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Dunno, but the mere fact she mentioned his skin colour goes to show that seeing not-white people is still a novelty in some places.
This is true. My most memorable experience of this wasn't even with someone well into middle aged either.
Wen't to uni with a guy who was lovely by all means, but grew up in a a village in an all country township! One day we drove down to London, through Tottenham to show him my old stomping grounds, mid summer, windows rolled down, with him loudly, and genuinely exclaiming with surprise "wow, I've never seen so many black people in my life!"
Heads turned pretty sharpish.
I'm 100% sure it was said in the most positive of ways but it was still a strange thing to hear, as I'd never really considered such a perspective before.
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Chak
dirac
It's probably not as explicitly and vilely expressed, but there is certainly an underlying suspicion of difference among certain people in some villages and towns of rural England. With terrible (and deteriorating) rural bus services, people on low incomes or jobless and without a car are seriously isolated. My mum, a retired teacher, regularly met kids who had never left the county - sometimes never even been to Cambridge just a few miles away. Easy to forget when you a baller.
My parents use a painter and decorator from a nearby town. He was working on a window frame outside their house. Their cleaner - an ostensibly lovely women well into her 80s - rushed in an exclaimed, "Dave, there's a black man up a ladder outside!". Was she suspicious of him? Dunno, but the mere fact she mentioned his skin colour goes to show that seeing not-white people is still a novelty in some places.
Knowing what we know now, we would have traded space for location and moved either to a town or a village with a train station.