Once upon a time in the battered little town of South Shields, precariously balanced on a dry island called the Lawe above the mouth of the River Tyne, there was a modest park that enjoyed few visitors. I enjoyed the solitude, as did a handful of others. It was known as the Roman Remains: the site of the important Roman fort of Arbeia controlling the river.
The Armstrong family moved from workaday Leicester to the ancient county of Brankleyshire. Their daughter Tameeyah entered a new world and very soon began to realise everything in this quiet village was not what it seemed.
The first Asian settlement in the United Kingdom was in Frederick Street, South Shields in the late nineteenth century. These were the Yemeni seamen who crewed the Atlantic convoys to the U.S.A. and the arctic convoys to Murmansk in the Forties. They married the Shields lasses, had families and have vanished into the population.
