Pauline Black. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the GuardianPauline Black's earliest memory is of throwing up her breakfast in response to the news that she was adopted. It was 1958, in Romford, Essex, and Pauline was four. Until then, she had been in "blithe ignorance" about her origins, despite the fact that she was the only non-white person in her family. She knew her skin colour was different from that of the rest of her family, and that this seemed often to be worthy of negative comments, but she hadn't understood why. "It was something that never came up, I had no notion of it," she says.
Aware that her little girl was about to start school, where questions were bound to be asked, Pauline's mother, Ivy, told her daughter that her "real" mother was a Dagenham schoolgirl and her "real" father was "from a place called Nigeria".
Throughout her childhood, Pauline felt like a "cuckoo, in somebody else's nest," she writes, in her new memoir, Black by Design. It wasn't until 20 years later, when she was lead singer of the 2-Tone band, the Selecter, that she felt she finally belonged somewhere: "Any band is like a surrogate family," she says.
In the 1950s and 60s, Essex was not an easy place to be an adopted mixed-race girl. "It was totally unreconstructed," says Pauline. Her memoir is full of shocking stories, such as her mum telling her she looked "like a bloody golliwog" when she decided to grow an afro. Were Pauline's family racist? "I'm not going to say they were racist – they weren't racist. The word hadn't been invented then. They were xenophobic, absolutely, but that wasn't just confined to black people, that was anybody," she says.
In her 40s, Pauline's mother had developed Bell's palsy, a facial paralysis that made her reluctant to leave the house. The family doctor suggested the 1950s cure-all for depressed women – a baby. As Ivy had had a hysterectomy (after her fourth son), adoption seemed the answer. "The story I was given was that she had difficulty leaving the house and the doctor said, 'What you need is a baby,'" says Pauline. She was fostered and then adopted when she was 18 months old.
Pauline describes her mother as uptight and fearful of the world, but also "home-loving, a woman who loved babies".
How did such a fearful woman come to adopt a black child in the 50s? "I don't think colour really came into it. I don't think they'd actually thought that question through. I think there were only boys around that day and she wanted a girl," says Pauline. Her parents were so unprepared for the arrival of a newborn baby that they didn't have anywhere for her to sleep: "They didn't have anything. They didn't have a cot – I spent the first few weeks of my life in a drawer. This was the family joke," she says.
Pauline's relationship with her mother had become strained by the time she was 11, but she felt more affinity with her father, Arthur, a mechanic, whom she describes as "working-class and proud". "He was a very loving and very open man. I can never consciously remember him saying anything about a black person that was derogatory, but I can remember my brothers and uncles, saying things," she says.
Looking back, Pauline believes her father was a depressive. He used to take to his bed for a week at a time and she would be sent upstairs to cajole him out of his bedroom. How was her parents' relationship? "Pretty weird. I guess they loved each other in their own peculiar little way, but it wasn't all beer and skittles," she says.
Many of Pauline's memories will be familiar to anyone who has grown up adopted, mixed race or black in a white family: the sense of isolation, the alienation, the sheer loneliness of looking and feeling so different from your family, compounded by the guilt of having these feelings and the frustration of not having the vocabulary to express it at the time.
In her book, Pauline likens adoption to a full blood transfusion: "It may save your life in the short term, but if it's not the perfect match, rejection issues may appear," she writes. What would have made things easier? "To have known another black family. To have known other black kids. I needed to know there were black people who had jobs, were living normal lives," she says.
Her mother taught her to fear black people, particularly men: "I suppose all mothers make you scared of men, but black men were definitely bogey men, they got you pregnant, they didn't care, they'd run off and leave you, and if that happened – 'If you revert to type' she was trying to say – then we wash our hands of you."
Does she wish she'd been adopted by a black family? "That would have been better because I'd have had role models. But it isn't who brings you up – a black or mixed-race family could have adopted me and been absolutely dreadful, just like a white family could have been dreadful, but it's the lack of role models," says Pauline.
As she grew older, her relationship with Ivy became uncomfortable: "By the time I was 11, things had changed irreparably and that was because I was more conscious of who I was," says Pauline.
Education created another chasm: "My parents had both left school pretty much by the time they were 12, so I was just allowed to get on with it. By that time I was a very secretive child. I mistrusted adults. I went inside myself."
Even today, wearing a beautiful black silk shirt and looking at least a decade younger than her 58 years, Pauline seems shy and reserved, rather than the exhibitionist one might expect of a stage performer who was arguably the most influential women on the male-dominated 2-Tone music scene.
By the late 60s, early 70s, the American Black Power movement had given Pauline the vocabulary she needed to express herself, often with mixed results. She combed out her hair, wore an afro to school and painted "Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud" on a poster in her bedroom. This new found pride in her identity infuriated her mother, who was convinced no good would come of it: "She wanted me to be Shirley Bassey – I wanted to be Marsha Hunt."
In 1971, Pauline left Romford for Lancaster Polytechnic (now Coventry University), to study science before training as a radiographer in Coventry. It was around this time that she met her husband, Terry, an engineer – they have been together 38 years, quite an achievement for someone who says she has "little concept of family".
