First a tragic suicide and then a birth. This is the story of a child growing up in Johannesburg during the height of apartheid in South Africa. The first years were lived in the shadow of close family friends: the activist Bishop Trevor Hutchinson, the journalists Anthony Sampson and James Cameron, and the author Nadine Gordimer. Huddlestone defiantly christened the baby boy 'Crispin' in the black township of Sophia town, beyond the 'white' city of Johannesburg. It was an illegal act under the repressive white law. Crispin's mother Jasmine, an active member of the anti-apartheid Black Sash movement, came perilously close to being sent to jail. 

In the mid 1950's the family emigrated to the Gold Coastin West Africa, which later became the first colony in Sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence. These were formative years in Crispin's early childhood. They were also important years for the emergence of a dynamic new nation called Ghana, which attracted world attention overnight. 

Amidst increasing tension between East and West, the Third World found itself at a political crossroads. The Cold War had begun and the Space Race was set. During this period of global miss-trust at the age of 10, Crispin was sent thousands of miles away from the family home in Africa to Sidcot.  Despair and extreme loneliness were only really encountered by the children of expatriates when they were sent home for secondary schooling. Unprepared for the sudden introduction to England, it would take Crispin several soul-searching years to adjust and recover. This account is of not so long ago and is seen through the eyes of a young child desperately trying to comprehend the disparities of the English way of life during the final years of empire when developed nations warily took notice of the awakening of the African continent emerging from a world rather different to the one, we live in today.  

Photo credit: By Jasmine Rose Innes, Axim, Ghana, 1956       

Below is an extract from the Sidcot Chapter, Crispin's book is available to purchase on Amazon here 

Back Then - Book Extract

Nicks 12th Birthday 

Crispin