This much I know: Pauline Black, singer and actor, 71

Photograph by Dean Chalkley

My earliest memory? Puking over my mum’s freshly ironed sheets when she told me I was adopted. She then smacked me. I was just about to start school. If you’ve got a totally white family and you’re enrolling in a mostly white school, someone was going to point it out. They had to tell me.

I was adopted at four weeks old. My birth mother had me in a home for unmarried women. The people who adopted me were a white working-class family who lived in Romford, in Essex. All through my childhood, I was the only black kid in school. The whole experience of my youth left me feeling like an outsider. My mother wanted to make me like a little white girl.

My family held the racist views common to a lot of working-class families at that time. I had an uncle who believed Enoch Powell had the right idea.

From the age of nine to nearly 11, a family friend sexually assaulted me when I went to his house to help his wife bring up a new baby. This man thought nothing of having his hand down my pants while we stood next to his newborn child. Eventually, I plucked up the courage to tell my parents, but the whole thing was very badly dealt with. I was made to stand in the middle of the room and explain what had been happening. I was then called a liar by both him and his wife. It left me very mistrustful of adults.

2 Tone was a movement. The music was a meeting of reggae, punk and rock. It captured the imagination of a disaffected black and white youth. Margaret Thatcher had come to power, and there was a lot of pushback against that. Our songs captured the time – they were social reportage.

We always had Nazis at shows. There was a right-wing contingent among the skinheads. We used to perform to people Sieg Heiling at us. It was scary at times. We had six black band members, so [our band] The Selecter came in for a lot more aggro than, say, Madness, who were seven lovely young white men.

When I was 42, I looked for my parents. I learned that my birth mother grew up in Dagenham, Essex, just six miles from me. Apparently, she would stand at the school gates to watch me go into school. I didn’t know.

My birth father was Prince Gordon Olodosu Adenle from Osogbo, a Yoruba town in Nigeria – his father was ostensibly a king, and my father was a prince. Unfortunately, he passed away a year before I went looking for him, but I found plenty of his descendants. I suddenly became the oldest of his 17 children.

My husband and I have now been married for 52 years. The secret to a lasting marriage is to argue a lot. It keeps things alive. The worst thing is when you see two older people sitting in a pub and they’re not talking to each other. We chunter away about anything and everything.

My worst habit is over-explaining. I have to see and talk about all angles. It infuriates my husband.

I’d like to be remembered for dying on stage. Tommy Cooper had the right idea.

The documentary film Pauline Black: A 2 Tone Story is available on Sky Arts, Freeview and NOW