By 1976, Pauline was singing in local pubs, earning ?10 a gig. Then one day in May 1979, she went to a rehearsal with a group of friends and left as the lead singer with the Selecter. A few months later, the band had their first hit, On My Radio. Within seven weeks of being a fully formed band, the Selecter were supporting the likes of Madness and the Specials and Pauline was being hailed as the Queen of Ska.
It was around this time that she changed her surname from Vickers. The name Black came to her after a session with the band – she was naming the elephant in the room, she says: "I thought, that is just absolutely amazing! My family, for the first time, will have to say it," she says.
"[The term] coloured was still used in those times. Black was still an underground thing, and to actually name yourself Black, as far as my family was concerned, was quite a big bone of contention. I don't think I've ever been fully forgiven. If I'd changed my name to Smith, that wouldn't have been quite so bad," she says.
If changing her surname to Black was radical for the time, so too was her androgynous "rude-girl" uniform of a sharp black and/or white suit with a grey fedora.
Though never quite as successful as Madness and the Specials, the Selecter had their own loyal following and a string of UK hits after On My Radio, including Too Much Pressure and Three Minute Hero. What made them different from other bands on the 2-tone scene was not only the fact that they had a black female singer, but there was only one white member, out of a line up of seven. "Madness were all white, there were only two black people in the Specials. And then there was us," says Pauline.
It was a time of racial tension in Britain and it was not uncommon for rightwing skinheads and National Front supporters to launch into sieg heil chants during 2-Tone gigs. Wasn't Pauline disheartened when the music she loved was appropriated by "bonehead skins," as she calls them? "It was never appropriated, they were just there. In Top Rank clubs and Tiffany's, and all those kinds of places, you would have 2,000 people in there and 40, possibly 50 people who sieg-heiled at you that particular night," says Pauline.
How did she deal with it? "I rather naively thought they could be shown the error of their ways. That didn't happen, but we tried. We'd ask the audience: 'Do you want these people in here?' Sometimes that would shame them into shutting up," says Pauline.
When the Selecter broke up in 1982, (they have since reformed and have a new single out this week) Pauline built a successful career as an actor. But in their Top of the Pops heyday, when she was regularly on television and featured in the press, Pauline began to wonder if her birth mother might see her and get in touch.
Out of loyalty to Ivy, Pauline didn't try to trace her birth mother until she was 42, eight years after Ivy's death – her father had died in 1976.
"I knew I couldn't do it while she was alive. It would have been too upsetting for her," she says.
Once she had decided to trace her birth mother, Pauline became "a whirling dervish" of activity. Within a couple of weeks she had found an address and telephone number. This was fast work given that her birth mother, Eileen, was a "?10 Pom", one of the wave of Britons encouraged to emigrate to Australia in the mid-60s – she had left when Pauline was 13 and knew nothing of her daughter's success.
Pauline wrote to Eileen right away and within a week her telephone rang at 5am. When she answered, a woman with a strong Australian accent said: "Darling, it's Mummy."
Eileen told her that her father had been an engineering student who had come to London from Nigeria to study. His name was Gordon Adenle. Pauline hit the phone book and rang every entry under that name. The following day, she found herself in the London flat of Gordon's second wife. She was shown pictures of her father, who, it transpired, was a Yoruba prince. She felt an instant physical connection with him: "It was the strangest thing, walking into the room and there was my father, staring at me, I wasn't prepared for that, at all, or the whole story about him," she says.
Sadly, he had died a year earlier, so he still remains a mystery: "Almost like a fantasy figure," she says.
She has yet to visit Nigeria, although she has met a half sister: "I've tried to talk to people, I've written letters about my father, their impressions of him, but you don't get anywhere ... A cousin went there and photographed my father's grave. That was cathartic because that's a bit like a full stop."
There was, however, a proper reunion with her birth mother. A few weeks after first speaking to Eileen, Pauline stepped off a plane in Sydney to meet her and, as she writes, was "enveloped in 42 years of love".
After the initial euphoria of their reunion, came the hard work of building a relationship. "When you've done with all the introductions – this is my life story, this is your life story, where do you go from there?" she asks.
Reunion is a little bit like a love affair, she says: "For the first two weeks, it's absolutely wonderful. They're the most adorable thing in the world, your heart flutters, you've got so much to learn about each other." Then things become more prosaic: "You've just got to get on with it," says Pauline. (She maintains a good relationship with her four older adoptive brothers, but they have shown little interest in the connections she has made with her birth family.)
Eileen, who writes once a week, told Pauline that she used to stand at the end of her street in Romford and watch her go to school.
What kind of advice would she give anyone who is considering tracing their birth family? "Don't just think about the object of your desire – your birth mother – think about everything that's going to come with it, and think about that quite hard. Be prepared for it. She's going to come with a whole heap of other people and they are going to have a whole heap of other agendas. Be prepared for that, but don't let it stop you," says Pauline.
She thinks not enough is done to support adopted children: "They've addressed the needs of everybody else, but not the child."
She also believes adopted children should have follow-ups with social services and, where possible, contact with birth parents. If it's not possible? "They should have photographs, some sort of family history, who you came out of. You should grow up knowing that – be able to assimilate that – so that by the time you are 18 you're not feeling as though you are bereft or you don't belong to – or never belonged to – something."
Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir, by Pauline Black, is published by Serpent's Tail, ?12.99. To order a copy for ?10.39, including free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846
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