A Black Scot

My mother loved beaches - she's seen here with Elizabeth on a beach in Jamaica - and she loved the sun. She had black hair and very dark skin which tanned to a deep shade of mahogany, the genes for which she passed to my brother.

She seems at her darkest in her wedding photographs, when, to use my father's phrase, she looks as if she has 'a touch of the tarbrush'.

My mother was proud of her darkness. She claimed it came down through the Wilson family from the time when they, as members of Clan Gunn, inhabited Caithness, and that the dark complexion originated from Spanish sailors who, wrecked along the Scottish coast during the Armada, integrated into the local population.

She was intensely proud of being a Scot. She claimed that she was a Black Scot, descended from the Moors, and that, therefore, when she was travelling through Apartheid South Africa, she really ought to use the facilities reserved from the Nie Blankes and not those for Whites Only.