The former Casualty actor wrote Driftwood – a family drama set against the backdrop of Trinidadian independence – as a private act after reconnecting with her roots. It was like solving a crossword, she says
More than two decades ago, the actor Martina Laird took a trip back to her past. As part of the ensemble on the TV drama Casualty, in which she played paramedic Comfort Jones, she was a household face with a rewarding job, yet she felt stuck in her life. “Things weren’t developing,” she remembers. “I went: ‘OK, there’s stuff to go and face in the past.’”
She travelled to St Kitts, where she was born, to look for the Black Caribbean mother from whom she had been separated at the age of three, when her white British father took her to live with his family in Trinidad. “It was a relatively privileged upbringing but there’s always questions. So I went to St Kitts and I met the family that I had not known was there. I thought that I could keep myself shielded and not let people in but that was not the case. It all had to just crack open. Afterwards, the world seemed to me beautifully upside down. Everything I knew to be feared was loved and everything that was down was up.”
