Pat Cumper talks about her parents' mixed race marriage, and the effect it had on their lives - and, in a very tenuous way, how Emperor Haile Selassie started it all off...

Pat's parents met at a concert in Cambridge just after the Second World War. Finding himself sitting beside a black woman, Pat's father asked, "Are you Haile Selassie's daughter?" knowing that the Emperor's daughter was in Cambridge at the time. Pat's mother had been sent by her father from Jamaica, to study abroad and was one of the first black women from the Caribbean to be educated at Cambridge. Six weeks after their first meeting, they were married. "For two sensible people it was, shall we say precipitous!" says Pat, "My mother's family, was a quite miffed. They had great plans for their daughter to marry into one of The Families in Jamaica, but she married a lower middle-class Englishman! My father, had won a scholarship to Burton-on-Trent Grammar, and was a leading light in their family. Him going off and marrying a black Jamaican woman wasn't seen as the best choice he could have made. His mother disapproved."

Pat's parents decided to move to Jamaica, for a combination of reasons. One of them was the attitude of Cambridge to his black wife. "My father ran into difficulties when he was told Mum would be a bit of a drag on his academic career." But life in the Caribbean was better than grey, post-war Britain where everything was rationed. "My father couldn't believe the colour everywhere in Jamaica - and there was food, and jobs. They felt it would be healthier to bring up children in Jamaica - particularly mixed-race children."

Pat's father got a job at the new University College of the West Indies, becoming a head of department and Professor of Economics. The family prospered, but at the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, the Black Power Movement had a huge impact on their lives, "They suddenly discovered my father was white. Politically white! My mother was exceedingly angry that he was singled by his fellow academics - he'd proved himself - he was a Jamaican citizen and had raised a Jamaican family. It was difficult not to sympathise with a colonial society finally trying to have its black majority assert itself." But at the university, personal phone calls, and students barracking in classes finally took it's toll. Pat's father became unwell and eventually took another job in India to work for the World Health Organisation.

Pat's mother, stayed with Pat and her younger brother in Jamaica to see them through their school exams. "It was hard for them, they were exceedingly close. We always said that they had one long conversation that was their marriage. They never stopped talking about whatever was going on." With the exams out the way, Pat, at seventeen, remained behind in Jamaica, whilst the family moved to India where they stayed for ten years. From there her parents moved back to Britain, with Pat's father working at the School of Tropical Medicine. After a few years, they moved back to Jamaica, to a small house overlooking Kingston.

Spending time apart allowed the relationship to mature between children and parents, and whilst talking together, which they did much of as a family, the Haile Selassie story came to light. "It was really quite something - they honestly thought my mother was a huge celebrity - they didn't quite know what to do with her. She may have said hello to Haile Selassie's daughter at some point - it's a tenuous link- but it was a good opening line for my parents. It got them talking and they never stopped..."