Pizzas galore!

“All immigration is hard; it is an adjustment for those who have come and those who you are coming to. Each group has its issues.”

She concedes that our new-found racial tolerance has as much to do with subtle repositioning as genuine enlightenment: a black man will no longer be told he “can’t have a job here because there are white women working here”, but it still does not mean that he will get the job. Her own sense of identity was confused by her exceptionally pale pigmentation from inter-racial breeding going back centuries in the West Indies.

“In Jamaica there is black, coloured and white,” she says. “The lighter your skin, the more privilege you had. It was about how you acted and whether you sided with Britain. I am not mixed race: my family have been this colour for generations.

“Outside Jamaica it would be hard to find people of my exact colour chart. But wherever I go I get taken for a native: Spain, Italy, north Africa, South America. Except in England,” she smiles ruefully. “I know my background is Caribbean but I’m English — despite what the papers say.”

Her regret is that so much of our racial tension is avoidable. “I can see why some black people have that ‘come here and I will bite you’ expression. It is very hard if you are judged by the way you look, to be picked up by the police because of your colour. It makes you very alienated. It is self-fulfilling.”

Is it alienation that holds young black men back? “Teenagers are pretty awful anywhere,” cackles Levy knowingly (she lives in a rambling Edwardian house in north London with her graphic designer husband Bill Mayblin and two children from his first marriage). “I see small black kids smiling and I think it is so sad that the joie de vivre is beaten out of them.”

Many whites are also troubled by the transition from cheery black child to somewhat menacing teenager, but feel anxious about voicing such a view for fear of being labelled racist. The result? Nothing is done to engage them.

Levy agrees, alluding to the recent case of a black child shot dead because social services did not want to question the suitability of the father (who turned out to be a drug dealer and not even her father). “A small child can die but at least they won’t be accused of being racist,” she says sarcastically.

Levy is a skilled observer of little ironies: “My mum came to this country as the centre of empire; 50 years later she finds herself in Britain but on the periphery again, with everyone asking ‘What does America think about this’, or cooing over a Hollywood film star. In that sense, Britons are now like the downtrodden West Indian colonials of old.”

Far from revelling in this, Levy says that travel merely reminds her of her Britishness: “I find myself fantasising about a bacon sandwich and some decent telly.”

As such, Levy thinks David Blunkett, the home secretary, is right to ask immigrants to celebrate Britishness, but wrong to snarl at them with hostility. If we are not welcoming, we can’t expect them to love their adopted homeland.

“The citizenship ceremony should be inclusive: people do naturally integrate,” she says. “When people stick together it isn’t because they want to share basmati rice, it is because it is easier.”

Her touching book reminds us that in many ways West Indians coming to Britain were already more British than we were. There is a deep historical connection. As Levy says: “Jamaica didn’t have much of a history of its own.”