I stood out as different in Llandudno but by learning about its past and mine, it became the home I love
Looking back, a good deal of my younger years seemed to be perched somewhere between if only and my fate. If only my hair was straight, if only my bum was flatter, if only our house was ordinary, if only mum didn’t speak Welsh, if only dad could settle in Wales, if only I lived somewhere else, anywhere, anywhere but here. I often felt just too big for my world, out of place. Suspended on a faultline of creative adaptation, I invented Tessa. Tessa was blonde and white and lovely, and she lived somewhere in my dreamscape. She provided me with a lot of comfort in my small girl days, an escape from an odd reality. This may be a known story by now, the story of rural assimilation, mixed-race psychic angst and adaptation, but in fact the story was never about me, or my escape from being me. It is really a story about Wales.
I grew up in the 1960s in Llandudno in North Wales, a small seaside town that everyone from the northwest has either been to, or will come to, for a day out at least once. A pastel arc of holiday hotels hugs the shoreline in the bay between two slumbering headlands. A town that once attracted the Victorian and Edwardian monied classes and, later, in droves, factory workers from the northern towns with their newfound leisure time, stepping off the steamers on to the longest pier in Wales. The town offered them, among many pleasures, N-word minstrels and other curiosities in en-plein-air concerts in Happy Valley and in its various indoor theatre halls.
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