My pride at shaking maracas with Floella

What Are You Doing Here? Floella Benjamin Macmillan £20 ★★★★★

The most overwhelmed I’ve ever been was when I was about eight. I was with schoolfriends, mooching around Woolworths in my home town of Oxford. Suddenly, there was Floella Benjamin (left), recording a song for BBC radio – and asking us to join in.

I ended up shaking maracas, my face set grim, determined to stay cool in front of the smiley woman whom every child adored. I clearly recall Dame Floella (as she’s been since 2020) trying not to laugh at my fierce expression. Reading her memoir, I realise my starstruck reaction was par for the course. Strangers frequently accost her for hugs, grown men confide how they used to kiss their television screens when she appeared.

We’re all Dame Floella’s ‘Play School babies’, from television’s golden, gentle era between 1964 and 1985 – children who, after school, enjoyed beakers of orange squash with Club biscuits while watching her alongside the likes of Brian Cant sing nursery rhymes with Humpty and Jemima and wondering whether today we’d watch something through the round, square or arched window.

Ever since, I’d been vaguely aware that Dame Floella, now 72, was now very much one of the Establishment. She’s packed a lot in since arriving, shivering at Southampton docks from her native Trinidad aged ten, to be greeted in the heralded ‘land of hope and glory’ by vile racism.

Highlights include her quitting her safe bank job aged 20 to join the cast of the ‘infamous’ musical Hair and rejecting overtures from David Bowie (at the same party she told Mick Jagger off for sitting on her dress). She was the first female black university chancellor at Exeter and campaigned tirelessly for the recently unveiled monument commemorating her Windrush Generation.

At times, the name-dropping and list of quangos Dame Floella has joined can be wearisome. But whenever the CV bullet points verge on exhaustive, both you, as reader, and Dame Floella are brought abruptly down by some hostile person asking her, as a black woman: ‘What are you doing here?’

Often, the racism is overt. Each incident reads like a slap in the face. A six-year-old tells her: ‘I hate you because you’re a [racist word].’ Her mother-in-law refuses to meet her mixed-race grandchildren. The police stop her rushing to her dad in hospital because she’s a black woman driving a fancy Mercedes. Yet she never bears a grudge or stops smiling. ‘Lots of people did wicked things to me,’ she writes. ‘[But] I have no resentment in my heart.’ I’m as awestruck by her now as I was all those years ago.