![]() ![]() "I hadn't known my father had it in England it was a great disgrace, to do with poverty and immigrants." Her father, who worked for a sugar company, fell ill with tuberculosis, spending long spells in a sanatorium. The family (she has two sisters) moved to south London in the early 1950s, when she was "five or six". They had met in Cuba while her mother was on a break from working on the Canadian railways. Her father was "mixed-race Guyanese, part South American Indian, African and Scottish", and her mother came from a "big working-class family" in south London. Maya Jaggi ( The Guardian, 1/1/10) notes that "the imaginative power to inhabit others' lives, and ventriloquise voices, nourished Melville's early life as an actor and stand-up comic." Her pre-school years in the 1940s were spent in the colony of British Guiana. ![]()
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