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I was born in India, in a city which is adjacent to Calcutta called Howrah. I grew up there, mainly on the campus of the Engineering College. Dad was a professor there and it was a very happy childhood growing up within that community.
Mum came to Sussex from the Philippines in 1973 at the age of 21. She moved over for her education and career, with the goal of having a better life and supporting her family.
Prakash Sinha was an oncoplastic reconstructive cancer surgeon and the Medical Director of Princess Royal University Hospital and South Sites at the King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. He died in service at the age of 58 in October 2020.
It must have been around 1955, but I can’t be exact about when I arrived in England. I came from Waterford in Southern Ireland. I was the third youngest of nine siblings.
Colonel Yvette Gussie Gordon MBE, MR (nee Spencer-Auber) is a retired nursing sister and the first Sierra Leonean female to enlist in the Sierra Leone Military Forces after Sierra Leone’s independence.
My mother was born Margaret Elizabeth Raghoonanan in Trinidad. She was named after Princess Margaret who visited the island on the year of her birth in 1955. Her parents, Dolly and Sonny, were both sugarcane and rice farmers supporting a family of nine. In the early hours of the morning, my mother would tend to the farm animals, cook for the house and help raise her younger siblings.
It was a multicultural environment at the home with nurses from Spain, Mauritius, Ireland, Jamaica, and Germany and we soon fitted in.