This is The Guardian.

The Guardian is a story that helped explain what it was like to be the white English parent of a black African child.

Martins was a baby when it happened, so it would have been in the early 1970s.

Her foster mum was pushing her in a pram through Canvy Island, the blustery Essex seaside settlement where she lived with her other foster siblings.

When she spotted a mirrored virgin of herself approaching, another white woman, another gurgling black baby in a push-chew.

There was a nervous, excited flash of recognition, like two VW camper van drivers waving awkward hand signals at each other on the motorway.

This other woman apparently went, oh you've got one as well, said Martins with a laugh, telling me the story half a century later.

And then she said, what do you feed yours?

Martins, not her real name, left a beat, raised, and eyebrow. And my foster mum said, well they just have the same food that we have to which this woman said, oh I just cut boiled rice for mine, that's all they have.

There was another careful pause, a disbelieving chuckle.

Needless to say, my foster mum was incredulous, she sent this woman off with a bit of a flee in her ear about how disgusting it was that you could just give your kids boiled rice all the time.

But it was quite interesting to hear that story, given that my fostering experience was so positive.

It feels on the face of it, like a particularly strange and unsettling vignette that sticks out even amid the notoriously intolerant landscape of 70s Britain.

In 1974, the National Front, who called for the compulsory deportation of non-white settlers in their descendants, fielded more than 90 candidates in the October general election, up from 54 in February of that year, and just 10 in the election of 1970.

But perhaps the most striking thing about the story Martin's foster mother told her is that it was not unusual at all.

After the Second World War, it became commonplace for African immigrants establishing themselves in the UK to privately foster their children with white families.

From the moment the first advert was placed by a Nigerian family in the Child Care Journal Nursery World in 1955, there was great demand.

As a listing in a 1974 edition of the magazine read, Pretty Baby Girl needs a new home.

The following year, the magazine introduced a regular Holmes-womtered section in the classified ads.

And in the period between 1966 and 1970, 6,700 adverts were placed by West African parents seeking carers for their children.

Though official figures on the number of approved agreements are hazy, a 1968 story in the Times reported that up to 5,000 children from West Africa were being fostered or farmed as it came to be informally known in this way every year.

Not unexpectedly, some of these children's stories are of prejudice, abuse and a kind of traumatising cultural disorientation.

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