderland. It was marshmallow quiet. I felt as though I could swim into it and tried to move. Moments later I felt my mother's groping hands latch onto me from behind.

I trudged through the site in the wake of my mother's footsteps. The snow squeaked beneath our feet as we went past the other caravans to the road, where we searched for our Mini under the snow drifts. From the surface the snow was still glorious, but in my mind the beauty of the world beneath the snow was matchless.

The day after we arrived at Gatwick our mother had bought a yellow Mini and we loaded it onto the train from King's Cross to Perth, where we disembarked and drove the rest of the way to Aberdeen. For the first few weeks of the summer we lived with my grandparents: I shared a bed with my mother in her old bedroom overlooking the stepped gardens behind Gairn Terrace, while my sister bunked with our grandmother and my brother slept on a camp bed.

One morning in the first weeks of August a blue aerogramme arrived. On the front it bore the large diamond-shaped stamps of Sierra Leone; inside our father's sloping hand. He had been arrested on the orders of the junta on 29 July after rumours circulated that he had been raising money to buy arms for the APC. He had not been charged and he didn't know when he would be freed.

As it turned out his spell in detention lasted four months. Years afterwards our father confessed to being baffled by the curious circumstances of his arrest. The envoy sent to Koidu by the NRC to investigate the rumours turned out to be a young man called Colonel Jumu, someone my father had taught at Bo School. Instead of pursuing his inquiries the young colonel tried to persuade our father to give up the APC and join the junta. My father refused. A letter followed reiterating the offer; he ignored it.

Shortly after the encounter with Colonel Jumu our father was arrested and taken to Pademba Road Prison. There a second letter from the NRC hierarchy, which promised him promotion to lieutenant-colonel within a year, was forwarded by some thorough soul to the detainees’ wing of the central prison. From his cell our father penned an uncompromising reply refusing to join an illegal regime.

There were cracks in the NRC leadership, rumours that Colonel Jumu and several cohorts planned to topple Juxon Smith. The British offered to pack Jumu off on a military training course in England, which was soon quietly effected. The commissioner of police, no fan of Juxon Smith himself, had been encouraging the dissidents whilst making efforts to secure his own position. All the while there was no indication that the NRC had any intention of making way for the rightful winners of the election. A newly-appointed council of civilians briefly brought hope that democratic rule was on its way, but time passed and – nothing. William Leigh, who now had a new job on the council, was certain the APC had hidden caches of arms around the country with plans to remove the junta by force if necessary. It could have been either him or Juxon Smith who gave the order to arrest our father.

My mother showed the letter to her parents and my grandfather absorbed the news in the same detached manner he had greeted her return home six years after he had turned his back on her. About a year after we moved to Koidu a package had arrived. It was unsigned and bore no return address, but inside was a copy of the Aberdeen Evening Post. That was the closest my grandfather could bring himself to apologising to his daughter. You'd better get out and find yourself a job then, he observed; his advice was delivered without embroidery, short and to the point, as ever.

Our mother enrolled on a teacher training course at a local college and applied for a grant. With the money left over from our savings she found boarding schools for Sheka and Memuna and paid the first term's fees. One darkening autumn evening our grandfather drove us all out to Drumtochty Castle. The castle was pink, built of rose granite with several impressive turrets and a tower; it lay in a hollow surrounded by thick pine forests. For all the world it looked to me just like the witch's house in Hansel and Gretel.

We led my brother, dry-eyed, innocent of his fate, up to the long attic dormitory with rows of iron beds spread with tartan rugs. A boy whose parents had already driven away sat on the bed next to my brother's own and watched us. My mother asked his name. I stared, fascinated by his dead-straight, pale hair, equally pale skin and confident manner. Our grandfather placed Sheka's tuck box, with his name in stencilled letters, at the end of the bed and we said our farewells. Poor Sheka was to spend the next two years of his life in that bleak hideout. A few days later my mother and I deposited my sister, two weeks short of her fifth birthday, in her school ninety miles to the south-west in Ayr.

