For the Love of Julie: A nightmare come true. A mother’s courage. A desperate fight for justice.

The political atmosphere has changed so much since then. If someone got together a petition like that these days, I imagine it would be all over the front pages of the papers and there would be questions in Parliament. It was really just a question of sticking up for ourselves, something we would become very good at over the years.

In the end I got used to people who didn’t know him talking to Charlie in Pidgin English, as if he was just off the boat. I even managed to see the funny side sometimes. ‘What pricey you likey?’ someone at a cinema ticket desk would shout at him helpfully, and sometimes Charlie would play along with them, looking vacant as if he couldn’t understand a word they were saying. I couldn’t really be too indignant since I had made almost exactly the same mistake when I first met him.

We had our first child, Gary, in 1965, a couple of years after we married, by which time I’d just turned nineteen.

‘What colour’s Ann’s baby?’ our next-door neighbour asked Ellen, a friend of mine.

‘He’s green,’ Ellen replied, with a straight face.

Julie came along in 1967 and then Angela made her appearance in 1969. With three small children running around, the house was soon too small for us all and we put it up for sale. The woman who had organized the petition when we first moved in asked me how much we were asking for it.

‘That depends,’ I replied.

‘Depends on what?’

‘Depends on the colour of the buyer’s skin,’ I said. ‘The darker they are, the cheaper they can have the house.’

Although I was only joking we did end up selling to a man who had a half African wife, so that probably confirmed the neighbour’s worst fears about how the neighbourhood had now gone completely to pot. Times were changing in so many different ways.