Tinu: I was absolutely stunned. His jaw dropped, he looked at me and he said, I can't believe you're here, because they were so horrible to you.

Alex: Almost thirty years after she graduated, Tinu Cornish heard that her old high school was hosting a reunion.

Tinu: I hadn’t gone to any of the school’s reunions. But I just thought if this is a final reunion for this school, then I should go.

Alex: She wanted to see her old teachers – well, one in particular: Mr. Brown, who taught physics.

Tinu: He was just our favourite teacher and we just loved him.

I was one of his favourite pupils coming back

Alex: At the reunion, Tinu spotted Mr. Brown across the hotel ballroom, and made her way towards him.

Tinu: I just really expected him to … his face to light up. And you can imagine… I was absolutely stunned: his jaw dropped, he looked at me and he said, I can't believe you're here, because they were so horrible to you.

Alex: It was in this moment that everything Tinu thought she knew about her childhood completely unravelled. And she realised that the person who was supposed to be her role model, had failed, to protect her.

Tinu grew up in 1960s Norfolk.

Tinu: We were completely free. So you literally did go out of the house in the morning, come back when you're hungry. And so we would stay out all day, we would cycle around, we would swim in the sea. We would get up to adventures, we would you know steal apples we would you know totally totally unsupervised.

Alex: The flip side of that coin was that Tinu didn’t spend much quality time with her parents.

Tinu: It was still part of the era where children are to be seen and not heard.

You didn't talk to your parents about anything because you’d get in trouble.

Alex: That definitely applied to topics like race and culture.

Tinu: We never had a single conversation about race in our family.

I am of dual heritage. So my mother was from England and my father was from Nigeria.

It really wasn't encouraged to bring out any of the Nigerian side of culture. I never learned to speak Yoruba. So I think we lost out a lot because of that.

Alex: At school, Tinu loved science. In fact she was part of a group of students who all loved science.

Tinu: Nowadays, I suppose they’d call us science nerds.

We were so keen and enthusiastic and bright eyed and bushy tailed

Alex: The best class was physics, taught by Mr. Brown.

Tinu: He actually had a full brown beard. If you've ever seen pictures of Abraham Lincoln, that's what he looked like; he very much looked like that sort of patriarch. But he was an absolute laugh.

Alex: Mr. Brown would set up experiments for the kids, bustling around the classroom and preparing the test tubes and bunsen burners.

Tinu: And then for one reason or another, he would have to leave the room to get another bit of equipment or to adjust something. And then one of us would prank him by, you know, slightly doing something to make the whole experiment go wrong.

Alex: There was one time, for instance, that Tinu secretly added some washing up liquid to wreck a surface tension experiment.

You’d expect most teachers – especially during that era – to dole out punishments to kids playing pranks in class.

Not Mr. Brown.

Tinu: He never got angry at us doing these, you know, slightly messing up his experiments. He would just take it in, in good humour.

He would laugh with us.

I think he was a genuinely decent person who loved teaching us.

Alex: Tinu was the only child of colour in that little group of science lovers, but she felt accepted and included in Mr Brown’s class. The same can’t be said for the rest of school.

The school was a huge 1960s building.

Tinu: And there was a massive, wide main thoroughfare corridor. You'll often see it in American films, where the sort of nerdy kid has to walk through all of the football jocks who will jostle them and call out names. Well, this was the same, but we would be running a gauntlet of white kids who are calling out racist epitaphs. And no one did do the thing, which occasionally they do in American movies, is that one of the teachers will come out and intervene and stop it all happening.

Alex: There was never an intervention. The issue wasn’t addressed at home either.

Tinu: In my family, nobody talked about race. Nobody talked about what was happening at the school. Racism was normalised. You had all of those awful comedians like Bernard Manning and everybody. You had a black and white minstrel show – we would all sit around and watch that together as a family with my grandparents. They were racist and misogynistic. That was what was on telly and everyone sat round on a Saturday night and laughed about it all. And that was the culture.

Alex: In this oppressive culture of silence and bigotry, Tinu didn’t have any role models in tackling racism.

Tinu: And the only person who was talking was Bob Marley and his lyrics. And that was the only thing that reached Great Yarmouth. And he was the one who was talking about racism, talking about fighting back, talking about challenging, talking about standing up for your rights, and that was the person who was talking, through that music.

Alex: Tinu didn’t see any of her old school teachers – until that earth-shattering reunion when she was in her mid-40s. She went to the reunion deliberately to see Mr. Brown. His class had been a respite from the racism she endured in school.

