Toni's father was from St Lucea in Jamaica. He'd come to Britain as an airman to join the RAF in 1942. After the war he married her mother and they settled here for a few years before leaving his wife and child for good. Toni lived with her her mother's parents in Coventry, where she grew up. Her father was never mentioned, "I just had one photograph of him with my mother taken in London, around Oxford Circus," says Toni. Her white mother and black father were cause for comment in post-war Coventry, "I was referred to in those days as 'the only coloured child in the district. I just kind of blended in. The only perceived difference was in the eyes of my grandmother who used to say, 'you'll need to be twice as good as everybody else to be as good as they are."

Then ten years ago, in a ghostly way, he re-entered her life again. Her daughter, Alicia, had become interested black history, and had taken Black Settlers in Britain 1555-1958 out of the library. Flicking through it, Toni got to the section on the Second World War, "I looked at a picture of four airmen, West Indian, and there was an instant recognition of one of these men. I looked up and said to Alicia, 'There's a picture of my daddy in this book,' I was about three years old again. I just knew that this was my father."

In a strange echo of her mother's experience, Alicia recalls the time when as precociously politically aware ten-year-old, she had been browsing through a book on squatter's rights. As she did so, her mother looked over her shoulder and suddenly said, "That's your dad!" The difference was that Toni had talked to her daughter about her father, "I did know who he was and what he did," says Alicia, "We haven't had contact recently, but we did have contact with his family."

Piecing together a sense of belonging is a strange process, and when Toni visited Jamaica in 1993, she felt another part of her identity had slipped into place, In tears she said to one of the holiday reps, "I feel I have come home. This is where my daddy came from. I felt as though I'd found a part of me which had been sort of lost from me for all those years before."

Alicia, now a photographer, has no strong desire to go to Jamaica, "I never feel like anywhere's home - because I'm from so many different places," she explains. In terms of the family, Alicia feels that the two photographs haven't had much influence, but she adds, "It's made me very interested in identity in terms of photography and images, and how that affects you and how it makes you feel about who you are in the world."