"I saw my mother, father, brother and sister fully for the first time when I was 12 years old, thanks to Mr. Fitzpatrick, my art teacher. He told my mother the whole story, and she blamed herself bitterly for the gap of my earlier life, especially as she imagined the danger I'd been in.
When Mr. Fitzpatrick raised the alarm, he also managed to save his dwindling self-respect as an artist. There were 22 of us in his class and I always sat at the back. Mr. Fitzpatrick, who'd come over from Grenada to find this teaching job, would arrange some objects on his desk and tell us to draw them. While everyone else struggled to render faithfully the bowl of oranges and bananas, the neatly arranged mugs and jug, or the vase of hibiscus flowers, I always drew something different."