She’d expected him to be thrilled to see her – one of his favourite pupils. But his face fell.

Tinu: He looked at me and he said, I can't believe you're here, because they were so horrible to you.

Alex: Tinu was gobsmacked, stunned into silence.

Tinu: It’s the moment where everything you thought you knew about something completely changes. You know, when they say you're dying that your life flashes in front of your eyes. It's that sort of experience in reverse where basically you sort of unwind a whole history, a whole narrative.

Alex: The person she thought was protecting her from racist bullies, from institutionalised neglect – – had actually been turning a blind eye the whole time.

Tinu: I suddenly realised that they all knew exactly what was going on, and did nothing to stop it.

What I didn't realise until that moment, when he was so shocked to see me, was that the teachers were aware of exactly what the children were doing. And they did absolutely nothing about it.

I actually call them the sort of Jimmy Savile generation. They did nothing to protect children.

Alex: Standing in front of Mr. Brown, time seemed to stop. Tinu felt deeply hurt and abandoned. She was having this devastating realisation – but there at the reunion, she brushed it off.

Tinu: We didn't have a conversation about it. And we would have just carried on as though it almost didn't happen. There was no there was no deep conversation.

Alex: But Tinu could see that Mr. Brown felt ashamed.

Tinu: I think it's the equivalent of anybody who knows that they have been complicit in allowing some sort of abuse to occur. And I think that … that shame, you know, it really, it just dumped out of him at that moment, that he's been carrying it, that he hadn't said anything, that he hadn't done anything.

What people don't understand it's not just about doing no harm. It's about preventing, and standing up and being anti. So a lot of people go around being non racist, and think that that's fine, as long as they don't say or do anything, but they're not being anti.

I don't think it's as straightforward to say that people are guilty or not. The whole culture and society is designed in a way to make sure that people don't know how to be anti. Because I think once they started being anti, they'd start fighting for their rights in all sorts of other ways as well.

Alex: Tinu has dedicated her life to being anti-racist. She works as an organisational psychologist.

Tinu: I'm interested in the science of how people think, feel and behave at work.

I wanted to try and understand people. I wanted to understand my family, I wanted to understand the ways that people interacted with each other, and I wanted to understand myself.

Alex: Her focus is racial equality in the workplace.

Tinu: I work with organisations that are doing research to try and improve, making sure that more black Asian and ethnic minority people are engaged in what they're doing, that they're improving their experience at work, that they're helping to ensure people not only come into organisations, but once they're there, that they thrive and flourish, that they get promoted in proportionate numbers. So you could say that my whole career really is about fighting for racial justice in our organisations.

Alex: It took Tinu a long time to make sense of that moment and her feelings towards her old teacher. To reach a new understanding of all those old memories.

Tinu: That whole time, that whole group was…. that little… that safe space was quite a cherished memory. And so all of that sort of cherished memory that also went as well. So, you know, really quite sad, and stunned really. He provided a safe space in that, within the confines of the physics lab, no harm happened. But he didn't provide a role model as someone standing up to stop children being abused. None of them did.

Alex: Tinu never saw Mr. Brown again – he passed away not long after the reunion. She felt real sadness when he died.

Tinu: If he and you know - there was a couple of other teachers – hadn't provided this safe space, then I would have had no sanctuary at all because I didn't have a sanctuary at home. And I would have had no sanctuary in the school. You know, it wasn't safe in the world. It wasn't safe in the race of the rest of the school. It wasn't safe in the family. They provided that safe space. And I loved learning and I love science.

Alex: Tinu believes she may not have pursued a career in science if it weren’t for Mr. Brown, and the way he nurtured her talent.

Tinu: And I will always feel immense gratitude as well, that they did what they could within the limits of themselves as individuals and this society that they were in and their understanding of what was going on.

Alex: We hear Tinu’s deep disappointment emerge as she realises those who should have been her role models had, in reality, let her down. Her school was generally a hostile place for people of colour. But you can hear how painful it was for Tinu to realise that her potential role model, Mr Brown, was just as complicit in her abuse as the rest of society. Tinu believed that Mr Brown had been on her side, that he had valued her. Yet he had known all along what she had gone through and he had not protected her. These experiences have informed Tinu’s actions in her own life. In her work at SEA-Change Consultancy she is focused on promoting equality and inclusion. A key way of achieving this is to encourage people not only to act without prejudice themselves but to challenge acts of discrimination from others. Only by doing this can we ensure that all who live in society are truly protected.