We always liked the trip from Moorfields station across St John’s Gardens. As we stopped to appreciate the ornamental flower beds on our way to the Liverpool Central Library or the Walker Art Gallery, discerning onlookers might look at my Nan’s idiosyncratic clothes and consider it pretty obvious that she was a dedicated follower of William Morris, the British Arts and Crafts movement and useful, pretty things.

There was, however, something more visible to the librarians and gallery assistants who greeted us at the end of our parade across the gardens and assumed that we needed serving separately. However much mixed-race kids were a rather banal feature of the city when they were out and about with their parents, it wasn’t always apparent that I was related to the elderly white woman who cared for and protected me.

Countless academic texts and opinion pieces have been written about the microaggressions that are faced by multiracial families when they move into mostly white, middle-class settings. My Nan wasn’t particularly interested in attempts to educate middle-class white folks in how to demonstrate greater tolerance or cloak their racism behind more creative language. Nor did she seek to make life more comfortable for people of colour who expected that they deserved respect based on their credentials and positions in the middle and upper levels of formal institutions. She was more concerned with informal activities that brought together people of different classes, ethnicities and social identities, which she associated with creativity, inspiration and unabashed humanism rather than cruelty, fear and parochialism.