I come from a family of secrets and lies, and as a consequence have led a life of deception and cover-up. It took a couple of decades for me to understand this, that what was being acted out in my conscious life was a secret to which I didn't have access. I knew I had had a god-awful childhood, but I also knew there were things I couldn't remember about it, and everything I knew about psychology told me we don't have amnesia about the happy parts. As the years passed and my life kept crashing, I decided that the memories I had forgotten would have to be brought back. By then I had knocked out nine novels in 12 years; as soon as I finished one I started another. I was in that sense a junkie, and the only way of knowing what lay behind all the violence and murder I wrote about was to go cold turkey. I stopped writing completely.
In 1990, at a writers' conference in Toronto, I had my first hallucination: the high-heeled shoes I was wearing turned into a pair of black button-up shoes, the kind a little girl would wear. It was a freaky moment, lasting only a few seconds, but enough to take me back to a time in my life when I had worn shoes like that. I was six. I knew exactly where I had been. Following these clues like a map, I entered a year of madness and grief when fragments of memories slowly culminated into one piercingly clear memory of my father raping me. People sometimes ask: How could you forget something like that? The real question is: how could you remember? If you did, how could you sit opposite your dad in the morning without sticking a knife into him? How could you open your mouth without blurting it all out? The first time it happened, I told my mother. She said I was lying and warned me never to mention it again. The rapes continued until I was 12 and went to boarding school in Johannesburg. No one in our family was saying a word. It would take decades before I could.
After I stopped writing, I didn't go back to it for over seven years. When I did, I knew I would have to write about my childhood - not the one I had described in my fourth novel, Dreams of the Kalahari, but the hidden part. No publisher would touch it. They were nervous, but then so was I. I wasn't prepared to put myself on the line; I had written my story as a novel and, to give it even more distance, I had set it in America rather than in Africa, where I grew up. When the book was rejected on both sides of the Atlantic, I wrote a second version. This novel was rejected, too. Finally, I wrote the story as it had happened, in Africa, at a time when British colonial rule was coming to an end. This time the publishers were ecstatic. My memoir Before the Knife was published two years ago, and the door to the past began to swing shut.
The second secret in our household centred on my maternal grandmother, Anne, who left Wales when she went to India to marry my grandfather. My mother - like my grandfather, my sister and I - was born in India, but she never talked about her childhood and it was many years before I even realised she had lived there. I was told that that my grandmother had died when my mother was nine, nothing more. I was one of those kids who kept asking questions: what did my grandmother die of, what was she like, could I see a picture? But no one was talking.
When my mother began to descend into Alzheimer's after a lifetime of depression, I wrote to her brother, Ivan, and asked him to tell me everything he could remember about their mother. I said I wanted to write a book about her. (This was a lie.) He wrote back: "Keep calm for a minute before reading further. Please. Your grandmother, my own mother, is alive, she is 81 years old, is physically fit, very active, and does sewing at the time this letter is being written." He continued: "Dear Carolyn, I am sorry these things are coming to light for you, but you asked for knowledge and when the Rock of Truth is lifted, God's truth will be revealed." Finally, several letters later, he told me my grandmother was in a mental institution.
In these conversations with my mother's brother, and in the deluge of his strange, frantic letters, full of religiosity and despair, written late at night in a caravan in Okehampton, Devon, I got to know my grandmother and my mother for the first time. The lie I had told about writing a book about her was no longer a lie. When I first decided to write a novel about Anne Webb, there wasn't much to go on - just the little my uncle could remember. I knew that she was born on March 26 1897 and grew up in Porthcawl, in the Vale of Glamorgan, and that it was there she met her future husband. He was on leave from the Indian army and looking for a wife. Anne was strenuously urged not to marry him; her family didn't like or trust him. But they sailed off to India and set up home in Ferozepore in Punjab, where my mother and her two brothers were born. Anne was left alone for long periods of time while her sergeant husband was up in the hills, fighting imperial battles.
My grandfather had had a miserable childhood; he was an army brat, born and raised in barracks and then sent to the strict military school where he later sent his own children, the Lawrence military asylum for the children of British soldiers serving in India. My uncle has described his time there as a "condition of orphans, only worse"; they were small children living under a disciplinarian regime in a remote part of the Himalayas.
At some point in their marriage, Neville took Anne back to Wales and tried to leave her there; it seems she might have had a nervous breakdown in India. But she got a job, saved money by living on "bread and scrape" and bought her passage back to India. She wanted to see her children, who by now had been at military school for five years. Not long after, in 1936, my grandfather arranged to have her put away - it only took a doctor's signature - and she was taken to a mental institution in Ranchi, Bihar. My uncle described it as "the lunatic asylum of the British Raj, notorious from the time of the Indian mutiny".
Neville was taken prisoner by the Japanese in l941, at the surrender of Singapore. He was presumed dead at the time of my parents' marriage in l943, but my uncle later got a Red Cross postcard telling him his father was alive; he eventually returned to India. He divorced Anne in her absence and remarried, returning to England with his new wife. After independence in 1947, the asylum at Ranchi became a frightening place, according to my uncle, taking in criminals and prostitutes as well as the insane. My mother's two brothers were determined to get their mother released. My mother refused to help them: she was in Africa with us, trying to deal with what was going on under her own roof. In the end, the British government transferred my grandmother back to England in1951, where she was placed in another asylum.
When I first went to see her, at St Bernard's in Ealing, I was terrified. I didn't know what I would find and I had images of a woman sitting in a circle with other blank faces, or mumbling to herself in a corner, or shouting obscenities into the air. I hate those places, mainly because I always thought I would end up in one. When I got there I marched right up to the doctor and asked for a diagnosis. I was told there was nothing wrong with her. A nurse said she had once been a little paranoid, nothing more. But while she was sane, she had become institutionalised after spending more than 40 years living in asylums. She could remember the distant past, but little that had happened since her arrival at Ranchi in the 30s. She stayed at St Bernard's until she died in 1985.
It's now over 20 years since my uncle and I began our correspondence about his mother. I have used his letters and our conversations as the basis for my novel, but since he was a small boy when his mother was locked up, he didn't remember too much about her. I prefer it that way. It has allowed me to give her a brand- new life and to imagine a different destiny for her. In writing about her, there was one thing I was damn certain of: she wasn't going to be put in the asylum, not for the third time, not by me.
· A Black Englishman by Carolyn Slaughter is published by Faber at £10.99. To order a copy for £8.99 plus UK p&p, call the Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875