My mother and I began to look for a place to live. We drove up and down the hills of Aberdeen looking at likely apartments. My mother was anxious to leave her parents’ house as soon as possible but there were few affordable alternatives.

One afternoon we thought we'd struck lucky. The apartment comprised the upper floor of a sturdy, turn-of-the-century semi-detached house belonging to a widow who lived downstairs. She was fragile-boned, grey-haired and her face seemed kind. She showed us the rooms, explaining at the same time that the house was too big for her and she was looking to let part of it. The entrance was shared, but beyond that we would have complete privacy. As we walked from room to room my mother's optimism flourished. The space was clean, airy and decorated in plain Scots style: oatmeal walls, sprigged curtains and a settee covered in hard-wearing bouclé fabric.

As we stood in the hallway preparing to leave my mother told the woman we'd be happy to take the apartment. Is it just the two of you, then? The woman glanced at me. I was holding onto my mother sucking my thumb. I've two other children, a boy and a girl – they're away at school. And what about your husband? My mother certainly wasn't going to tell her he was in prison. He's a doctor, she replied. Her voice was deliberately casual as she added, He's in West Africa. Oh, I see, said the lady. She had a voice like a whisper, and the rhythm of her accent made it sound almost as though she were crooning. She paused and gave a troubled smile. The problem is, she said, and I'm sure you'll understand – it's just me on my own here and I don't want any foreigners coming into the place. Even if I didn't mind, it's my sons, you see. They'd worry about me awfully. Knowing, well . . . you know.

After that my mother gave up hunting for a flat. An advert for a caravan for sale looked like the solution to our problems. My mother put a deposit on it immediately. It was parked on a site just south of Aberdeen on the other side of the Dee, but still close to her parents, and we moved in. At one end there was a separate bedroom complete with double bed; at the other end the caravan narrowed into a bay window with a pair of benches along either wall. Between them was a Formica table that folded down at night and the benches converted into bunk beds.

My mother painted out the interior, sewed orange covers for the seats and hung a ribboned divider between the kitchenette and the sitting room. There was no bathroom, just a toilet in a concrete shelter shared with the caravan next door and a shower block in the middle of the camp. Near the entrance was the office, run by a woman who wore her peroxide hair teased into a high beehive, and the man who owned our site, Mr Gordon. He was middle aged and had black hair, side parted and slicked down with oil. He wore square, black-framed glasses and a sheepskin driving coat with big leather buttons. Most days we went into the office to collect our post or buy milk and bread. When we passed I would see Mr Gordon looking out of the window by his desk and whenever he saw us he would slip out from his seat and come over to talk to my mother.

In autumn the long grasses turned golden and the heather browned. A crisp wind blew straight in from the North Sea, and the site up on the crest of the hill caught the worst of it. My mother needed help to pay the hire purchase loan and the bills, so Sonia and Brian, a brother and sister who were also students – Sonia was at the same college as my mother – moved into the tiny space with us. I slept with my mother in the big bed; Sonia and Brian on the bunks. When Memuna and Sheka came home for weekends and holidays there was barely enough room for us all even after everyone doubled up.

Sonia wore a sixties bob with wings of dark hair that framed her face. We three children referred to her between ourselves as ‘the lady whose hair was longer at the front than at the back’. We didn't do this to distinguish her from all the hundreds of other Sonias we knew, but rather because we remained deeply awed by her avant-garde hairstyle, the memory of which remained after her name faded.

Brian was Sonia's younger brother and a student of architecture at Gray's. Brian and I got on well; we spent a lot of our time together. Early on weekday mornings, often before dawn, he dropped me at Gairn Terrace on his way into classes. Every day Gran opened the door, nodded briefly at Brian, and pulled me inside. At other times, if there was no one else who could look after me, if my mother was still in classes and Gran was busy, Brian took me to his lectures at the School of Architecture, where I waited for him in the common room in the company and under the care of a dozen male students.

