I grew up in West Sussex in the 1970s and 80s. I have two very strong memories from that time that influenced this book. Firstly, a homework assignment when I was about nine. We had to imagine ourselves as a character from Elizabethan times and write a story. I loved history and I loved writing stories even more. However, I struggled. I think I even cried. As far as I knew, people who looked like me were not in England in Elizabethan times. My mum put me straight on that. She said there were people referred to as “blackamoors” around, even then. I started writing my story with renewed vigour.
A second strong memory is the raising of Henry VIII’s flagship, Mary Rose, from the bed of Portsmouth Harbour in 1982. It was like a ship from my imagination coming to life. However, like most of the British history I had learned about, I felt at a slight distance from it. Every history lesson I had absorbed, every book I had read and picture I had pored over as a child, every UK-set historical film and TV series I had ever sat through, told me that people who looked like me had no role in British history other than being slaves.
Now, I know better, of course. Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain was an eye-opener! I had no idea that black people had been part of British life for the last two thousand years. Many years after reading that book from cover to cover, I was researching the history of black people around the City of London and Hackney. The Institute of Historical Research has a list of church entries starting in 1573 – baptisms, marriages, burials – of people with roots in Africa and Asia. I cannot help but wonder about all those lives, many of them servants, some skilled workers, some of them living and dying in poverty. My heart bleeds for the nameless man who was buried on 29 June 1588 in the churchyard of St Olave’s on Hart Street, City of London, after being found dead in the street.
I had bought Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors: The Untold Story a few weeks before I was asked to write this story. A happy coincidence! I was attracted to the story of the diver, Jacques Francis, because the raising of the Mary Rose was a significant moment in my generation’s history – and also, it wasn’t too far from where I grew up. There is also the enduring myth that black people can’t swim. What the story of Jacques Francis showed was that sometimes, black people were the only people who could swim! Jacques is also one of the first recorded Africans to give evidence in an English court. It’s a really significant moment, but lost – or trivialised – in the history books.
However, I wanted to tell the story through a child’s point of view. I did not want to focus on slavery, but I also knew that people from the African continent were being kidnapped and exploited by European countries such as Portugal and Italy for hundreds of years. In 1570, when my story is set, slavery was still considered illegal on English soil. Though it did not mean that people of African descent were safe.