Snow Black in from the cold

Homeless babes in the wood abound on stage at this time of year, but you don't often find one of their real-life counterparts writing the show. As a one-time Barnardo's girl who lived rough in London as a teenager, Valerie Mason-John drew deeply upon her experiences for a play about two young girls lost in a wild and spooky wood. Despite its bleak heritage, however, the multicultural Christmas show The Adventures of Snow Black and Rose Red is the most mainstream work yet from the archetypal outsider who finally came in from the cold.

Mason-John, universally known as Queenie, meets me at the show's rehearsal rooms, a former south London vicarage and the blue-plaqued birthplace of Montgomery of Alamein. Even such a fleeting connection with an Establishment icon makes her laugh loudly: two years ago Queenie, a journalist for the Left-wing, black and lesbian Press before becoming a playwright, was stigmatised as a " race-relations activist" by a Sunday newspaper for daring to write a play about the Queen's African ancestry.

Brown Girl in the Ring, which won her an award from The Voice and which took its title from the nursery song that later became a Boney M hit, drew upon established facts about the Queen's African ancestry that has been traced back to George III's wife, Queen Charlotte.

"I was a bit miffed by that description," says Queenie in her slow, gentle voice. "If I had been a white writer, would they have called me a political activist? I'm an artist." Which is why she aims to unite rather than divide, exploring the cross-cultural experiences of her own fractured childhood with an ingenious new African and Asian take on an old western fairy tale. "I remember being upset at the age of 12 over the conflict between black and white; I couldn't understand it because we are all connected, as Brown Girl in the Ring showed. I passed as a white person in a white world with white foster parents, and it took me years to get to know my cultural heritage." The youngest daughter of a single mother who came to Britain from Sierra Leone, Queenie, now 35, was fostered from the age of six weeks by three sets of foster parents until she went into a Dr Barnardo's home at the age of four. "Part of me was very happy there, and being able to write a Christmas fairy tale is an aspect of that happy childhood. Materially, we had a very privileged life because it was a model home with lots of facilities, but you didn't get close to adults because they would move on."

When she was 11, because of the political orthodoxy of the day she was sent back to live with her biological mother, who treated her so cruelly Queenie was taken away by the police. "I would have ended up deranged if I'd stayed with my mother," says a sombre Queenie, who has not seen her since and has met only one of her sisters. "Then I started running away with my mates. On and off between 13 and 15, I slept on streets, in parks and on college roofs; when you're that young, it's exciting. When it was very cold, we would break into empty houses and squat, and we lived by shoplifting and pick-pocketing.

"I got to a point where no children's home would take me. I ended up in Holloway at 15 for shoplifting and was then sent to borstal for 18 months; it was just like another kids' home but with more rules."

Her life was finally turned around by a remarkable Irish foster mother called Carol-Ann Gallagher, only eight years her senior. "She believed in me when no one else would and she got me into college," says Queenie, who took a degree in politics and philosophy at Leeds University. Now she teaches anger-management through drama therapy to children with difficult backgrounds, which has won her a Windrush Achievement Award. She is also working on her first novel, one chapter of which earlier this year took first prize in the Shorelines-Cultureworld competition for black, Asian and Chinese writers in Britain, and is completing an MA in Creative Writing at Sussex University.

Only in fairy tales do people live happily ever after, however, and Queenie's hard-won achievements come at a price. "Yes, I'm resilient, but you've got to relive it all in order to let go; only that way," she explains, "do you find your voice."

The Adventures Of Snow Black And Rose Red