We had arrived in Britain from rural Africa in the middle of the Summer of Love of 1967. London and San Francisco throbbed to the beat of the sixties. The same could not quite be said of Aberdeen, but there was a vibrant student life and my mother's sense of fun, suffocated under layers of tension in Africa, resurfaced. There were parties in our tiny caravan late into the night, snapshots in my memory: sleeping next to my sister in the big bed, beneath a pile of heavy coats left by guests; the melody of ‘Day Dream Believer’ plucked on a guitar; the collection of nylon-haired gonks I kept on the shelf above my bed.

The Summer of Love, or at any rate the autumn, brought Alistair into all our lives. He was tall, bearded and flame haired: a movie director's idea of a Scots nobleman whose family were gentry from somewhere around Perth. Alistair came with us on trips, crossing fords and hills out towards Deeside and north in the direction of Inverness. We took turns to ride on his shoulders through the prickly gorse and he skimmed stones for us over the translucent water of the lochs. My mother had met him through the folk music group at the college and together they went out night after night, singing songs and recording old tunes in pubs and community centres in the outlying villages.

Our mother transformed into a different woman; she cut her hair into a smooth pageboy that curved under her ears; she was no longer Maureen. Her new friends all called her Chris.

Winter arrived. On a dark, icy morning I woke up and slid my feet into my slippers to go to the toilet. I tried to take a step. My slippers resisted. They refused to part company with the lino. Overnight the temperature had plummeted below freezing and all our shoes had stuck fast to the floor. It was almost as though they were more afraid to go outside into the cold than their owners. We won a goldfish once at a fair, where I tasted the melting sweetness of candyfloss for the first time. The ill-fated creature survived the confines of life in a plastic bag, overfeeding by three small children, only to perish when we went away one weekend and came back to find the pipes frozen and the goldfish entombed in ice. Our mother thawed the ice, thinking that the fish might be held in suspended animation, but the corpse disintegrated and then she couldn't even flush the pieces down the loo, because that was frozen too.

These are the memories that are left behind from our lives in that caravan. I didn't question my life: I hadn't learned to. Nor had I yet learned not to. I don't think I asked about Big Aminatta, or Jim or even my father. I had no yesterdays and no tomorrows. My days were routine, punctuated by small deeds, minor happenings; I was roused by the occasional petty excitement and endured a series of childhood mishaps.

I was hospitalised by a Highland terrier called Paddington whose teeth tore through the flesh of my lower lip and slashed my nostril. On the way to the hospital I sat between my mother's legs; she had a flannel held to my mouth. By the time we reached the children's wing of the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, the cloth was so drenched in red the pattern had been obscured.

I spent an eternity in the hospital in a bed opposite two American boys. I recollect nothing of the pain. Or the hours of stitching to reconstruct my lower lip. Or being unable to eat because of my ruined mouth. I only know that I was angry because the nurse who made the rounds of the children's ward with a potty made me pee in the pot on the top of my bed. The American boys, being several years older, she allowed to take the pot under the covers.

The scars were eventually entered into my passport: ‘scars on left lower lip’ in mauve ink next to the heading ‘Special peculiarities/Signes particuliers’. That meant I would always be identified in the event of an accident. I was the only person I ever knew who had a special peculiarity listed in their passport. Eventually the lopsided slant to my mouth evened and the scars faded, almost.

The teacher training course had given our mother an enthusiasm for organising educational trips. Somewhere along the way she met an architect who worked on the design of the Forth Road Bridge. At his invitation we all drove down the coast road to the crossing over the Firth, where her friend led us on a tour of the bridge. Thirty minutes later, at the halfway point, we stopped to look at the view. And what a mighty scene it was, truly. There we were, hanging perilously over miles and miles of uninterrupted sea. I clung to the steel railings and looked through the bars at the white-peaked waves and the seagulls gliding past at eye level.

Above my head I could hear the architect's voice. My mother asked questions. Their conversation bubbled on. I wasn't tall enough to see above the railings and the heavy top bar blocked the view, so I slipped my head between the bars, where the murmur of adult voices was carried away by the buffeting bluster.

Minutes passed; our guide decided we should press on to the other side, where coffee, juice and biscuits were waiting for us. Everyone moved away. I tried to follow them, but I couldn't seem to withdraw my head. Each time I tried to pull it out, my ears caught against the bars.

