DULWICH FESTIVAL

12th -21 st MAY 2023

10 DAYS OF MUSIC, LITERATURE, ART, COMEDY, THEATRE, HISTORY, WALKS, FILM, TALKS & FAIRS!

Over 100 events, including free family fun!

MUSICLITERATUREPERFORMANCECOMMUNITYCREATIVE

The inaugural Catford Literary Festival in October 2022 was a resounding success, and for local author Anna Corbett it was a game changer.

“It was a fantastic event. I was delighted to see the room was packed and everyone was listening and that felt wonderful.”

Even the venue seemed auspicious for Anna, because she remembers bringing children to play in the sports fields at the Abbotshall centre when she was a teacher at Torridon school.

Anna is Lewisham to her core, having spent most of her working life here, so it comes as a surprise to learn that she was born and raised in Cornwall, and once considered retiring there, before trying Cardiff for size and deciding it didn’t fit.

“There’s nowhere like London,” says the happy Hither Green resident. “When I moved back [after the Cardiff experiment] I walked through Lewisham market and thought, ‘I’m home’.”

Home, and a sense of belonging, is one of the themes running through Anna’s first novel, Masquerade, and will be picked up in her second book, Full Circle, to which she’s putting the finishing touches before it’s published in May.

“Masquerade is inspired by a real person, who left our family 100 years ago. George, the character I develop in the novel, is based on a photo we had in our family. We often wondered what happened to him.

“In my book, which is set in 1923, George sends a photo of himself to his family in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay. He’d left without telling anyone years before, determined to live the high life in New York.”

George’s decision to deny his heritage in his adopted city has farreaching consequences, and it’s a conflict that Anna is familiar with in her own life.

“My father’s father was from Ghana but he settled in Cornwall and married a Cornish woman. My dad, also a seafarer, met my mum in Tiger Bay and brought her to Cornwall. They had six children.

“In those days people still said the word ‘coloured’ and there were very few coloured people in Truro. But it’s a beautiful place, I still have brothers and cousins who live there whom I go back to visit. However, I thought better of retiring to Cornwall because the attitudes are still a bit, well, parochial.”

Anna looks stricken for a moment.

“Oh, that sounds awful... I’ve been in London too long! Every Londoner you speak to seems to feel the same, though. In London everyone mixes together, especially in Lewisham. I found that in Cardiff this wasn’t the case, it was a tighter community, which is why I moved back here.

“My youngest brother, living in Cornwall, is 65 and has adult children. He’s often stopped by the police, for no reason. Just the other day he saw some policemen in a car clocking him, so he stopped voluntarily. They drew up and asked why he’d stopped. He told them he just knew they were going to pull him over. They wrote a report afterwards claiming they’d had to chase him with their blue lights on.”

She sighs, and continues.

“We grew up in a council house. In those days you had to take the 11-plus,

I'd say to the kids I taught, everyone has a family story and I love stories

the bar in the evenings. It was hard work, but rewarding, because at the time there was a resurgence of jazz in Britain. Courtney Pine, Gary Crosby and Dudu Pukwana were just some of the big names that used to play there.

“I became friends with many of the musicians, and interviewed them recently for the new book. I also used to host a local radio jazz show when I lived in Cardiff.”

Thinking about the character of Sarah has brought up more memories from Anna’s youth. “I was born in 1947. When I was growing up, there was another little girl in Truro who looked like me; people said she’d been left behind by a soldier.

“I was adamant that I didn’t want to be mixed up with her and I wanted people to know that I’m black and my mum and dad are black. I used to walk around with a photo of my parents and tell people that this is my mum and this is my dad and I wasn’t left behind. I wanted to emphasise my identity.”

Since she retired 15 years ago, Anna has had time to work through the many episodes of her eventful life, from her feelings of otherness at that Cornish school, to her long career as a teacher.