There was no choice but to stare at the view for another hour. Help and emergency equipment was summoned; two men worked around me. In time the bars were forced open. I was out.

Back home in Sierra Leone my father was released from prison. Two months later he left the country to join the APC government-in-exile in neighbouring Guinea, where they were indeed amassing arms and men, bankrolled by the diamond millions of Henneh Shamal, a Koidu-based Lebanese diamond dealer. Siaka Stevens and Henneh had known each other for many years, from the time when Stevens served as a minister for mines under the pre-colonial native administration. Shamal, previously an SLPP supporter, was ready to switch allegiances and ally himself openly with the prospective new power.

They planned to invade Sierra Leone and topple the military junta by force, if necessary. Colonel John Bangura, a pro-APC military man who had been sent into comfortable exile to Sierra Leone's embassy in Washington, returned to train the troops. Our father's job was to act as medical officer to the men and he joined them in their bush retreat, where they lived and were drilled. He left everything behind; even the clinic he handed over to an old schoolfriend, Dr Turay, without expecting anything in return. He wrote to my mother and asked her to send him a portable medical kit, which he packed, alongside a copy of the speeches of Che Guevara, and departed for the bush.

Meanwhile my mother spent more and more of her time with Alistair. One chilly evening Brian came home from a trip to London to find me asleep alone in the caravan. On the table was a note from my mother: ‘Please look after Aminatta. We've gone to a concert.’ Brian was due to attend an event himself that night, at one of the architects’ professional associations. Seeing no alternative, he fetched me from my bed, dressed me in mismatching clothes and carried me with him. At the entrance to the cocktail party, in one of Aberdeen's smart hotels, the doorman refused to let me into the room, which was full of men in dinner jackets. We stood at the door not knowing what to do next.

‘Come on, then. Bring the bairn here. Come on.’ It was the receptionist who had overheard everything from her place at the front desk. For the next four hours I slept on the floor under her desk until past midnight, when Brian came to fetch me, and we walked the three miles home, me riding high on his shoulders.

Brian and Sonia left the caravan soon afterwards, and I had completely forgotten Brian until he wrote to me after I began to present a series of programmes for the BBC in the early 1990s. I have the letter still, asking if I was the same little girl from Sierra Leone who lived in a caravan up at Nigg. A dark photocopy of an old photograph was contained in the brown envelope. It was taken one Christmas spent at the ski slopes at Aviemore. He thought the date was 1969 or 1970 but I knew it must be perhaps two years earlier. Our mother is on the right of the picture, next to an unknown man, and Brian is on the left. Between them is my sister. Sheka alone is forward of the group, peering into the camera lens. For some reason, I am not in the picture.

Yet I remember the day well. We had been ice skating for the first time and everyone had eventually conquered it except me. I wobbled and slid until my mother persuaded me off the ice. I sat in the empty stands and watched. Someone brought me a cup of hot orange juice, so hot I scalded my tongue. I remember the strange rough feeling, like licking rubber, that lasted the whole of the next day.

There was a telephone number at the top of the page; Brian still lived in Scotland – in Elgin on the coast north of Aberdeen. In his letter he wrote how he often wondered what had become of all of us; he had tried to trace my mother several times without success.

My mood was light as I dialled the telephone number. I thought it was fun: here we were after all these years. Yet as soon as he answered I realised the mistake I had made in telephoning without warning. I announced my name and the man's voice that answered trembled with emotion.

I feigned confidence, but I was experiencing the sensation of walking back into my dark past, the geography of which was both familiar and confused. A feeling of dread; too late to turn back. So much of the past was covered in veils. Whatever was coming, he would expect me to provide the answer and as likely I would not be able to do so.

Brian's enquiries among my mother's friends and acquaintances in the early 1970s had met with a series of blanks. Finally he came across a woman who told him, apparently on good authority, that Maureen was living overseas. He asked about the children, the girl he used to baby-sit. He was told I was dead, slaughtered as a child along with my brother and sister somewhere in West Africa. Until he saw my photograph in a newspaper twenty years on Brian had no idea I was alive.